ABSTRACT
Civil society is no longer confined to the borders of the territorial state. The end of the Cold War and growing global interconnectedness have undermined the territorial distinction between 'civil' and 'uncivil' societies, between the 'democratic' West and the 'non-democratic' East and South, and have called into question the traditional centralized war-making state. Both global capitalism and global civil society have contributed to the growth of what David Held and his colleagues describe as growing political interconnectedness in the post-war period. Bounded civil society depended on the existence of an 'other' even if there were different categories of 'other' — 'civilized' Europeans and 'less civilized' outsiders. Civil society needs a framework of security; hence the growing pressure or an international framework of law to be applied in local situations where the state unravels. Civil society was associated with a rule-governed society based largely on the consent of individual citizens rather than coercion.
