This article seeks to address what we see as difficult yet necessary first steps toward meeting the challenges of analyzing the transformations in media and communication policy: defining the boundaries of what we actually mean by “global media policy (GMP),” providing a conceptualization of GMP as a domain, elaborating a consistent analytical framework, and addressing methodological implications. Our framework is part of a GMP mapping project that has been developed within the context of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, to address the issues faced by researchers and practitioners, as well as policymakers and advocates operating in this domain. In this article, we present an overview of the conceptual journey through which the GMP mapping project has evolved.

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This issue of Global Media and Communication offers a themed section on the changing contours of international communication discourse, from the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), to coincide with the UN-sponsored summit in Tunis in November 2005. In line with the MacBride Commission report Many Voices, One World, recently republished to mark its silver jubilee, we at Global Media and Communication are pleased to devote this final issue in the first volume to tracing the continuities and changes in global communication debates over a generation. Although the concept of a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), which dominated the international communication agenda in the 1970s, has been confined to the margins of globalization discourses, the concerns it raised have continued to be relevant for contemporary communication debates. Questions of the democratization of international communication, the commodification of media and communication, the domination of the Anglo-American media and the imbalance in the flow of cultural products around the world from the West to the rest (though a small but significant contraflow from the global South is a growing reality) are still as pressing today. In its essence, the NWICO debate was a political one, largely between what was then called the 'Third World' (non-aligned) and the 'First World' (capitalist), with the 'Second World' (socialist) playing Cold War politics to inflame the anti-Western rhetoric of the period. The West, led by the United States, perceived NWICO as a Soviet-sponsored movement, primarily supporting censorship and state control of the mass media. That many NWICO champions ran dictatorial media and communication policies in their own nations also dented the credibility of their cause. The US withdrawal from UNESCO, followed by the UK, financially crippled the premier UN organization, which had been the key site for the heated discussions. Much has changed in the last quarter of a century, with the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union: the Third World as we knew it has ceased to exist; the Non-Aligned Movement

In a digital context that is profoundly transforming social interactions in different domains and at different levels, the label "communication rights" (CRs) has emerged in recent years suggesting the need to better articulate the principles and rights pertaining to communication processes in society: principles and rights which should be recognized as guidelines to set normative standards of behavior in such a transformed communicative environment.