ABSTRACT
To place the two terms 'social movements' and 'world politics' into conjunction is to invite serious conceptual trouble. Judged from the regal heights of statecraft, social movements are but mosquitoes on the evening breeze, irritants to those who claim maturity and legitimacy at the centres of political life. Social movements and world politics are supposed to be understood as expressions of two distinct ontological realms, the inner and the outer. The slippage from a framing of rationality, or democracy, or civil society, within a particular community to a framing that encompasses the world as a whole simply commits the domestic fallacy. Historical ruptures and civilizational confrontations disappear beneath legal scripts and cartographic cleanliness. Similarities and connections are translated into grand philosophies of history that points the projected vision of a global civil society, a global governance and a properly world politics.
