activities for which governments are unwilling to accept direct responsibility
(Weiss and Gordenker 1996 , 21 ). BONGOs are business-organized NGOs that
may appear similar to public-interest advocacy groups but in reality are funded
by and advance the interests of speciWc businesses. Moreover, civil society groups
are made up of individuals, whose interests may diVer from those of the group and
who may use group structures to advance individual rather than group goals.
Kaldor ( 2003 ) parsed the deWnitional landscape diVerently, identifying two
traditional and three contemporary usages of the terms. The two traditional
meanings are:
- thesocietas civilis, the oldest of the meanings, referring to a society character-
ized by rule of law, where legitimate violence has become the monopoly of the
state;- the bourgeois society as deWned by Hegel and Marx, the arena of ethical life
between the state and the family, produced by capitalism which created
individuals who came together in arenas outside the state.Kaldor’s three contemporary meanings overlapped with Edwards’, but with the
crucial distinction that she explicitly considered how those meanings would apply
at the international level. At the national level, the voluntary associations covered
in Edwards’Wrst deWnition can serve as essential intermediaries between citizens
and the state. At the global level, that intermediation role is much murkier, as there
is neither a global state nor a recognized, well-deWned global citizenry. Kaldor
( 2003 , 7 ) argues that the emerging framework of international law, notable in the
development of human rights and humanitarian law, the establishment of the
International Criminal Court and other international tribunals, and the expansion
of international peacekeeping, constitute a framework for global governance that
mayWll in to some extent for the absence of a global state.
- The activist version: referring to active citizenship and self-organization.
Kaldor argued that what occurred in the latter twentieth century was the
development of a global public sphere: ‘‘inhabited by transnational advocacy
networks like Greenpeace or Amnesty International, global social movements
like the protestors in Seattle, Prague and Genoa, international media through
which their campaign can be brought to global attention, new global ‘civil
religions’ like human rights or environmentalism’’ (Kaldor 2003 , 8 ).- The neoliberal version: similar to Edwards’Wrst deWnition, civil society as
associational life via a non-proWt, voluntary ‘‘third sector.’’- The postmodern version: civil society as an arena of pluralism and contest-
ation, including nationalists and fundamentalists.The deWnitional problems give rise to data problems as well. It is very diYcult
to measure something whose parameters are not agreed on. Nonetheless,
several sources attempt to give a sense of the size of the sector and trends in its
678 ann florini