TEE

its modern conception, e.g. minorities, immigrants, first-nation people, and many feminists. And b) the fact that this dy-
namic brings with it an incipient de-nationalizing of specific types of power that used to be embedded in the national stafe
and have now been relocated, at least partially to global corporations and markets, NGOs, international organisations and
sub-national structures, particularly global cities, and transnational spaces, particularly the Internet.

The large city of today emerges as a strategic site for these new types of operations. It is one of the nexi where the for-
mation of new claims materializes and assumes concrete forms. The loss of power at the national level produces the pos-
sibility for new forms of power and politics at the subnational level. The national as container of social process and power
is cracked. This cracked casing opens up possibilities for a geography of politics that links subnational spaces. Cities are
foremost in this new geography.

One question this engenders is how and whether we are seeing the formation of a new type of transnational politics that lo-
calizes in these cities but is part of a transnational network of such localizations. The local is today part of cross-border net-
works rather than simply the bottom or smallest level in the conventional spatial hierarchies that have dominated formal po-
litical systems, i.e. local-national-international. The Internet plays a strategic role in this re-positioning of the local.

There is little doubt that the Internet is an enormously important tool and space for democratic participation at all levels,
the strengthening of civil society, and the formation of a whole new world of transnational political and civic projects.
Notably some of the struggles around the Bosnian-Serb conflict. But it has also become clear over the last few years that
the Internet is no longer what it was in the 1970s or 1980s; it has become a contested space with considerable possibil-
ities for segmentation and privatisation. We cannot take its democratic potential as a given simply because of its inter-
connectivity. We cannot take its "seamlessness” as a given simply because of its technical properties. And we cannot take
its bandwidth availability as a given simply because of the putative exponential growth in network capacity with each
added network.

This is a particular moment in the history of digital networks, one when powerful corporate actors and high performance
networks are strenghtening the role of private digital space and altering the structure of public digital space. Digital space
has emerged not simply as a means for communicating, but as a major new theater for capital accumulation and the oper-
ations of global capital. But civil society --in all its various incarnations is also an increasingly energetic presence in cy-
berspace. The greater the diversity of cultures and groups the better for this larger political and civic inhabitation of the
Internet, the more effective the resistance to the risk that the corporate world might set the standards. From struggles
around human rights, the environment and workers strikes around the world to genuinely trivial pursuits, the Internet has
emerged as a powerful medium for non-elites to communicate, support each other's struggles and create the equivalent of
insider groups at scales going from the local to the global.

The political and civic potential of these trends is enormous. It offers the possibility for interested citizens to act in con-
cert across the globe. It signals the possibility of a new form of politics: local politics with a difference -- simultaneous ac-
tion in multiple localities or local action with an awareness of many other localities struggling around similar issues. We
are seeing the formation of a whole new world of transnational political and civic projects.

These developments in the transnational networks that connect cities and in the digital space of the Internet bring with
them a series of new interactions between what has been constituted as the private and the public, the domestic and the
international. The public can now operate through the private and the private through the public (Aman, Jr. 1998). For in-
stance, markets are taking over many of the functions that used to be in public bureaucracies and so are NGOs. On the
other hand, market forces and corporations can now influence public agendas to a much larger extent than was the case
twenty years ago (powerful corporations always did influence public policy, but what we are seeing today is on another
scale). Similarly, NGOs have grown in number and in influence. The large international organisations such as the World
Bank now are expected to consult with (the well-established) NGOs and large western funders now often prefer to fund
NGOs in Africa to do development and public work rather than governments.

SOME NOTES ON NGOS.
NGOs have been around for a long time. What is different today? It is their diversity, breadth of coverage, and, perhaps