Civil Society Organizations and the Enduring Role of Religion in Promoting Democratic Engagement

As Tocqueville observed the emergence of democracy in the USA, he noted the central role religion played in undergirding democratic life. Nearly 200 years later, it is unclear whether religion continues to possess sufficient capacity to promote democratic engagement. This study links organizational theory with research on the structural and cultural characteristics of civil society organizations (CSOs) to assess the current impact of religion on democracy. It analyzes original data from a national study of politically oriented CSOs to determine whether drawing on structural characteristics of religious congregations and cultural elements of religion helps the organizations promote democratic engagement. The analysis finds a positive relationship between organizations that incorporate structural and cultural forms of religion and their organizing capacity, political access, and mobilizing capacity. These findings suggest that religion, mediated by congregations and religious culture, retains sufficient civic vitality to help politically oriented CSOs foster democratic engagement.     

Democratizing the Refugee Regime Complex

This article considers how civil society organizations (CSOs) may be understood in relation to the global refugee regime complex. It describes how several leading scholars have conceptualized refugee/internally displaced person (IDP) governance and explores how the neoliberal cognitive frame is impeding the possibility of democratic agency among IDPs/refugees. It argues that CSOs can play essential roles in encouraging democratization of the refugee regime complex by working to reshape their prevailing frame or orientation. Civil society organizations can also work to foster critical reflexivity among the parties that govern refugees and within that population as well. As an example of one such effort, the article employs Fraser’s (Scales of justice: reimagining political space in a globalizing world. Columbia University Press, New York, 2010) democratization framework in a brief case analysis of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Deshodaya initiative in Sri Lanka that has sought to enable IDPs in that nation to embrace critical reflexivity to reimagine themselves as governing agents who can redefine state and international organization-based definitions of refugee protection. Overall, the analysis suggests that civil society organizations can act successfully and intentionally to open democratic spaces in which refugees/IDPs may find possibilities to exercise their innate agential possibility.     

Civic Agency in Governance: The Role of Legitimacy with Citizens vs. Donors

Civil society strengthening programs aim to foster democratic governance by supporting civil society organization (CSO) engagement in advocacy. However, critics claim that these programs foster apolitical and professional organizations that have weak political effects because they do not mobilize citizen participation. This literature focuses on how donor programs lead to low legitimacy of CSOs with citizens, limiting the means to develop agency toward the state. Here I investigate the influence of CSO legitimacy with donors and citizens on civic agency. Empirical research was conducted in Bosnia–Herzegovina on CSOs considered legitimate by donors, citizens, and both. I found that different forms of legitimacy were associated with different strategies and agency. CSOs with both forms of legitimacy, which have not received much attention until now, turned out to be of particular interest. These CSOs demonstrated agency as intermediaries between donors, government, and citizens, which enabled greater agency and broader outcomes.     

Cultural mediation through vernacularization: framing rights claims through the day‐off campaign for migrant domestic workers in Singapore

Scholarship on civil society in Singapore has tended to emphasize the structural and institutional constraints on civil society space. Conversely, little attention is paid to the broader cultural and discursive realms in which civil society and state actors operate. This article seeks to address this gap by analysing the day‐off campaign for migrant domestic workers in Singapore. We demonstrate that by employing the cultural mediation strategy of vernacularization, civil society was able to frame migrant rights claims in a manner that resonated with the institutional logics and cultural repertoire of Singapore society. Civil society actors gained headway by adapting the discourse on migrant rights to Singapore's socio‐cultural and political context in three ways: by reframing rights claims into a moral appeal; by appealing to the cost‐benefit logics of Singaporean employers of migrant domestic workers; and by situating the provision of migrant labour protections as a relative market position.     

Transnational political action and ‘global civil society’ in practice: the case of Oxfam

The term ‘global civil society’ has taken on increasing significance within scholarly debate over the past decade. In this article we seek to understand transnational political agency via the study of a particular transnational actor, Oxfam. We argue that various schools of thought surrounding the global civil society concept, in particular the prevailing liberal‐cosmopolitan approach, are unable to conceptualize transnational political action in practice – due largely, in the case of liberal‐cosmopolitanism, to a shared normative agenda. We also assess what contribution literature on development and civil society has made to the analysis of groups such as Oxfam. In investigating Oxfam's own perceptions of its context and the meanings of its agency, we discover an anti‐political perspective derived from an encounter between Oxfam's longstanding commitment to liberal internationalism and globalization discourse. Existing scholarship has insufficiently identified the local or parochial nature of the identities of global civil society actors.     

State-authorizing citizenship: the narrow field of civic engagement in the liberal age

Liberal citizens are held ethically accountable not only for their own acts and behaviors, but also those of their state. Reciprocally, a proper liberal subject is one that metonymizes with the state, merging their fates and moral worth, and taking personal responsibility for the state’s actions. I claim that as a result, the liberal subject is not only self-authorizing according to liberal theories of moral autonomy, but also state-authorizing. I demonstrate the above claims through a consideration of changing activist practices among the Israeli political left. I show that the hegemonic model of civic engagement is oriented towards the state and state policy as the privileged and naturalized site of ethical intervention. I then describe the ways this model hampers political endeavors by restricting the sites of intervention as well as structural access to political participation. I also consider contemporary efforts at political engagement that bypass the state.     

法团主义与当代中国社会

作为一个源远流长的政治思想,法团主义一直认为要关注国家与社会之间的联合与协作,这种主张与西方当代主流的多元主义大相径庭,后者提倡市民社会与国家的分立与制约。然而,在分析当代中国社会时,法团主义的视角却有着巨大的理论潜力。无论是在中国的城市社会、农村社会还是基层政府组织中,都出现了许多法团化的组织形态,这样一种社会特征通过许多具有法团主义视角的研究得以比较清晰的展现。法团主义成功应用于中国社会研究得益于它与中国社会多方面的契合性,但同时二者的差异也必须予以细致的分析。     

The transnational politics of the Tomato King: meaning and impact

Abstract In this article we deploy transnational ethnography to explore the transnational electoral politics by which Andrés Bermúdez, a successful tomato grower and labour contractor from Winters, California, who came to be called ‘the Tomato King’, was elected mayor of the municipality of Jerez in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. We seek to explain the meaning of his transnational electoral victory and its impact on the role of ‘the migrant’ as a new social actor in Mexican political development. We thus situate the Bermudista phenomenon in the context of the literature on migrant transnational politics. We hope to move the literature on migrant political transnationalism forward by advancing an agency‐oriented perspective that incorporates both the politics of representation of ‘el migrante’ in transnational electoral campaigns and the emerging dynamics of transnational coalition politics. Our approach underlines the need to carefully historicize the relationship between transnationalism and citizenship ‐ namely, to map the contingency and agency underlying the changing practices of states, migrants, and transnational institutional networks vis‐à‐vis questions of transnational citizenship. This is best done by paying close attention to the actual social and political practices whereby human agents pursue historically specific political projects that extend the practices of citizenship across borders.     

Democratic Governance and Actors’ Conceptualization of “Civil Society” in Africa: State–Civil Society Relations in Ghana from 1982–2000

Despite civil society’s ambiguity, many scholars tend to focus on the economic reasons for the apparent conflict between state and civil society, with little or no attention to the conceptual differences that may be influencing the behavior of public and civil society actors. Using Ghana under J. J. Rawlings as a backdrop, this article argues that state–civil society relations are partly shaped by the divergent conceptualizations of “civil society” held by state and civil society actors. It suggests that the issue is not just the African state’s limited understanding of the multiple roles that civil society organizations can legitimately play in the polity; it is also civil society’s lack of recognition and acknowledgment of the legitimate functions of the African state.     

Minutewomen,Victims, and Parasites: The Discursive and Performative Construction of Women by The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps

This study uses data from 40 interviews and 80 hours of participant observation to examine the discursive and performative (embodied, enacted, and nonverbal) position of women in twenty‐first‐century militia–nativist organizations, using the case study of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC). The case of the MCDC demonstrates that the organization produces competing narratives for understanding the role of white and migrant women in U.S. society. White American women are constructed as victims of immigration, while white women within the organization are viewed as capable colleagues. Migrant women are produced as both parasites on American society and victims of Mexican male sexuality. As this article shows, women's demands for agency, their political drives, their ascribed race, and their intentions shape their discursive production.     

The Potentials and Limitations of Civil Society Research: Getting Undone Science Done

The term "undone science" refers to absences of scientific research that social movement and other civil society organizations find when attempting to make epistemic claims in the political field. The existing literature has identified various pathways for addressing the knowledge needs of civil society organizations, including asking elected and appointed political leaders to shift funding priorities and directly seeking support and partnerships with scientists. Here, a third pathway is identified and explored: civil society organizations that have the resources to fund their own research. A sample of such "civil society research" from large, mainstream, U.S. environmental organizations demonstrates that although the large organizations do engage in such research, most of it is not published in peer-reviewed journals. The peer-reviewed research is found almost exclusively in large preservation and conservation organizations that have staffs of scientists. Most of the other research reports are oriented toward documenting environmental problems and providing policy and management solutions. The research is highly applied and does not represent fundamental contributions to large mainstream scientific fields. Comparisons with civil society research in the author's previous research projects on religion, health, and economic development are discussed to assess applicability of the concept for other sociological subfields.     

Hip‐hop cultures and political agency in Brazil and South Africa

It is assumed in the article that the contemporary urban condition is marked by an increased pluralistic intensity in cities. Coupled to this shift in the nature of the urban context, one can also observe a proliferation of sites of political engagement and agency, some of which are formally tied to the various institutional forums of the state, and many that are defined by their insistence to stand apart from the state, asserting autonomy and clamouring for a self‐defined terms of recognition and agency. This article draws attention to the significance of one category of urban actors – hip‐hoppers – that can be said to occupy a ‘marginal’ location in relation to the state, but one uniquely relevant to the marginalised existence of most poor black youth in cities of the global South, particularly Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town. The article demonstrates that hip‐hop cultures offer a powerful framework of interpretation and response for poor black youth who are systemically caught at the receiving end of extremely violent and exploitative urban forces. The basis of hip‐hop's power is its complex aesthetical sensibility that fuses affective registers, such as rage, passion, lust, critique, pleasure and desire, which, in turn, translates into political identities, and sometimes agency (i.e. positionality), for its participants. In the final instance, the article tries to link conclusions about the potential of hip‐hop cultural politics to larger themes in urban studies, such as participation, public space, citizenship and security.     

Alternative Regionalism from Below: Democratizing ASEAN's Migration Governance

Most literature on migration governance has addressed the global level, and it has done so primarily from a state‐centric and top‐down perspective, with little regard to the role of civil society organizations in shaping its direction. Moreover, in an institutional sense, except for the EU, the regional level has only received scant attention, which is surprising given the significance of intra‐regional migration flows elsewhere. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a case in point. Although there are few direct channels of engagement for civil society, the vibrant migrant rights community in Asia has been capitalizing on, and creating, opportunities at multiple levels including the regional. Our argument is that this creative use of channels of engagement in combined form at multiple levels can have democratizing potential.     

Sponsoring Civil Society: State and Community Movement in Taiwan*

This article contributes to the growing literature on the synergic production of civil society in newly democratized countries. State sponsorship can be effective when clientelism, as a form of social dominance, continues to frustrate purposive organization from below. Three elements are necessary for this scenario. First, a group of reform‐minded officials must be able to pursue an independent agenda that deviates from local elites. Second, reformers have to create new institutional avenues to channel resources downward by bypassing local politicians. Lastly, civil society organizations must be capable of effectively responding to the initiatives from above. I use Taiwan’s community movement to understand the logic and consequences of sponsoring civil society. State endorsement is critical to legitimatize community organizations’ presence in local politics. With a detailed analysis of a local case, the Qiaodou community movement, I argue that state sponsorship is critical for the growth of civil society organizations. Sponsored movement activism maintains its political independence by leveraging the incoherence in bureaucratic division of labor, and its professional expertise offers an advantageous bargaining position when facing officials.     

Civil Society and Public Relations: Not So Civil After All

Recent articles appearing in communication outlets such as Human Communication Research and Public Relations Review celebrate the emancipatory power of civil society projects as the solution to the primitive forms of totalitarian governance in Third World nations, suggesting the central role of public relations scholars and practitioners in development communication. Having embraced the mantra of civil society, these public relations scholars suggest that the concept of civil society offers a paradigm shift in the field of development communication by facilitating "true" participatory communication. This article takes a critical approach to the rhetoric of civil society and points out that the civil society trope is not a novel innovation in the field of development communication. Using the narratives of the Philippines, Chile, and Nicaragua, it is demonstrated that civil society serves the goals of the transnational elite and actively participates in the marginalization of the Third World participant; the subaltern subject in the Third World exists outside the realm of civil society in its cracks and fissures. The author takes a political economic approach to problematize civil society efforts and draw out the linkages among civil society, colonialism, and transnational market hegemony. Finally, subaltern studies are offered as an alternative point for communication scholars interested in understanding the communicative practices in the marginalized spaces of the world.     

Managing Expectations, Demands and Myths: Swedish Study Associations Caught Between Civil Society, the State and the Market

Several challenges, external and internal, to the identity and position of civil society organizations exist today. Organizations may be tempted or coerced into closer cooperation with the state. There are also incentives to become more market oriented. This article deals with such struggles in Swedish study associations and how these organizations attempt to gain legitimacy. The tradition of the organization is an important legitimating aspect and so is efficiency. These two aspects can complement each other but may also collide. The article demonstrates how civil society organizations handle an influx of market logics and trends of professionalization when these clash with a civil society identity. The findings indicate that different isomorphic processes are at work. Cultural resources are used to handle conflicting myths, leading to varied discursive strategies and incidences of decoupling.     

State Building,State Autonomy and the Identity of Society: The Case of the Israeli State*

Abstract Into the conventional framework of the state civil-society relationship, which usually includes the state's autonomy and the state's strength, this paper adds a dimension - the identity of the collectivity. The collective identity is from one side the common 'symbolic space’ for both the state and the actors of the civil society, and from the other side the ‘battlefield’ between the state, the society and the different components of the civil society. These tensions stem in a great measure from the emphasis of some aspects over others (for example the primordial vs. civic ingredients) of the collective identity. These interpretations have far reaching implications on the rules-of-the-game in the state and on the state-society relationship. Its identity is central to the determination of the various societal boundaries of the collectivity. This approach is exemplified through analysis of the building of the Israeli state and its transformation from a community to a nation-state, and again from a nation-state to a community state, in a perspective of about 75 years. The article fundamentally challenges the conventional presentation and analysis of the social and political history of Israel.     

The Polish Social Enterprise Sector Vis-à-Vis the Welfare Regime: Following on the Solidarity Movement?

This paper presents the development of the enterprise sector and the welfare regime in Poland, dominated by two opposing trends originating from the country’s recent history: remnants of the “Communist welfare state” and liberal tendencies that came after the political and economic transformation in 1989. The growing civil society that supplements a deficient welfare system finds its roots in the peaceful underground Solidarity movement of the 1980s which played a great role in liberating Poland. After the political turnover, the Solidarity’s mission-driven approach not only survived, but also helped shape Poland’s contemporary civil society. The outlined mechanisms seem to be significant for understanding the transformation of social economy and the welfare state concept in post-communist Europe. In our paper, we identify six mechanisms underlying the Solidarity movement, which, when subsequently implemented by social entrepreneurs, has guaranteed the success of their organizations. We will also characterize the current welfare state in Poland, as well as the role of social enterprises in filling the gaps and addressing the shortcomings of the welfare state. Several case studies will illustrate the latter.     

Does Gender Equality Influence Volunteerism? A Cross-National Analysis of Women’s Volunteering Habits and Gender Equality

Research regarding the roles of women in society and in political and social organizations is large, with scholars focusing on the likelihood of political and social engagement. However, few of these studies examine the influence of gender on participation in voluntary organizations by utilizing cross-national data. This study intends to analyze the influence of gender on the type of organization that an individual volunteers and on whether these volunteering habits are influenced by the gender equality in a country. Is there segregation in the type of organizations men and women volunteer? Do women in more gender equal societies have similar volunteering patterns as men, or does the difference continue in volunteering? For this study, we use the World Values Survey from 1999 to 2002, to identify the differences in the types of organizations that men and women volunteer and discuss the impact gender equality has on these volunteering patterns.