Global governance in transition: emancipation versus domination in the debates on "global civil society".

This paper intends to show a recent diversification in the literature about the idea of �global civil society�. We believe this diversification, including the growth of critical perspectives, follows a regression of expectations - regarding the processes of globalization and the mechanisms of governance - that marked the debates on the 1990`s. In the first section, we will present the mainstream definitions of the idea of global civil society and we will briefly consider some changes in the international context, particularly in the end of the 1990`s. In the second section, we intend to indicate some issues that emerged within more critical perspectives, especially about the legitimacy of the actors, about the idea of a global field of action, and about the possibilities of emancipation and/or domination in these arenas of articulation beyond borders. Finally in the last section, we propose that the concept could be better understood considering the distinction of two broad dimensions of non-state political action beyond national borders, or two different spheres of pressure (top-down e bottom-up), that can either complement or oppose each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]