ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on what precedes global responsibility, in an effort to elucidate which of the problematiques surrounding responsibility are still posed and which are not. The way to conceive of the coexistence or the mutual exclusion of power politics and responsibility is an epistemological and political choice. We must conceive of power politics and global responsibility both as situated in a chronological continuum and as existing at the same time. The passage from power politics to global responsibility can be thought of in terms of justification. The adjective "global" has been added to the previous "civil society" that referred to the intrastate situation. If this intrastate/interstate analogy were to be strictly maintained, then we would have to ask which is the global government to which global civil society corresponds. In the globalization era, the reality of this international community must be problematized, as Zygmunt Bauman suggests in a thought-provoking paper on war.
