ABSTRACT
Against the thoroughly domesticated reading of civil society in democratisation theory, in the field of international relations theory civil society has recently become the focus of a more ambitiously transformatory, and also less nation-state-orientated, political vision. Thus for some theorists, global civil society represents nothing less than the outline of a future world political order within which states will no longer constitute the seat of sovereignty, a status first bestowed on them in Europe by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and subsequently exported around the globe. Richard Falk, for example, suggests that global civil society ‘recasts our understanding of sovereignty’ as ‘the modernist stress on territorial sovereignty as the exclusive basis for political community and identity [is] displaced both by more local and distinct groupings and by association with the reality of a global civil society without boundaries’ (Falk 1995: 100). Lipschutz also sees the transnational political networks put in place by actors in civil society as ‘challenging, from below, the nation-state system’. Indeed, ‘the growth of global civil society represents an ongoing project of civil society to reconstruct, re-imagine, or re-map world politics’ (Lipschutz 1992: 391). The factors enabling such a role for global civil society are identified by Lipschutz as the ‘fading away’ of anarchy among states in an increasingly norm-governed global system; the functional inability of states to address certain welfare problems; and the growth of new forms of non-statist social and political identity such as are provided by human rights and environmental groups, for example (1992: 392).
