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CIVIL SOCIETY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 159
this dilemma reflects the structural inequality embedded in institutions of
global governance, where the transcultural resonance of claims associated
with negative freedoms – in this case the freedom of information from
state control for example – displaces claims associated with inequality.
The dilemma of displacement is inextricably linked to the third political
dimension of social justice: representation. The last section of the
chapter examines the vexing question of representation by expanding on
feminist critiques, which help us interrogate the discourse of civil society
and social justice in the field of global communication governance.
Gender, power and place
In this section, we argue that despite the limitations imposed by the
ITU’s multistakeholder structure, the Gender Caucus within the WSIS
allowed for the articulation of more expansive claims for recognition and
redistribution as well as greater emphasis on the issue of representation.
We contend that this is a reflection of decades of volatile and invariably
productive discussion about how to formulate campaigns for global
social justice while paying attention to difference. If Northern CSOs
most actively engaged in the WSIS process can trace their origins to the
legacy of the MacBride Commission, then the gender justice advocates
who took part in WSIS have a separate trajectory from the 1985 and
1995 UN-sponsored Summit on Women in Nairobi and Beijing which
set the stage for two decades of transnational advocacy and fierce debate
over women’s empowerment, gender equality and norms of modernization.
The individuals and organizations that became involved in the
WSIS process through the establishment of the multistakeholder Gender
Caucus in 2002 in Mali brought a wealth of experience in transnational
mobilization grounded in broader social concerns than most activists and
policy-makers in the relatively narrow world of ICT governance.
One of the problems facing gender advocates in WSIS is the ‘fragmentation’
of policy generally combined with the approach that gender is an
issue that can be dealt with after the basic working structures or problems
have been solved. In other words, gender is seen as a secondary rather
than an organizing factor, an ‘added’ element in the policy agenda that is
dealt with after the ‘urgent’ business is attended to. It is also treated as a
‘subcategory’ in selected policy ‘sections’. It was only in 1998 that the ITU
set up a taskforce on ‘gender issues,’ producing gender awareness guidelines
for policy-making and regulatory agencies only in 2001. In 2002, the
multistakeholder Gender Caucus was formed at a regional preparatory
meeting in Mali with funding from development agencies within several
Nordic states and UNIFEM, in contrast to the other caucuses within