Introduction

Abstract

This book has grown out of concerns with how changes in media organisation and news production are impacting on conceptualisations of democracy and resistance in a global age. Much analysis and hope in academia currently rest on ideas of deliberation and post-national democratic practices — the roots of a ‘global civil society’ — that have taken force as not just analysis of social and political change but as a normative project. These ideas have gained currency in discussions on the nature of democratisation and governance in the global system by overcoming some of the perceived burdens of an out-dated ill-suited international order made up of nation-states. Rather, ‘progressive’ theorising has been understood as necessarily addressing ‘new’ spaces and scales of political activity that are not territorially defined or concerned with political representation as traditionally perceived. The concept of ‘global civil society’ (GCS) has emerged as a relevant way of understanding and conceptualising the activity and influence of non-state actors in the global system. It speaks to a global ‘space’ of politics, it privileges deliberation rather than representation as the central feature of political practice, and it understands non-state actors as key transformative agents of resistance. This is a powerful notion in the contemporary world.