Civil Society

The word “globalization” almost automatically evokes the idea of economic globalization. However, globalization clearly has other dimensions, among them the political – and conceptualizing political globalization poses some immediate difficulties. Pre-globalization politics was defined through a geographically specific nation-state, and “it is hardly possible to argue that there exists a global state” (Thörn 2006a: 204). Theorists like Richard Falk have grappled with this at the governance level, deploying the term “geogovernance” to identify the ad hoc emergence, in the context of economic globalization, of “a more integrated economic, cultural, and political reality” (1995: 1). However, this geogovernance in the first instance, emerges as corporate or “capital-driven geogovernance” (p. 135) and has little clear relation to political democracy. Many theorists have suggested that the democratic content to globalization will have to come “from below” (p. 87; Thörn 2006a; 204). Increasingly the term “global civil society” (GCS) has been deployed as an attempt to conceptualize the space where this democratic globalization from below can be articulated.