The paradox of civility: Rethinking Alexander's civil sphere theory in an age of global conflicts

Abstract

This article revisits Jeffrey C. Alexander's Civil Sphere Theory to explore the enduring paradox of civility and the fragile pursuit of cosmopolitan peace in an era marked by renewed warfare and deepening global divisions. Building on Giambattista Vico's claim that civil society is a human creation and David Held's assertion that history remains with us and can still be made, this article argues that the aspiration toward a global civil sphere – though yet unrealized – endures as a persistent moral and sociological horizon. The analysis positions Alexander's recent reflections in dialogue with Bauman's notion of deterritorialized ‘reconnaissance wars’ and Mann's contemporary sociological analysis of warfare. Together, these perspectives reveal how globalization – within which current wars are increasingly situated – was once envisioned as a framework for extending democratic solidarity beyond nation states but has instead reinforced nationalist boundaries, geopolitical rivalries, and the militarization of international order. At the same time, contemporary struggles for justice, alongside the communicative and affective capacities of twenty-first-century media, are generating new forms of transnational empathy and moral imagination that may reconfigure the civil sphere. The paper concludes that peace, inseparable from the civil sphere itself, remains – though fragile – the most profound and enduring achievement of global civil life.

The idealizing promises of the civil sphere stop at the border of one's own collectivity. (Alexander, 2026)

If Orwell is right that control of the past allows control of the future, it is imperative, for the sake of that future, that those who control the present are not allowed to manipulate the past in a fashion likely to render the future inhospitable to humanity and uninhabitable. (Bauman, 1989: 250)

I

As Jeffrey C. Alexander argues, the cosmopolitan dream of global peace – one that can be attained only through the creation of a genuinely societally-embedded global civil sphere – has persisted as an idea over time (Alexander, 2007, 2026). It appeared in rudimentary forms from humanity's earliest periods and gained explicit conceptual articulation in the eighteenth century, most notably in Kant's writings. Thus, despite enduring waves of enmity, revolutions, civil and regional conflicts, as well as national and supranational schisms, and total and global wars across different historical periods and geographies, this idea has survived. Thus, even though Alexander rightly observes that a global civil sphere has not yet come into existence, this absence is not due to a lack of trying. Indeed, it is precisely the ‘2500-year effort to create and empower civil spheres’–its remarkable persistence, continuity, and resilience – that provides a ’reason not to give up hope’ (Alexander, 2026).

Invoking Giambattista Vico, Alexander introduces a further, and more pragmatically grounded, argument, one that offers not merely hope but a basis for confidence. As Vico famously asserted, ‘the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and ... its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind’ (Vico, 1968 [1725]: 96 [para. 331], cited in Alexander, 2026). This implies that although ‘the paradox of actually existing civil spheres has not been resolved’ (Alexander, 2026) and, consequently, these spheres remain incapable of constraining war on a global scale, the equally paradoxical and ‘contested dream of cosmopolitan peace can never be entirely suppressed’ (Alexander, 2007: 380).

Although civil society primarily refers to the concrete structures and practices of everyday solidarity, it is now, more than ever, essential to recognize its aspirational dimension – the enduring dream of peace that transcends empirical reality. It is this imaginative horizon that continues to give life to the civil sphere. In a period marked by global crises and the renewed spectre of large-scale wars, it is equally imperative to pursue the project of global peace within the domain of civil society and across those discursive arenas in which critical reflection and ideas are formed.

It is well understood within sociology that the civil sphere is neither an ontological given nor a merely normative ideal; it must be analyzed in its concrete social manifestations and on the ground of societies. The civil sphere materializes in the observable practices and institutions through which claims to solidarity are articulated, enacted, and contested. These include regulatory institutions such as electoral processes, voting, and legal frameworks; civic associations; factual and fictional media representations; and broader modes of public communication. Wherever such solidaristic bonds take shape, they do so in tension with enduring dynamics of self-interest and the interwoven structures of political and ideological power (Mann, 1986, 2023) that have defined social life from its inception. Yet, in the present moment, these bonds require deliberate strengthening if the pursuit of peace is to continue. The more unsettling question, perhaps, is: what viable alternative exists?

In line with Alexander's reasoning, ‘the tragic paradox that clawed at the heart of Greek democracy has been recapitulated time and again in the course of Western history’ (Alexander, 2026). Caesarism, Bonapartism, and the diverse democratic, authoritarian, and totalitarian manifestations of what Weber termed charisma have all become metaphors of ’the dark possibilities triggered by the paradoxes of actually existing civil spheres’ (Alexander, 2026). This leads Alexander to suggest that what Weber regarded as the modern state's great achievement – its ability to pacify the nation through the monopolization of legitimate violence – proved to be an empty promise, as the history of the twentieth century tragically demonstrates (Alexander, 2026). As Alexander reminds us, ‘it was not despite, but because of, state monopolization that violence continually resurfaced’ (Alexander, 2026).

As one of the most influential social theorists of our time, Zygmunt Bauman – like many others – would likely be struck by the renewed prominence of large-scale ground warfare, with Ukraine and Gaza serving as prominent, though not exclusive, examples. Yet this state of affairs does not negate the broader social and historical processes Bauman identified when theorizing the globalization of war, particularly his notion of ‘reconnaissance wars’: conflicts that probe, pre-empt, and configure the strategic manner of military engagement within an increasingly deterritorialized global ‘frontierland’ (Bauman, 2002).

Reconnaissance forms of warfare coexist today with an expanding array of violent modalities – ranging from terrorism and conventional inter-state wars to multiple proxy conflicts, cultural and informational wars, cyber warfare, and the renewed eruption of previously ‘frozen’ conflicts. Regarding the reconnaissance form of warfare, recent large-scale military parades – Beijing's 2025 commemoration being a prominent example, marked by highly publicized displays of advanced strategic weaponry – further illustrate how demonstrations of force remain central to contemporary geopolitical signaling. These reconnaissance strategies offer a sobering reminder that periods of global peace have ‘less to do with the putative success of civil internationalism, and more to MAD, with the rational calculation that nuclear warfare will trigger “mutually assured destruction”’ (Alexander, 2026).

But, despite the unprecedented intensity of contemporary ground wars – simultaneously proxy in their financial and logistical architectures, yet fiercely national and territorial in their claims – Bauman's post-9/11 assertion still holds: in the global era, place no longer guarantees protection. Security and threat became, and, after 9/11 with its ensuing waves of terrorist attacks, unequivocally remain, extraterritorial issues that evade territorial solutions (Bauman, 2002: 82, emphasis added). This development led Bauman to formulate a diagnosis that remains strikingly relevant: ‘The now ever-present threat of a terrorist attack 11th-September style was on the cards for a long time, due to the global insecurity massively generated inside the … politically uncontrolled … extraterritorial “space of flows”’ (Bauman, 2002: 82). This deregulated and unbounded ‘space of flows’ (after Castells, 1992; 1996) not only enabled the diffusion of what Bauman later termed liquid fear (Bauman, 2006) and the intensification of global insecurity, but also created conditions conducive to the proliferation of warfare.

Simultaneously, the collapse of the Iron Curtain coincided with the emergence of the World Wide Web – a development that inaugurated the Information Age, in which accelerated communication flows rapidly transformed social organizations and economic policies. This transformation amounted to a revolution in its own right, exemplifying what Giddens (1990) described as time-space distanciation, and what Harvey (1989) identified as time-space compression, these being interrelated dynamics that define globalization. It is these very dynamics that prompted Alexander to ask: ‘Has it not been the compression of time, space, and meaning that has allowed destructive violence and mass murder to become so worldwide?’ (Alexander, 2007: 375).

The age of Information and Globalization has also entrenched a series of tragic and paradoxical binaries, marked by constant movement between the local, the national, and the universal – categories that are often as contradictory as they are treated as being synonymous. As Alexander observes, the much-heralded modernity of the twentieth century proved to be ‘as barbaric as any recorded in the annals of traditional history’ (Alexander, 2007: 373). Alluding to the devastating wars that scarred twentieth-century Europe, Alexander's characterization resonates with Mark Mazower's depiction of Europe as a ‘dark continent’ (Mazower, 1998), as well as with Hobsbawm's portrayal of the era as an ‘age of extremes’ (Hobsbawm, 1995). It is this same historical terrain that later inspired Keith Lowe to describe the continent as ‘savage’ (Lowe, 2013). This is why Alexander (2007: 371) alerts us to another paradox at the heart of globalization:

Globalization is hailed as a revolutionary, path-breaking, weltgeschichte phenomenon. It solves the world's economic problems or condemns more of the world's people to poverty. It creates equality and cooperation or frightfully deepens inequality and hegemonic domination. It opens the way for world peace or it ushers in a new and nightmarish period of terrorism and war.

Paradoxically, globalization was initially conceived as a project of international democracy that sought to extend the civil sphere beyond nation states after the Cold War (Alexander, 2026). This ambition coincided with the geopolitical project of expanding both EU and NATO borders eastward, right up to the frontiers of the Russian Federation (Alexander, 2026). Yet it is precisely this expansion – following the disappearance of the Central and Eastern European communist buffer states – that has become the focal point of ‘Russian nationalism rooted in fear. Ukraine has become, in this narrative, the next, decisive, and final link’ (van der Laarse, 2024: 6, italics added). As a retired professor of cultural heritage and conflict van der Laarse (2024: 6) further emphasizes this point:

… [R]emember, these are not lies from a Russian geopolitical perspective. But for Europe, which has shifted eastwards, the Russian threat has become increasingly real, especially after the fall of communism. Be that as it may, what all warring parties are grappling with is a reservoir of spectres that feed on the phantom pain of lost empires.

Rooted in memory politics as well as in aspirations to build broader peace and civil society, these processes – initially intended to open the boundaries of international democracy – ultimately remained confined within the framework of the nation state, thereby legitimizing state power at the expense of a transnational civil sphere. Bauman draws on David Held in a manner similar to Alexander's engagement with Vico. In his assessment of the post-9/11 international order, Held observes a strong temptation for states to ‘put up the shutters’ and retreat into narrowly national forms of self-protection (Held, 2002, in Bauman, 2002: 83). This diagnosis resonates with Alexander's formulation of the central paradox of actually existing civil spheres: ‘internally, they remain fragile; externally, they remain delimited by the nation state’ (Alexander, 2026). Alexander concludes that, under such conditions, ‘organized violence remains, not just a last resort, but a primary mode for resolving political dispute’ (Alexander, 2026). Held further warns that, while there remains an opportunity to strengthen multilateral institutions and international legal frameworks, there is an equally real danger of responses that reverse such fragile gains, leading instead towards intensified antagonisms and division – ‘a distinctively uncivil society’ (Held, 2002: 74–88, in Bauman, 2002: 83). Taken together, the perspectives of Vico, Held, Bauman, and Alexander highlight a central paradox of the contemporary global condition: as the material and symbolic boundaries of violence spread accros multiple terrains and become ever more diffuse, the need for a society-embedded global civil sphere becomes more urgent, yet more difficult to achieve.

Further within this intertextual thread, drawing implicitly on Vico, Held offers a conclusion that resonates today as powerfully as it did nearly a quarter of a century ago: ‘Our consolation – though the only consolation available’, but also, ‘as Bauman adds, the only one humankind needs when falling on dark times’&ndashis the fact that ‘history is still with us and can be made’ (Held, 2002: 74–88, in Bauman, 2002: 83). If history can be made, and if the principles of civil society are to be found within the modifications of the human mind, then – following Vico and Alexander – the world of civil society, too, remains a human creation.

Fom Weber through Bauman to Alexander, change remains society's only constant. Yet the forms of change now before us unfold amid hyperdynamic and complex global conditions, increasingly overshadowed once again by the prospect of large-scale war.

II

War and peace are enduring and recurrent conditions of human social life; yet peace, no less than war, is an active social process that requires sustained collective effort to be achieved and preserved. In the context of today's large-scale conflicts, the central question is no longer simply who will prevail militarily, but rather how peace can be attained. Beneath this pressing – and at present seemingly hard-to-resolve – question lies a deeper one: by what means can the civil sphere evolve into a genuinely global sphere capable of acting to sustain peace?

Sociological and statistical analyses indicate that in the twentieth century alone, war-related deaths surpassed those of all previous eras combined (Kuznar, 2024: 300). Widely regarded as the bloodiest century in recorded history, it witnessed the outbreak of roughly 250 new wars and an estimated 100–120 million deaths, including some 70 million from the two world wars (Centeno and Enriquez, 2016; Holsti, 1991; Malešević, 2010; Tilly, 2003, in Benčić Kužnar, 2024: 300). Altogether, twentieth century accounts for approximately 75% of all war-related deaths over the past 5000 years (Eckhardt, 1992: 273; Malešević, 2010: 118). In this age of extremes (Hobsbawm, 1995), after 1945, as Alexander observes, especially ‘on the regional level, war-making has despoiled the post-WWII landscape, with two million dead in almost 300 armed conflicts, ¹ some 50 of which remain ongoing. Some of the most savage among them have been waged in the name of protecting the civil sphere of the United States. Think Korea, Vietnam, Central America, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan, and most recently Gaza and Iran’ (Alexander, 2026).

It should come as no surprise that the hundreds, if not thousands, of regional, national, and global wars fought across the preceding three millennia have continually rekindled humanity's dreams of global peace. In other words, the historical movement from the horrors and crimes of war towards policies of reconciliation, rapprochement, and the strengthening of civil society, has consistently been driven by the fear of war's sudden return.

Emphasizing this as the most critical limitation of the civil sphere, Alexander (2026) convincingly observes that

The idealizing promises of the civil sphere stop at the border of one's own collectivity. For the ancient Greeks and the republican city-states of the Middle Ages and early modern Europe, this meant the boundaries of their cities. For moderns, this usually means the boundaries of their nations. It is for this reason that civil suspicion about anti-civil outsiders fuels war. The national form of organization severely compromises the civil sphere's promise of universalizing solidarity.

In the context of globalization – still a terrain for present-days wars – this boundary is no longer confined to physical or territorial frontiers but extends into the moral and symbolic geographies that structure inclusion and exclusion on a planetary scale. Nowhere is this paradox more visible than in Gaza, where appeals to universal human solidarity collide with the hardened boundaries of national, religious, and geopolitical identities and fears. It is here that the civil sphere's aspiration towards universal inclusion is most acutely tested – and most visibly constrained.

Not much has changed in the normative function of regulatory institutions since The Eumenides, the final play of Aeschylus's Oresteia, in which Athena established ‘an oath-bound trial by jury’ (483–484), ² envisioned as ‘a court into all time to come’ (484). By selecting ‘the finest of her citizens, who shall swear to make no judgment that is not just, and make clear where in this action the truth lies’ (487–489), Athena inaugurated what she herself described as history's ‘first trial for bloodshed’ (682). She further instructed each juror to ‘take his ballot in his hand, think on his oath, and make his judgment’ (709–710).

In so doing, Athena institutionalized two enduring pillars of civic regulation – the court and the vote – which, in the conceptual language of Civil Sphere Theory (Alexander, 2006), represent the foundational mechanisms through which societies mediate conflict and legitimate moral order. When the jurors respected their oaths and rendered a fair verdict, Athena urged them ‘to govern and to grace’ (697), symbolically uniting justice with the moral ethos of civic responsibility.

Yet even though ‘the goddess offers a masterful poetic remonstration on behalf of the nonviolent solidarity that the newly established civil space can create’ (Alexander, 2026), and while the democratic spirit of ethics, dialogue, and cooperation appears to have replaced anger, domination, revenge, and bloodlust, Athena's final words reveal the limits of this newfound civility. After warning the Furies not to seek vengeance, she pointedly declares: ‘it is only in this place that I haunt’ (858), and continues, ‘let our wars range outward, and may they range full fierce and terrible’ (864–865), concluding with the injunction, ‘No true fighter … fights at home’ (866).

These lines expose the tragic paradox at the heart of Athenian democracy: the same institutions that secured domestic peace also legitimized external warfare. The court and the vote may have sustained an internal sphere of civil order, but ‘the spirit of Achilles’ was projected outward as an instrument of power and expansion (Alexander, 2026). As Alexander (2026) notes:

… [T]hroughout the entire span of the fifth century, there was scarcely a time when Athenian democracy was not at war, when its domestically civil citizens were not fighting ferociously and violently against invading forces from outside Greece or hostile city states within it.

The same dynamic can be traced through successive imperial formations – the expansion of the Roman and Byzantine empires, the hegemonic reach of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov empires, and later the Western European colonial empires the operations of which culminated in the totalitarian catastrophes of the First and Second World Wars. This historical continuum invites a critical question: what, in essence, has changed within regulatory institutions and within the broader, actually existing civil spheres since the time of ancient Athens? The paradox inscribed in the concept of the civil sphere – its inward cultivation of solidarity and outward projection of power – became even more entrenched with the rise of the nation state. As Alexander (2026) observes:

[F]rom the onset of the First World War in 1914 to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Western societies have been mired in intensely destabilizing global conflicts, their putatively pacific civil democracies invested, deeply and passionately, in violent, and often, global wars.

Part of this complex problem lies in the unavoidable politicization of civil spheres when they are projected onto the international stage. As is well established, the civil sphere is surrounded by what Alexander (2006) terms non-civil spheres – the domains of economy, religion, family, community, and, above all, the state and political power. The very interests and imperatives that sustain these domains often come into tension with the social dialogue, moral codes and solidaristic ideals of the civil sphere, at times posing a direct challenge to its integrative and universalizing aspirations. Moreover, from the earliest formations of society, it has been evident that real civil societies are contested and fragmented. While the hierarchies in non-civil spheres ‘interfere with the construction of the wider solidarity that is the sine qua non of civil life, these same dynamics create the conditions for suppressing the very existence of the civil sphere. On the brighter side, they also create the possibility for its civil repair’ (Alexander, 2006: 7, emphasis added).

Precisely because ‘victors decided that, to achieve pacification, civil spheres would have to be more deeply institutionalized in the conquered nations and more widely available outside of them’ (Alexander, 2026), and because ‘the dictatorships that had initiated the world wars were forcibly transformed so that their civil spheres would control their national governments’ (Alexander, 2026), the very infrastructures of international democracy designed to extend the civil sphere beyond the nation state ultimately faltered, some collapsing entirely, others failing in part. This occurred from the League of Nations after the First World War to the project of globalization following the fall of Communism. The same fragility persists today, as institutions such as the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) remain constrained by national sovereignty and geopolitical asymmetry, unable to transform moral aspiration into justice and enforceable global solidarity. Even though the ICC issued arrest warrants in March 2023 for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova on charges of war crimes involving the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children, both have thus far evaded arrest, while Hungary has meanwhile become the first EU member state to withdraw from the Court.

Establishing coherent democratic patterns, both within and beyond national boundaries, remains elusive when their design is subordinated to the interests of ruling political elites. History shows that, in the aftermath of war, the rhetoric of global peace often conceals the restoration of entrenched hierarchies, as states seek not the universalization of civil solidarity but the reassertion of political dominance. This contradiction has repeatedly undermined postwar efforts to institutionalize global order: from the League of Nations to the United Nations, and from the European integration project to the International Criminal Court, each has struggled to transcend the sovereignty of nation states and the asymmetries of power that define them.

What endures – and is continuously reborn in ongoing global struggles for justice, freedom, and human dignity, from Mandela's South Africa to today's Palestine, as recently reaffirmed by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese (2025) – is what Alexander rearticulates as the lived civil sphere of ‘structures of feeling’ and ‘habits of the heart’ (after de Tocqueville (2000)), where the moral and emotional foundations of social solidarity truly reside.

While binarism and paradox will remain inscribed both in the idea and in the lived realities of civil societies, the worsening of wars has nonetheless fostered a growing – if uneven – global awareness of what Elazar Barkan (2000) called ‘the guilt of nations’. As Barkan argues, the late twentieth century marked a critical turning point when states began to acknowledge moral responsibility for historical injustices such as genocide, colonialism, slavery, and expropriation. Thus, for the prospects of civil repair, the images, emotions, and shared grief emerging from contemporary wars – from Palestine and Ukraine to Syria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Xinjiang – are, as never before, generating new forms of historical dialogue. These dialogues hold the potential to confront what van der Laarse (2024: 15) calls ‘the difficulties of acknowledging the pain of others and the guilt of one's own nation’.

In this context, the task before us is to reimagine the civil sphere through the communicative and affective capacities of twenty-first-century media – however contested these may be – by bringing into public life every word, image, and moral impulse that strives to feel the pain of others. Only through such acts of transnational empathy and moral imagination can we begin to rebuild a genuinely global civil sphere capable of sustaining peace. Global marches for peace – in response to the wars in Ukraine, Palestine, and elsewhere – have revealed glimpses of what a genuinely global civil society might yet become.

By contrast, the recent incapacity of Western political elites – evident in their third failed attempt to broker peace in the context of Russia's invasion of Ukraine – casts serious doubt on the European project itself, a project founded upon and grounded in the ideal of peace. It likewise challenges the broader civil sphere project exemplified by the U.S. Constitution's opening phrase, ‘We, the people’, which was intended to expand the horizons of social solidarity and equality. Thus, what unfolds in Ukraine today is not only a profound tragedy for Ukraine and its people – and, in many respects, for Russia as well – but also a deeper tragedy for Europe itself: for the very idea of Europe as a normative project grounded in peace and cosmopolitan solidarity. The war calls into question Europe's postwar self-understanding as a community founded on law, dialogue, and the renunciation of violence.

As it stands starkly before us, we can no longer ignore how, amid today's global crises of identity, the civilizing rhetoric that sustains democratic self-understanding continues to obscure the enduring legacies of totalitarianism, religious extremism, colonial domination, racial violence, and ideological exclusion. The paradox of the civil sphere, then, lies in its simultaneous capacity to defend freedom while legitimizing violence in its name – a contradiction now visible in the erosion of the rule of law, the resurgence of militarized discourse, and the troubling silences of citizenries that ought to be more independent, vigilant, and critically engaged. This tension remains inscribed within the very binary structure of the civil sphere itself – a duality perhaps best captured in Alexander's (2026) formulation:

The possibility for creating a civil sphere rests upon … utopian conceits: that people are independent rather than dependent and critical rather than deferential… Only if the motives of our fellow citizens and their relations are conceived in such a hopeful manner can we imagine the kind of civil solidarity that makes democracy possible… The paradox is that the very process of imagining such a world – a world that sacralizes such civil qualities as autonomy, honesty, and cooperation – requires us, at the very same time, to construct an imaginary world that is its very opposite: One that is anti-civil and profane… It is easy to imagine that dark and threatening forces of anti-civility are churning just outside of civil spheres, and just beneath them as well. It is the imminent experience of danger and fragility that explains why civil spheres exclude as much as they include; why they feel compelled to energetically fight against actors and groups whose motives they imagine to be dependent and dishonest and whose relations they imagine to be aggressive.

In summary, despite the steady rise in global military expenditures – not only in recent years but throughout the past decade (SIPRI, 2025) – the enduring relevance of Vico's and Held's pragmatic insights remains evident: that civil society is made by human hands, and that history is still with us and can be made anew. What may offer renewed hope for future efforts to strengthen civility and peace is articulated in Michael Mann's recent work (2023), which reminds us that war – contrary to both popular belief and much academic convention – has yielded little enduring good, even for the political elites who have waged it. What endures, as both aspiration and imperative, is peace itself: the most fundamental and yet the most fragile achievement of the European and global civil community.