ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, discourses of ‘global citizenship’ and ‘global civil society’ have played a central role in the proliferation of global neoliberalism across a wide variety of civil, corporate, intellectual, and policy domains. In the sphere of international development, neoliberal global citizenship initiatives have seen multinational corporations (MNCs) and their business associations make common cause with mainstream nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) by mobilizing around a growing range of ‘voluntary’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainable development initiatives. The argument of the chapter is that such voluntary initiatives function to legitimate and reproduce the exploitative global capitalist system by endowing nominally ‘economic’ and ‘private’ entities such as MNCs with a sense of ‘civic’ identity and ‘public’ purpose. In the context of ongoing class struggles over primitive accumulation, capitalist crisis, and neoliberal restructuring, it follows that corporations can seek to represent the grotesque inequality, exploitation, and domination at the heart of capitalist globalization as economically ‘long term’, socially ‘responsible’, and ecologically ‘sustainable’. Consequently, their claim to act as ‘good’ corporate citizens within many states both strengthens and reinforces the material differentiation between the economic and the political constitutive of capitalist social relations whilst simultaneously blurring the discursive boundary between the public and private spheres.
