5 Emerging Directions of Research
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In the immediate aftermath of 9 / 11 , speculation abounded that now that the
‘‘interwar’’ period (between the end of the cold war and the emergence of the
next great military conXict) had drawn to an end, the conditions that allowed civil
society participation in global aVairs toXourish would prove to have been only a
passing stage in a world still heavily dominated by nation-state decision-makers.
And it is true that the more spectacular manifestations of global civil society—the
massive demonstrations that had surrounded meetings of the WTO, the World
Bank and IMF, and the G- 8 —did die down. But it appears that the more funda-
mental trends that drove the rise of transnational civil society in the 1980 s and
1990 s still exist: The reality of border-crossing problems that national governments
are not adequately addressing; the relative ease of cross-border communication
among ordinary people in the information age; the availability of suYcient
(if limited) human and Wnancial resources. As the LSEYearbooks and other
recent publications demonstrate, the empirical evidence continues to show
that transnational civil society continues to matter in global politics.
But that one answer—that transnational civil society does matter to outcomes in
global politics—leaves open three enormously important questions that future
research should continue to address. TheWrst is to further elucidate how and
when transnational civil society matters. As Price ( 2003 ) pointed out, the literature
has raised numerous hypotheses about the interaction between domestic political
norms and structures and the successes and failures of transnational campaigns,
but only occasionally have scholars rigorously vetted their empirical cases against
other possible theoretical explanations.
Second, until very recently, the literature focused almost entirely on the
interactions between transnational civil society and states, or state-created
intergovernmental organizations, and tended to explore the adversarial side of
those interactions. Given that much of what motivated the civil society actors was
opposition to what states and IGOs were doing, this was a natural and appropriate
focus. But the pattern of civil society’s global interactions is shifting. Increasingly,
actors from the public, proWt-seeking, and citizen sectors are working out
partnerships, sometimes explicit, sometimes tacit. In some cases, civil society
actors have been included in the delegations of governments involved in oYcial
intergovernmental negotiations, a phenomenon that has received little scholarly
attention. And the sectoral divides, never perfectly sharp, are blurring. Some of
global problem-solving is being tackled by ‘‘social entrepreneurs’’ who use business
models to develop proWtable, and hence sustainable, mechanisms for solving
public goods problems (World Economic Forum 2005 ). Future research needs to
consider carefully the shifting boundaries of, and patterns of relations among, the
public, proWt-seeking, and citizen sectors.
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