Bamako Appeal spikes controversy

Teivo Teivainen

8 February, 2006

Dear NIGD,

After a quick read, I also confess that I very much like most of the contents of the Bamako Appeal. It would be interesting to hear from those of you who were in Bamako to get more reflections on the debates around it, the way it was constructed, and who has signed it?

One of the problematic silences in the document is its lack of any attention to questions of sexual diversity (gay and lesbian rights etc). My understanding is that this has been one of the problematic (or avoided) issues in the African WSF process, and may create controversies in attempts to construct a wide-based consensus on the issues that the movement of global democratization movements, or the WSF (no, I am not equating the two), need to confront, especially in the inter-cultural dialogues that "going to Africa" implies. I would be very interested in hearing suggestions on how the issue should be approached? To put it more provocatively, would an emphasis on gay and lesbian rights reflect an eurocentric bias?

My other slight worry in the document is with the statement that "national democracy remains THE strategic level" (emphasis mine). I very much agree that territorial (or "national") states need to be A strategic focus of the democratization movements, but does the formulation here suggest an overemphasis on the strategy of conquering the state at the cost of other strategies (both more local and more transnational)?