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CIVIL SOCIETY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 147
groups are diverse and range from conservative think-tanks, corporate
charities and development NGOs, to organizations representing ethnic
or religious chauvinists as well as progressive post-industrial social
movements – environmental and feminist movements, immigrant human
rights organizations, social movement unionism – usually associated
with ‘globalization from below’ (Kaldor 2003).
The relationship between civil society actors and state and market
institutions is a matter of ongoing debate between scholars of social
movements and democratic theory (Cohen and Arato 1993; Kaviraj 2001;
Keane 2003). For our purposes, it is useful to historicize the concept of
civil society, which for Gramsci was always a contradictory category in
relation to the state as described by Michael Burawoy:
Civil society refers to the growth of trade unions, political parties,
mass education and other voluntary associations and interest groups,
all of which proliferated in Europe and the United States at the end of
the nineteenth century. At the same time, new forms of transportation
(automobiles and railroads) and communication (postal service and
newspapers) and regulation (police) connected people to each other
and the state. On the one hand, civil society collaborates with the state
to contain class struggle, and on the other hand its autonomy from the
state can promote class struggle. (Burawoy 2003: 198)
The contradictory position of civil society in today’s global order remains
a constant. Moreover, this grounded and nuanced definition reminds us
to pay attention to politics and history in ways that are often taken for
granted in discussions about the role of civil society in shaping policy
outcomes. In the contemporary field of global communication policy,
groups within civil society span the traditional Left–Right spectrum.
Instead of a singular axis of politics defined by class and state autonomy,
we have argued that post-Fordist claims for justice are multifaceted
along at least three recognizable, interrelated dimensions of redistribution
(claims around economic equality) and recognition (claims around cultural
difference) and representation (claims for democratic accountability). As
discussed in Chapter 2, the scale of contest and the terrain of political
claims has expanded beyond class and the sovereign nation-state as we
have moved from the era of NWICO to that of the WSIS. Chapters 3, 4
and 5 examined how the negotiation of communication as public policy
has shifted beyond the exclusive domain of the nation-state, while the
publics at stake define interest through class, gender, race and ethnicity,
nationality and other markers of difference. As we seek to elaborate on the
larger political stakes of what remains a narrow and for the most part technical
debate about the future of the Information Society, feminist analysis