Insofar as it has altered the national framework for the study of political, juridical, economical and cultural sociabilities in the modern world, globalization has imposed an urgent reinvention of theories on the social sciences on some of its traditional analytical categories, as is made evident by the frequent indiscriminate use of the terms "global", "world[wide]" and "cosmopolitan." The concept of "civil society" has been included in this wide epistemological "redirecting", creating controversies that are not only conceptual but also factual regarding the very actor of "global civil society" (GCS). This article is divided into two parts: the first maps out the trajectory of the concept of GCS through a review of the main contributions to the category, the second attempts to confront theoretical and normative impasses that emerge from the perspectives of those who are enthusiastic and those who are skeptical about GCSs, taking up the central argument posed by Mark Warren in his book Association and Democracy. Taking off from the perception that the existing notions of GCS are idiosyncratic and that their political role in a globalized world is under constant theoretical dispute, the goal of this article is to suggest a tentative approach to (a) interpret the associative heterogeneity that comes together through the category and (b) project some scenarios for more empirical studies that make it possible to verify their real democratic contribution to the globalized world. We believe that the idea of transnational associativism provides an analytical path for GCS actions and their multiple effects within the political sphere, among which democracy may prove to be just one.
globalization; Political Theory; civil society; global civil society; transnational associativism