A global civil society in a world polity, or angels and nomads against empire?

• Author: Reitan, Ruth

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 the Newest Social Movements (London: Pluto, 2005), 262 pp.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the 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 the 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, the 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 the frequency of interactions across borders, but also in the networks' density, adaptability, complexity, and reach. Sidney Tarrow and Donatella Della Porta have called this trend "the most dramatic change we see in the 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 the Internet. (3) They have even created their own space, the World Social Forum (WSF), as well as a web of regional, national, local, and thematic forums modeled on the WSF's horizontal, "open space" format. Here, the movements deepen and broaden their solidarity ties and joint analyses under the strategically ambiguous slogan that "Another World Is Possible."

While diverse, the networks are united in the conviction that this alternative should be forms of governance other 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, the feminization of poverty, the exacerbation of conflicts, and the erosion of democracy. They identify and denounce the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO) as the 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 the most recent WSF in Nairobi, Immanuel Wallerstein spoke of a "family of movements," replete with all the affinities, identifications, and squabbles that constitute such relationships. Broadly, the movements divide between "reformist" NGOs and more "radical" direct action social movements and networks. At bottom, the 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 the degree and methods of change that each pursues. Contemporary activist forums like the WSF have brought these different circles into contact with one another and thus have helped to attenuate the polemic between them. Yet tensions remain, and there is evidence that the "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 the state and the international governance regimes that states have constructed? Finally, what can we learn about the nature of global governance from the movements' relatively marginal vantage points? These questions orient this essay.

Each of the four books examined here offers a unique standpoint and insight into this upstart clan of nonstate (and sometimes antistate) actors that challenge the patrician families comprising global governance: those of states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and transnational corporations (TNCs). This essay will introduce two contrasting models of global governance to illustrate the divergent positions and visions of the reformist NGOs on the one hand, and anarchists and Marxist autonomists on the other: the simple polity model and the imperial rhizome, respectively.

The first two books--Lisa Jordan and Peter van Tuijl's NGO Accountability and Clifford Bob's The Marketing of Rebellion--focus on the well-behaved, but conflicted, sons and daughters of an emergent, cosmopolitan, civil society. While rhetorically aloof from partisan politics, in practice these actors seek greater rights, resources, recognition, and influence within a global polity dominated by states, IGOs, and corporations. These are the prototypical Northern-based, international NGOs (INGOs) with Southern beneficiaries, now frequently called "partners."

In contrast, the other two works--Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude and Richard J. F. Day's Gramsci Is Dead--exemplify the rebellious, nomadic, and prodigal sons and daughters in contemporary global social movements. These post-Marxists and anarchists battle against the reformers, and among themselves, for the hearts and minds of the anticapitalist youth--as well as those young at heart--within and against an oppressive, all-encompassing global "empire" and toward an open, egalitarian, and horizontally networked--or "rhizomatic"--world.

Together, these two pairs of books encompass, and indeed lay bare, the family resemblances and the sibling rivalries among activists who are striving to inform--and transform--global governance, the state, and capitalism at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

NGOs and the Domestic Polity Model Transposed to the Global Level

While activists, scholars, and policymakers acknowledge the conceptual and practical pitfalls of projecting the "domestic analogy" onto the international level, (4) civil society actors often betray such a transposition in their assumptions, practices, and goals. Global politics is more complex, entailing a larger diversity of actors, more pathways for petitioning, and greater uncertainty. Yet civil society practices of demanding recognition, rights, and resources from governing agents goes largely unchanged and unchallenged.

This implicit assumption of global governance as the modern, liberal state writ large can be illustrated via the simple polity model depicted in Figure 1. The model represents a regime, which consists of government and its relations to the population that falls under its claimed jurisdiction. While government forms the hub, polity members, such as corporations and powerful interest groups, constitute political actors that enjoy routine access to government agents and their resources. Further out lie the challengers, that are also political actors yet lack, and aspire to, routine access to the government's ear and purse. Subjects are unorganized individuals and groups who inhabit a government's jurisdiction. Finally, outside political actors, including other governments, reside beyond the limits of jurisdiction, but may, through their ties to subjects, challengers, polity members, and indeed governments themselves, impinge upon the domestic polity. (5)

Transposition to the global level creates obvious difficulties. Instead of one "black box" government, all governance bodies--states, IGOs, and the legal and normative regimes they establish--are potential avenues to petition for rights and resources. Yet because there is no single seat of authority, the nature and extent of rights differ and are contested while resources are dispersed and dynamic. This creates both threats and opportunities for polity members and challengers that must seek and maintain access to this diverse web of governance sites in order to make their demands, and also must expand as collective actors--often across borders--to enhance their power. Given the disaggregated nature of governance authority, there can be no final arbiter when rights are violated, and so attempts to uphold such rights are inconsistent, controversial, futile, or require force. In the global polity, theoretically there is no "outside" and thus no actors or sites beyond the regime's jurisdiction. Jordan and van Tuijl's NGO Accountability and Bob's The Marketing of Rebellion illustrate well the difficulties of attempting to transpose this polity model.

Jordan and van Tuijl adopt a somber tone, ruing the INGO's precipitous fall from grace:

In the final decade of the 20th century, there seemed to be a broad- based consensus that ... NGOs were a good thing--as shepherds of development, as democratic agents and in making sense of globalization. NGOs were seen as the core of active civil societies, supporting the delivery of public services and contributing to an ever-stronger wave of democratization that appeared unstoppable after the fall of the Berlin Wall. (p. 3) In the early 1990s, the commanding...