Ronnie D. Lipschutz is Professor of Politics and Co-Director of the Centre for Global, International and Regional Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. He is also Chair of the Politics Ph.D. program at UCSC. His primary areas of research and teaching include international politics, global environmental affairs, U.S. foreign policy, empire and religion, globalization, international regulation, and film, fiction, and politics. Lipschutz has published and lectured widely on these topics. Lipschutz received his Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from UC-Berkeley in 1987 and an SM in Physics from MIT in 1978.

This volume offers an historical and comparative overview of the literature, theory, practices and critiques of what has been variously labeled "global" or "transnational" civil society, which includes a broad range of nonstate actors, political, social and economic. The volume includes an introductory essay that historicizes and problematizes the relationship of society to state and market and seeks to contextualize the pieces in the volume, while locating the literature in relationship to international relations, political science and sociology.