ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s, the concept of ‘global civil society’ has been the focus of a good deal of research and criticism (Colas 2002; Drainville 1998; Hopgood 2000; Korten 1999; Lipschutz 1992; Pasha and Blaney 1998; Walzer 1994), and with good reason. On the one hand, there has certainly been an efflorescence of local, national and transnational activism, lobbying, and volunteerism since the 1980s (Kaldor, Anheier and Glasius 2003); on the other, we face at least two problems in theorizing and assessing the phenomenon. First, as Alejandro Colas (2002) has perceptively pointed out, much of this earlier work (including my own) is ahistorical and divorced from the state. Second, while there has emerged a clear distinction between transnational civic associations (here I draw on Paul Wapner’s term ‘world civic politics’; Wapner 1996), which have a more bureaucratic and bourgeois orientation, and transnational social activists, engaged in ‘world social activism’, and which tend to be more protest-oriented and engaged with the ‘political’ (Arendt 1958; Wolin 1996), the relationship of both to global politics and economics remains somewhat unclear. Moreover, this division of labour raises the question of how to address those actors that are clearly based in the market yet purport to be engaged in social and political activity (here I refer to corporate associations and the ‘corporate social responsibility’ movement).1
