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From the time international human rights became a topic of interest in the years following World War II, civil society was integral to the process, although global civil society was not even an imaginary in this early period. As time passed, and grassroots struggles to promote human rights deepened and widened, an impetus toward transnational collaboration evolved, and from this dynamic, in conjunction with some related civic initiatives associated with environmental activism, feminism, global economic justice, and, more recently, anti-globalization and anti-war militancy, there has emerged a historically significant social construction that can be duly named "global civil society" (Colas 2002; Edwards forthcoming; Lipschutz 1992; Kaldor 2003; Keane 1998).

There is an assumption that guides this inquiry to the effect that major geopolitical turning-points, such as the end of World War II, the Cold War and its abrupt ending, a decade of transition in the 1990s and the aftermath of the September 11 mega-terrorist attacks on the United States, bear strongly and distinctively on the pursuit of human rights. Attention will be given to how these shifts in the overall global setting seem to alter the outlook and priorities of state actors, international institutions and civil society actors. Global civil society provides multiple arenas within which creative perspectives on the future of world order are being fashioned, and offers a principal source of resistance to present trends toward global dominance associated with American behavior since 1989, but especially in the course of the presidency of George W. Bush (Broad 2002). The challenge confronting global civil society, at present, is to revive the forward momentum of the 1990s in the altered political setting of a global war against terrorism and an American political leadership that throws its weight around unilaterally, while opportunistically conflating "human rights" with the spread of universally valid "American values" by coercive means, as necessary.

But even aside from this issue of American dominance, the attitude of civil society actors toward human rights was complex from the beginning, and included some concerns. In the Cold War setting, leftist outlooks were suspicious of some prominent Western human rights groups that seemed to use their influence to mount anti-Soviet propaganda. At the same time, in the 1980s, civil society was the main force behind the European movement to promote détente-from-below, essentially a formidable movement for peace and human rights that innovatively linked activists in Western Europe with those in Eastern Europe (Kaldor et al. 1989). More problematic were the grassroots concerns throughout the South that human rights NGOs in the North did not regard economic and social rights with nearly the legal gravitas associated with civil and political rights, nor did they devote their resources or energies to such issues.

A further set of concerns have been associated with recourse to "humanitarian intervention" in the years since the end of the Cold War. There was a certain skepticism among countries of the South that humanitarian pretensions were a pretext for a post-colonial reassertion of Western control. This concern mounted in 1999 when a NATO coalition, directed from Washington, bypassed the UN Security Council to avoid a veto by China and Russia, to conduct the Kosovo War, which was undertaken to save the Albanian Kosovars from the prospect of imminent ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Serbs, and in response to human rights atrocities attributed to the Serb rulers of Kosovo (Independent International Commission on Kosovo 2000). Civil society opposition to "humanitarian intervention" undertaken without a UN mandate reached a climax during the pre-war debate on Iraq policy, and was not assuaged by further evidence of oppressive practices of the Baghdad regime uncovered after the war. Especially in the aftermath of the Iraq War, the US government vigorously claimed that it had liberated the Iraqi people from an abusive government, even insisting that this rescue served as a sufficient justification for the war, an argument given added weight by Washington in view of its awkward failure to produce any proof that Iraq, in fact, possessed weapons of mass destruction. Recalling the Iraq threat associated with this weaponry provided the principal pre-war rationale for the war, argued with special vigor by the American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, in the course of the Security Council debate. Those who had opposed such a war all along as dangerous and illegal have become even more dubious about entrusting leading states, and particularly the United States, with the authority to wage wars for humanitarian goals (Chomsky 1999). There remains ambiguity because the UN and governing elites and citizenry of certain countries facing catastrophe call upon the United States to lead peacekeeping efforts, as in Liberia during the summer of 2003. . .

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