Global Civil Society - Third force in which direction? Or,the implicit contradiction of an idea

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Politics - Political Theory and the History of Ideas Journal, grade: 1.0, The Australian National University, language: English, abstract: When looking at a 'black and white picture' one rarely realizes, without closer inspection, that hardly any pure black or white can be found on the emulsion. Rather varied degrees of grey give the picture its contours on a two-dimensional medium. The conventional term is as Aristotle's manifested in the law of contradiction, widersprüchlich. The idea of a 'global civil society' (GCS) does not differ from the observable contradiction between concept and fact of B/W photography. The widely accepted conceptualisation of GCS as the following argument will show, might be useful as an analytical tool; it does however obscure implicit contradictions of the idea itself. Its terminology, it is argued, can be a reductio ad absurdum if not cautiously used and reflected upon in any given context. As a neologism, Keane observers, GCS is 'becoming fashionable' continuing to justify its conceptual usage 'as an ideal type, for heuristic purposes'. Whilst dismissing its western origins 'and the possibility that it imposes alien values' as irrelevant consideration. Keane not alone in his reduction and in his benign outlook of the ideal type, treads on a swampy path when he goes on to see 'invisible governance' as an example of civil society outside its western original in the Batswanan kgotla system of chieftain domination. Without aiming to dismiss the recent achievements of actors in GCS, the aforementioned example of the kgotla highlights how actors of civil societies function 'within inherited structures of power that they may modify or alter but seldom transform'.5 Thus as this paper will illustrate the fallacy of 'contemporary thinking', which as Chandhokes shows 'gives us a picture of a global civil society that seems to be supremely uncontaminated by either the state or that of markets'.6 In other words the grey notion of GCS cannot be conceptualized without the black of the market and the white of the state [or vice versa].[...]

Dr. Lüdert is Assistant Professor and Associate Program Director in the School of Applied Leadership at City University of Seattle. Jan holds a PhD in International Relations from the department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is a Liu Institute for Global Issues scholar alumnus and recipient of the Killam Graduate Teaching Award. Jan holds a First Class Honors Masters of Arts in International Relations from the Australian National University and a Bachelor of Business Administration and Public Policy from Hamburg University for Economics and Politics. Jan studied at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania focusing on sociology and economics. He coordinated grassroots' community programs in Botswana for Skillshare International. His research includes Leadership Theory, International Relations, Political Theory, Intergovernmental Organizations, Non-State Actors, Transnational and Cyberspace Politics, Global Norms, Human Rights. Jan is deeply involved in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research projects. Jan writes for the Ivory Tower, an E-International relations blog.