Introduction

This book aims to elaborate a conceptually clear reading of the role played by civil society in global politics in the last five decades characterized by the emergence, peak, and crisis of globalization. Its innovative character lies in its original theoretical framework, which differentiates transnational mobilizations according to their vision of global politics: the key distinction is here represented by the cleavages among civilizationism, cosmopolitanism, localism, and neo-liberalism. Together with these visions, the book also studies the organizational forms, the strategies, and the issue of legitimacy, as well as the contextual conditions that allowed for the emergence and consolidation of global activism from the 1970s onward. The debate on the future of global politics in the age of (post-?)globalization and geopolitical tensions is arguably the realm wherein the core cleavage within transnational civil society mobilizations resides. The book holds precisely that it is not possible to fully capture the differing goals, strategies, and impact of transnational activism without taking into account such framing cleavage. And that is not possible to fully capture the dynamics of global politics without taking into account the other side of it, i.e., the transnational mobilization of civil society organizations.