In the last two months, tent cities (or Occupy, or Real Democracy Now) movements have spread to more than 1000 cities world-wide, showing a large scale of grassroots interest in a ‘just and democratic global system’. One of the manifestos that has come out of the Occupy movement is ‘United for Global Democracy’, which was produced in a four-month process of discussions by people’s assemblies, groups and individual activists in Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, North Africa and North America. The manifesto has been endorsed by many of the groups and assemblies involved in the tent-cities movements, as well as prominent voices of the Global Justice Movement, such as, Arondati Roy, Eduardo Galeano. Michael Hardt, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky and Vandana Shiva. You can read more about ‘United for Global Democracy’ in The Guardian and Red Pepper (in English) and in Publico (in Spanish).

Building Global Democracy has responded to several requests from Occupy to feed into debates about what a global democracy would look like, and by what strategies it could be advanced. Our office participated in the process of writing the ‘United for Global Democracy’ manifesto and helped to organise a public discussion on ‘global democracy as a human right’ at the Occupy London site outside St Paul’s Cathedral on 11 December. Speakers included Peter Chowla from the Bretton Woods Project, Richard Laming from the Federal Union, Peter Frankental from Amnesty International UK, our West Europe convenor Jan Aart Scholte and several activists from the camp. Scores of people braved winter chills to join four hours of lively conversations, which were also streamed live on Internet and tweeted to 23,000 followers of Occupy London on Twitter.

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