The International Forum on Globalization (IFG) is a research and educational institution providing critical analyses of the cultural, social, political, and environmental impacts of economic globalization.[i] It was established in 1994 and first convened as the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect and in the wake of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which engendered the World Trade Organization.
Through its network of over sixty activists, economists, scholars, and researchers, the IFG pursues a broad two-fold goal:
(1) Expose the multiple effects of economic globalization in order to stimulate debate, and (2) Seek to reverse the globalization process by encouraging ideas and activities which revitalize local economies and communities, and ensure long term ecological stability.[ii]
Since its inception, the IFG has been composed of high-profile thinkers and left luminaries; yet over time it has grown from what was arguably a top-heavy group, into a knowledge-producing organization with deeper roots in activist communities (primarily in the United States). Seeking to support and empower activists and those on the front lines of globalization processes, the IFG engages in ‘movement building for change.’ The principle means by which it has done this involve:
- creating large, high-profile teach-ins in major cities in the U.S. on political issues of great moment and salience (most famously, the IFG teach-in that immediately preceded the 1999 Battle in Seattle),
- convening smaller, strategic seminars of movement leadership from a wide spectrum to discuss, and design political campaigns, and
- policy work that has been in equal measures critical of neoliberal hegemony and proactive in the articulation of alternatives.
In its knowledge production and mobilization practices, the IFG contributes critical policy analyses for a wide constituency centred primarily in the United States. Its current core programs (the Asian-Pacific Program and the Plutonomy Program [iii]) are addressed primarily to Americans and produce interventions on geopolitical and class issues that are salient particularly within the USA. Yet, the IFG has mounted transnational initiatives and reaches out to international constituencies, through its online publications and international board of directors.
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Endnotes
[i] See http://ifg.org/about/about-us/, accessed February 12, 2015
[ii] See ‘History of the IFG’, at http://ifg.org/about/history/, accessed February 12, 2015
[iii] See http://ifg.org/about/ifg-programs-and-activities/, accessed February 12, 2015