Cosmopolitan democracy projects, widely disseminated vis-a-vis the westphalian crisis, are compromised to the extent that do not adequately take into consideration the power asymmetries in international relations and the empirical difficulties in building an institutional apparatus capable of granting normative legitimacy as well as political efficacy to decisions taken in the public sphere: who should participate in the deliberations and who is the recipient of the communications originated in the so-called global civil society? Nevertheless, I contend that there are transnational public spheres which provide new possibilities of thematization and solution of problems which had been dealt before exclusively within the national state framework. This article aims at exploring the potentials for increasing civil society organization's influence and power over the state, through the resort to transnational public spheres.
globalization; cosmopolitanism; international relations; transnational public spheres; human rights; transnational networks