Social Forum

Many are those who have passed through the different editions of the Social Forum. Such as the Nobel Peace Prize laureates Rigoberta Menchu and Shirin Ebadi, as well as the most recent person to be recognised by the Swedish Academy and to come to the who has been at the festival: Mohamed Ben Cheikh, edition 2017; the ideologist of modernity and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman; environmental activist Vandana Shiva; Egyptian economist and political scientist Samir Amin; Christian Felber, Austrian economist and ideologist of the economy for the common good; and a broad range of journalists: Mona Eltahawy (Egypt) and  Amira Hass (Israel); the Spanish Ignacio Ramonet director of Le Monde Diplomatique- and RTVE ex-correspondent Rosa María Calaf; the Italian Giulietto Chiesa or Sami Al-Ajj, Al-Jazeera journalist.

Their voices have been joined by many others, representatives of different social movements, groups, professions and ideologies, which have added diversity, plurality, to this space for debate. Voices like that of the Spanish philosopher and essayist Antonio Escohotado, known for his research on drugs that he presents ‘General History of Drugs’, a key reference in this field; and another philosopher, this time from Chile, Claudio Naranjo. Other who have spoken, and exchanged views with the public are, Tibetan lamas Thubten Wangchen and Geshe Lobsang Pende; David Couso, brother of Jose Couso the photojournalist who died in Baghdad (Iraq) in 2003 as a result of a projectile fired from a tank of the US Army; the Italian priest Renato Kizito Sesana and the Belgian priest and sociologist  François Houtart. Esteban Ibarra, from the Spanish Movement Against Intolerance; the Italian mathematician and politician  Furio Honsell; and Cindy Sheehan, American antiwar activist and mother of a soldier killed in Iraq in 2004, have shaped the extensive list of people to have visited the Social Forum, which continues to grow.