ABSTRACT
The invention of global civil society as a framing construct can be dated in various ways, but its time of existence is certainly no greater than a decade or so (Lipschutz, 1996). Of course, the lineage of ‘civil society’ is older and far more convoluted, and its role in achieving social change is becoming more frequently acknowledged and affirmed (Edwards, 2004; Kaldor, 2003). Alejandro Colás argues that the agency of civil society has actually been prominent in the social and political spheres for centuries (‘from the American Revolution to the current experiments in global governance’), and has always possessed overseas links and been strengthened by ‘practices of transnational solidarity’ (Colás, 2002:1). In this rather basic behavioral sense, ‘global civil society’ is not altogether an innovation, leaving aside the recent coinage of the phrase. Yet I think it is helpful to demarcate this current period as introducing a radically new dimension into our understanding of global governance, consisting of a variety of transnational undertakings by voluntary associations of citizens seeking to influence the global setting of politics, rather than to work for changes in particular states. In this respect, global civil society is best understood as part of the overall globality of the post-Westphalian world, although it is equally important to give due weight to the resilience of Westphalian sovereignty, including patterns of state governance and statist diplomacy. The existing framework of world order, then, can be best grasped from a perspective of organizational and normative hybridity, the overlapping of differing logics and ordering formats (Falk et al., 2002).
