Construction and Mobilization of civil society in the discourse of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN)

The paper presents a piece of research into the intradiscursive process in which a specific social object, denoted by the expression "civil society", has been constructed and mobilized by a particular discourse of a Mexican rebel organization, at a definite moment, from January 1994 to September 1996. The analysis of this discourse enables the description of the parallel evolutions of four kinds of construction; extensive, comprehensive, relative and dynamic. After presenting this analysis and its interpretation in an extra-discursive context, the resultant arguments are used to discuss a number of theoretical conceptions of civil society and social mobilization.