The Promise of Civil Society: a Global Movement for Communication Rights

The essays in this issue are based on a research colloquium that took place on 5±7 May 2003 in the cities of Padova and Venice, Italy. Sponsored by the University of Padova, the colloquium theme was `Information Society Visions and Governance: the World Summit on the Information Society and Beyond'. The event was intended to serve as an opportunity for communication policy researchers to gather and re ̄ect on research and policy agendas for global communication, in anticipation of the ®rst phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which took place in December 2003 in Geneva. Global, or at least transnational, policy making is not a recent phenomenon, although the degree of public participation in global policy forums is arguably on the rise. These essays are focused mostly on the role of `civil society'Ðthat part of social life that is often distinguished from the state and the corporate sectorÐin the generation of a worldwide public discourse about the future of communication rights and the global policies that are needed to secure them. Of course, there are grounds for disagreement about how uni®ed this discourse is, given the broad range of issues that have recently been brought under the banner of `civil society', including questions about: the communication rights of indigenous groups, workers, women, children, and people with disabilities; intellectual property; community media; open-source software; access to information and the means of communication; global citizenship and much more (Civil Society Declaration, 2003). But at the WSIS in Geneva it became clear that there was considerable political will to establish and maintain an effective presence to represent `civil society', which no doubt will remain the case in future global communication policy forums, including the second phase of the WSIS, which is scheduled to take place in Tunis in November 2005. Before proceeding with a discussion of the role of civil society in global communication policy making, I ®rst offer a brief excursus on the historical signi®cance of the concept. For it is helpful to trace its origins as a way of seeing how far this idea has travelled to become a part of the lexicon of a global movement for communication rights.