A Global Civil Society in a World Polity, or Angels and Nomads Against Empire?

Abstract

Clifford Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media and International Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 254 pp. Richard J. F. Day, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in Newest Social Movements (London: Pluto, 2005), 262 pp. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 427 pp. Lisa Jordan and Peter van Tuijl, eds., NGO Accountability: Politics, Principles and Innovations (London: Earthscan, 2006), 288 pp. Over past quarter-century, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and activist networks have increasingly gone global. Between 1973 and 1993, transnational social movement organizations concerned with human rights, environment, peace, and development more than tripled in number, rising to over 600 organizations. (1) Formerly local and national NGOs and community organizations now regularly operate transnationally: swapping information, networking, coordinating campaigns, framing claims, and locating shared targets. This is a change not only in frequency of interactions across borders, but also in networks' density, adaptability, complexity, and reach. Sidney Tarrow and Donatella Della Porta have called this trend the most dramatic change we see in world of contentious politics. (2) Transnational social movements are dynamic networks of multiple organizations and issues, forged in parallel and autonomous international summits, protest events, and via Internet. (3) They have even created their own space, World Social Forum (WSF), as well as a web of regional, national, local, and thematic forums modeled on WSF's horizontal, open space format. Here, movements deepen and broaden their solidarity ties and joint analyses under strategically ambiguous slogan that Another World Is Possible. While diverse, networks are united in conviction that this alternative should be forms of governance than neoliberal globalization. Activists decry this current global (dis)order as being characterized by mounting poverty and inequality within and among societies, corporate encroachment of the commons, environmental devastation, feminization of poverty, exacerbation of conflicts, and erosion of democracy. They identify and denounce World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO) as main institutional promoters of neoliberalism. Beyond this shared oppositional orientation, these actors have diverse--and often conflicting--demands, organizational cultures, tactics, and ultimate goals. At most recent WSF in Nairobi, Immanuel Wallerstein spoke of a family of movements, replete with all affinities, identifications, and squabbles that constitute such relationships. Broadly, movements divide between reformist NGOs and more radical direct action social movements and networks. At bottom, feuds between these two tendencies stem from fundamentally different conceptions of existing global governance and order (as well as their place within it) and from degree and methods of change that each pursues. Contemporary activist forums like WSF have brought these different circles into contact with one another and thus have helped to attenuate polemic between them. Yet tensions remain, and there is evidence that other superpower is both demobilizing and fracturing along traditional leftist fault lines. But who are these new global actors? What are their points of convergence, contradiction, and outright conflict? And how do they engage with, legitimize, or challenge both state and international governance regimes that states have constructed? Finally, what can we learn about nature of global governance from movements' relatively marginal vantage points? These questions orient this essay. Each of four books examined here offers a unique standpoint and insight into this upstart clan of nonstate (and sometimes antistate) actors that challenge patrician families comprising global governance: those of states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and transnational corporations (TNCs). …