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Direct citizen voices are relatively absent from China's public arena and seldom influence government policymaking. In early 2004, however, public controversies surrounding dam building on the Nu River prompted the Chinese government to halt the proposed hydropower project. The occurrence of such public debates indicates the rise of a green public sphere of critical environmental discourse. Environmental nongovernmental organizations play a central role in producing this critical discourse. Mass media, the internet, and “alternative media” are the main channels of communication. The emergence of a green public sphere demonstrates the new dynamism of grass-roots political change.

Recent discussions of the Internet have touted “virtual community” and a capacity to enhance citizen power in democracies. The present essay (a) calls for a more rigorous understanding of community; (b) suggests that relationships forged with the aid of electronic technology may do more to foster “categorical identities” than they do dense, multiplex, and systematic networks of relationships; and (c) argues that an emphasis on community needs to be complemented by more direct attention to the social bases of discursive publics that engage people across lines of basic difference in collective identities. Previous protest movements have shown that communications media have an ambiguous mix of effects. They do facilitate popular mobilization, but they also make it easy for relatively ephemeral protest activity to outstrip organizational roots. They also encourage governments to avoid concentrating their power in specific spatial locations and thus make revolution in some ways more difficult.

Universities have flourished in the modern era as central public institutions and bases for critical thought. They are currently challenged by a variety of social forces and undergoing a deep transformation in both their internal structure and their relationship to the rest of society. Critical theorists need to assess this both in order to grasp adequately the social conditions of their own work and because the transformation of universities is central to a more general intensification of social inequality, privatization of public institutions, and reorganization of the relation of access to knowledge. This is also a pivotal instance for asking basic questions about the senses in which the university is or may be ‘public’: (1) where does its money come from? (2) who governs? (3) who benefits? and (4) how is knowledge produced and circulated?

Les interventions dans les ≪ cas d'urgences humanitaires complexes ≫ sont devenues une partie essentielle de la société planétaire. Le texte fournit un compte rendu de la conception des ≪ urgences ≫en termes d'imaginaire social qui procure une caractéristique à la fois de la perception et de l'action. Cet imaginaire moule la définition et la rhétorique des urgences, les façons dont elles se présentent et sont reconnues, et l'organisation de l'intervention. II reflète à la fois l'anxiété face au risque et une foi moderne envahissante en la capacité de gérer les problèmes. Quoique les événements exigeant ces interventions – par exemple, au Soudan – soient souvent rapportés comme étant manifestement convaincants, l' « imaginaire social des urgences » organise conceptuellement ce système. Interventions into “complex humanitarian emergencies” have become a central part of global society. This article provides an account of the construction of “emergencies” in terms of a social imaginary that gives characteristic form to both perception and action. This imaginary shapes the definition and rhetoric of emergencies, the ways in which they are produced and recognized, and the organization of intervention. It reflects both anxiety in the face of risk and a pervasive modern faith in capacity to manage problems. Though the events demanding these interventions–for example, in Sudan–are often presented as transparently compelling, the “social imaginary of emergencies” conceptually structures this system.

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