"This contribution neither reviews civil society's development in former Yugoslavia before, during and after the recent wars (but refers to it in an explicit way), nor delivers a new theory about civil society (in the Balkans); it proposes instead a framework facilitating the discussion of some crucial questions centred on the state-civil society relationship in the context of a war-to-peace transition process. Combining a political economy and anthropological approach, this article aims to explore – against the background of some conceptual clarifications – the current global architecture of the civil society-state nexus. The text focuses on the consequences of the emergence of a neo-liberal governance-beyond-the-state, on new social and political transnational practices and on the necessity to rethink the question of multi-level governance and, thus, of space and scale. The last section examines the tricky question of whether there is a way out of the dead end. "

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