The naming of publics is an important political and ontological process. Several chapters of this volume (for example, Chapters Three, Eight and Ten) speak to the processual nature of publics; the idea that publics do not pre-exist the process of their becoming, and are not a substantive ‘thing’. Naming is part of this processual becoming, but naming is also the moment that complexity, contingency and contradictions are flattened, or as Law (2003) would argue, ‘othered’. This chapter will therefore address the attempted ‘names’ (categorisations) that have been developed in the post-Cold War era to fix the processual becoming of global publics. I want to show how the act of naming is not only an epistemological act, providing us with an increasing number of perspectives from which to understand the same processual reality, but also an ontological act, closing down the possibility of understanding publics in their fully contradictory and multiple realities. This is important for any politics of the public in that the act of naming can itself close down other possible becomings, open up silences and mask the relationalities of power, space and legitimacy through which publics are summoned. This matters for how participants in such publics understand their own agency, and for how much transformative potential those who study such publics invest in them.

This chapter will address the publics that have been variously labelled global civil society, the global justice movement, and the movement of movements (see Table 9.1). It is, of course, important not to reify these terms, not to turn them into ‘straw publics’. As will be explained, while these concepts contain contradictions, they also offer partial insights. Many of them speak to each other, explaining theoretical or empirical offshoots of global publicness. How, methodologically, do we negotiate this mess? While they are at times interchangeable, these terms all describe something particular about the process of global public formation, and understanding how and when to deploy them is vital if we are to avoid confusing the normative and the explicatory in our research.

This chapter draws on my own research on the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP). GCAP consists of a secretariat (recently moved from South Africa to the Netherlands) supporting a Global Governing Council (elected by a Global Assembly) that decides all global policy (that is, all policy without an explicitly national dimension).