Routledge
Paperback
240
39022
For many commentators global civil society is revolutionising our approach to global politics as new non-state-based and border-free expressions of political community challenge territorial sovereignty as the exclusive basis for political community and identity. This challenge 'from below' to the nation-state system is increasingly seen as promising nothing less than a reconstruction or a re-imagination of world politics itself. Whether in terms of the democratisation of the institutions of global governance the spread of human rights across the world or the emergence of a global citizenry in a worldwide public sphere global civil society is understood by many to provide the agency necessary for these hoped-for transformations. Global Civil Society asks whether this idea is such a qualitatively new phenomenon after all whether the transformation of the nation-state system is actually within its reach and what some of the drawbacks might be.