Transnational Publics: New Spaces of Social Movement Activism and the Problem of Global Long-Sightedness

Abstract

The article proposes the concept of transnational publics as a way of overcoming problems of global long-sightedness and stimulating sociological research able to operate on various spatial levels. By contrast, the concept of global civil society is so inclusive as to be almost analytically useless; it gives the mistaken impression that social action is becoming detached from the local and the national. It is theoretically flawed to speak of a global civil society in absence of a global state. To overcome this global long-sightedness we should speak of a plurality of transnational publics rather than a single global civil society. This forces us to identify the social spaces that individuals and social movements construct. We discover two things: transnational publics are not detached from physical space, but imply a transformation of space, combining the local, the national and the transnational in a new way; second, transnational publics are mediated, but also rooted in real people and places.