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Globalization and the growing interconnectedness of people, spaces, and problems is perhaps most evident in environmental issues and responses to such issues at the global level. This is as true for artificial disasters such as natural disasters which create humanitarian crises whose effects go far beyond national contexts and borders, as the tsunami disaster in Asia has most recently shown. The Asian tsunami was unprecedented in terms of geographical scope and the number of people affected. 1 The international response to it has also exceeded the response to other humanitarian crises. 2 Disasters of such scale and international scope evoke global responses accordingly. As the international community acts to mitigate the effects of such disasters, they form a part of a set of global forces, which has recently been termed global civil society.

This analysis starts from the broader question of how global forces …