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CIVIL SOCIETY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 167
5. The CBBI website clarifies the ‘business community’s’ objectives in
maintaining a neoliberal vision of an IS as discussed in Chapter 5.
For more see: http://businessatwsis.net/realindex.php
6. According to the Civil Society Meeting Point website, accredited
members participating in the WSIS process includes: ‘representatives
from “professional” and grassroots NGOs, the trade union
movement, community media activists, mainstream and traditional
media interest groups, parliamentarians and local government officials,
the scientific and academic community, educators, librarians,
volunteers, the disability movement, youth activists, indigenous
peoples, “think-tanks”, philanthropic institutions, gender advocates
and human and communication rights advocates’. http://www.wsiscs.org/wsis-intro.html
7. See: www.wsis-cs.org, choike., etc.
8. A variety of NGO and CSO participants to the Geneva Summit
discuss lack of access at the conference site itself, for more see:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wsis/home
9. In addition to the parallel civil society meetings, a group of about
fifty ‘dissident’ CSOs – mostly social movements and NGOs based in
Western Europe – took part in alternative events and actions protesting
the logic of the summit itself, under the collective banner of
‘WSIS: WE SEIZE’. Although only one of these events was a small
public protest, the activists were immediately arrested and disbanded.
For more see: Cammaerts and Carpentier 2004: 21.
10. The relatively low presence of Latin American CSOs is not explicitly
addressed in their piece, but the number of ‘active’ CSOs from
Latin America makes up 7 per cent versus 6 per cent from Asia. See
Cammaerts and Carpentier 2004: 15–16.
11. See Human Rights Watch on civil liberties and human right violations
after 11 September: http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/september11/
12. Taylor uses his findings to forward an argument about the emancipatory
potential for civil society in the Global South. He argues
that the ‘potential diffusion of power consequent upon the network
of practices of NGOs is what our results are showing. The Global
South is not represented in any sense through NGOs but their global
activities are providing a legitimizing platform for dissent and diverse
voices from regions where economic and political power is lacking’
(Taylor 2004).
13. Here, the distinction between civil and political society signals the
inability of the category of formal associational life to capture the
complex realities of political engagement in postcolonial societies.
This argument is elaborated by Partha Chatterjee (2004) who distinguishes
between official civil society in the form of NGOs and social