ABSTRACT
Civil society is a potent expression of post-Cold War concepts and practices and part of coming to terms with global transformations. The rediscovery and legitimation of the term in Eastern Europe and Latin America amid opposition to military regimes in the 1980s is, for example, considered part of a particular conjuncture from which ‘global politics’ emerged (Kaldor 2003a). Since then, extant and nascent versions of global civil society have been increasingly related to episodes and movements of resistance such as the anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrations in Seattle in 1999. Receiving less worldwide attention, the World Social Forum, a gathering of opponents to neoliberal globalization, began to convene shortly after. More recently, the reinvigoration of civil society in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011 was considered to signal the ‘completion’ of the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe (Kaldor 2011). Meanwhile, from 15 May 2011, Spanish indignants or indignados marched in protest against high unemployment and government policies, 15-M movements camp out in city squares in Madrid, Barcelona and across Spain, and occupy movements mobilize and expand beyond Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, New York, claiming their position as the 99 per cent within the hierarchies of power and influence.1
