CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Many of us have realized that a huge wave of processes for the construction or reconstruction of so called "civil societies" has been taking place since more or less the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This has not only occurred in so called Eastern European societies, but also in many societies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These processes have different origins and characteristics in each world-region and country, but most of them also show at least two significant commonalities. The first of these commonalities is the very use of the expression "civil society." We all know that this not a new expression, but we also know that it has become very much in currency only in recent years. We all know that this expression does not have a common and unique meaning for all the social subjects that currently use it, but we also know that --given this polysemic indetermination-- it has acquired a certain status as if it represent a universal feature of human societies. We all know that this expression is not a "natural thing," to be "naturally" found everywhere, but a symbolic representation of some social phenomena, which only exists as a product of social interactions. In the light of all these things that we all know, the impressive current worldwide diffusion of the expression "civil society" should at least stimulate our analytical curiosity. It is particularly in this regard that the other commonality that we may observe throughout all these processes may be significant. This second commonality is the participation of certain kinds of organizations in almost all these processes, I will for the moment name these organizations only in a very generalistic and imprecise way as "global agents. This article is precisely oriented to discussing this name and what is within it are.

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