Globalization and the international human rights regime have contributed to the emergence of conditions that weaken the exclusive authority of national states and thereby facilitate the ascendance of sub- and transnational spaces and actors in politico-civic processes once confined to the national scale. Drainville's radical and provocative thesis is that the global economy has become a place where social forces are operating but that the categories in use to capture this are spectral. Many of the 'global projects' from cosmopolitanism to global civil society, or constructs such as 'international public opinion", or 'the poor of the world', prevent us from recognizing the emergence of real global actors. These older categories actually veil the existence of such actors and they hide the possibility of their project.