Approaches to civil society in authoritarian states: The case of China

Both civil society in China and research on Chinese civil society have developed profoundly over the last three decades. Research on Chinese civil society can be classified into two categories: a structure‐oriented approach and an agency‐oriented approach. Both approaches acknowledge the state's dominant position in restricting the political space for civil society engagement, but they differ in their understanding of state–civil society relations. A key concern within the structure‐oriented approach is to analyze how the autonomy of civil society organizations is shaped by their structural position vis‐à‐vis the state. Agency‐oriented scholars, on the other hand, reject the analytical focus on structural autonomy. Instead, they build on a more nuanced understanding of the authoritarian yet nonmonolithic context in China and analyze how civil society organizations develop specific strategies to be able to operate within their restricted political space. In particular, agency‐oriented scholars have analyzed two ways in which organizations exercise agency: by strategically developing formal or informal ties with state actors and by bringing their engagement into the public sphere to raise awareness and express their voice. What could be further developed in the agency‐oriented approach is, however, a deeper understanding of the political dimensions of civil society agency.     

Twenty‐Five Years After the Fall of Communism: The Cultural Peculiarities of Fighting Corruption and Building Civil Society in Romania

Even when the domestic political system has undergone reform, it sometimes seems unlikely that any outside force can introduce enough of a “carrot and stick” approach to persuade a country to maintain momentum. This article is concerned with understanding the cultural peculiarities of fighting corruption and building civil society in Romania, where despite the tough EU monitoring and domestic anti‐sleaze efforts, corruption, and low trust remain significant problems. Many of the theorists in the post‐communist literature argue that socioeconomic factors and the communist legacy have weakened post‐communist civil society in the region. This article explores the question whether corruption has replaced the legacy of communism as a factor undermining trust in others and government in Romania and presents an examination of the association between corruption and post‐communist civil society. The article argues that future research needs to switch focus from discussing Romanian social, political, and cultural behaviors from a longue durée perspective to evaluating the impact of political corruption on trust and, hence, civil society in Romania.     

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.     

Civil society,social accountability and service delivery in Zimbabwe

Post‐2000, the deterioration of Zimbabwe's socioeconomic and political conditions is widely acknowledged as phenomenal and unprecedented. Consequently, government and local authorities are struggling to provide basic services. At the same time, civil society initiatives are promoting transparency and accountability in service delivery. The article explains how civil society coalitions and citizens are promoting and demanding accountability in the delivery of public services by local authorities. In particular, it focuses on four critical issues; namely local authority–citizen engagement, social accountability focus areas, social accountability tools and emerging social accountability issues. The article concludes that civil society‐led social accountability initiatives are effective under conditions of civil society capacity, institutionalization of social accountability by local authorities, and negotiating local political dynamics.     

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.     

Crowding‐in: how Indian civil society organizations began mobilizing around climate change

This paper argues that periodic waves of crowding‐in to ‘hot’ issue fields are a recurring feature of how globally networked civil society organizations operate, especially in countries of the Global South. We elaborate on this argument through a study of Indian civil society mobilization around climate change. Five key mechanisms contribute to crowding‐in processes: (1) the expansion of discursive opportunities; (2) the event effects of global climate change conferences; (3) the network effects created by expanding global civil society networks; (4) the adoption and innovation of action repertoires; and (5) global pressure effects creating new opportunities for civil society. Our findings contribute to the world society literature, with an account of the social mechanisms through which global institutions and political events affect national civil societies, and to the social movements literature by showing that developments in world society are essential contributors to national mobilization processes.     

Civil Society,Legitimacy and Political Space: Why Some Organisations are More Vulnerable to Restrictions than Others in Violent and Divided Contexts

This paper examines legitimacy and political space for civil society in violent and divided contexts. It draws on qualitative fieldwork with civil society groups in Burundi, where government restrictions and political violence have increased in recent years. However, not all civil society groups experienced these pressures in the same way, and some were more vulnerable to restrictions than others. This paper asks why and considers whether civil society legitimacy can help to explain some of these differences. In doing so, it develops a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between legitimacy and political space, and processes of legitimation and delegitimation in violent and divided contexts. The paper finds that the experiences of civil society groups in Burundi prior to the 2015 elections not only related to their organisational legitimacy, but also the extent to which they were perceived to challenge the political legitimacy of government elites.     

Antipolitics and Counterpolitics in Nepal’s Civil Society: The Case of Nepal’s Citizens’ Movement

This article considers the relationship of civil society to the domain of the political from the actors’ perspectives. It explores the attempt by a citizens’ movement (CMDP) in Nepal to construct new political realities in the context of the autocratic regime of king Gyanendra and then during the democratic transition. This was, paradoxically, to be achieved through the construction of an apolitical space. Theoretically, this production of apoliticality by civil society actors shows that civil society is not only implicated in the expansion of what is understood as ‘political’ but also in setting its boundaries. The broader aims of the article are to contribute to the ethnography of civil society and to add to current understandings of the relationship of actually existing civil societies to the political domain. Practically, it argues that debates over whether civil society is or is not political in the Nepal case and normative positions within development circles that it should not be political are misconceived since civil society is a site for the production of both politicality and apoliticality.     

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 as an anti-corruption actor in post-Euromaidan Ukraine

Of the instruments available in the anti-corruption arsenal of nations, civil society usually plays an ambivalent role. It may or may not be decisive in helping to counter corruption, depending on other circumstances, although in developed societies with a strong tradition of rule of law it can make a definite contribution. In post-communist Ukraine, where political leadership for reasons of self-interest has been reluctant to pursue anti-corruption policy effectively, and where agencies created specifically for the purpose have been compromised by political interference, infighting, and lack of co-ordination, the question urgently arises whether civil society could compensate for these shortcomings so as to make a significantly positive change. Is civil society Ukraine’s “last best hope” to control political corruption and salvage the legitimacy of the regime? For this to happen, according to the theory put forward by Marcia Grimes and applied here, press freedom, political party competition, and government transparency must all be at a high level. Without these critical sources of support Ukrainian civil society cannot be counted on to manage the struggle against corruption successfully alone. The findings can be applied to other post-communist states.     

Oil,Polity, and Civil Society: The Construction of a Hegemonic System in Iraq (1945–1958)

Conventional theories of political economy assume that dependency on natural resources, such as oil, have a negative impact on the development of a democratic political system. While there is a developed body of work that explains the different mechanisms that shape this relationship, one mechanism, the role of the civil society, remains mostly ungrasped. As a result, the aim of this paper is to expand our understanding of the group formation effect, first discussed by Michael Ross (2001), and unpack the mechanisms that underline it, by looking at the relationship between rent from oil production, the civil society, and the rise of authoritarianism in Iraq during the period of 1945–1958. We argue that examining the relationship between these variables will help us understand the past and the current situation in Iraq, and it will improve our knowledge of the political formations and activism in oil‐producing countries in general.     

Does civil society speak for the people? evidence from a survey of Scottish teachers

It has been claimed by many writers recently that civil society can lead a process of political renewal in the liberal democracies. However, the extent to which civil society is in touch with popular feeling has been challenged from both the right and the left. The paper examines one currently fluid case: civil society in Scotland, which in 1999 acquired its first parliament for three centuries following an emphatic referendum vote in 1997 in favour of setting up such an institution. The paper discusses the general issues and themes concerning civil society, explains the significance of the Scottish case, and then uses survey data to compare the views of one segment of Scottish civil society (school teachers) with those of the Scottish population generally. Teachers are studied because of the several key roles which they play in civil society and in social reproduction. The paper concludes that this segment of civil society is indeed close to the views of the general population (probably closer than Scottish members of the UK parliament), and that the new Scottish parliament will have to respect the legitimacy of the established civic institutions if it is to engage with popular concerns.     

Inoperative Community in Post‐Authoritarian South Korea: Football Fandom,Political Mobilization and Civil Society

South Korea’s dynamic civil society developed from the democratic struggle against the military dictatorship in the 1980s and early 1990s. The period of political liberalisation that began in 1992 saw the emergence of new voices and social forces, and a new “netizen” culture of Internet users. This article explores the new social, cultural and political landscapes of the country that were made possible by self‐organising communities of the public actualising their potential for occasions of collective mobilisation and subverting the powers of dominant authorities. The empirical focus is on two events that marked the post‐authoritarian political culture of South Korea: the Red Devil phenomenon during the 2002 football World Cup, characterised by passionate support, civic pride and a rudimentary cosmopolitanism, and the anti‐impeachment protests of 2004. These key examples of mass voluntary organisation and mobilisation, founded on the desire for association and enactment of the sense of civil sovereignty, and borrowing from decades of popular struggle and resistance against the state, have expressed the love of community, the intimate communication and the being‐together of what Nancy calls inoperative community. Standing in opposition to the overarching authority of the state, inoperative communities emerge through the self‐actualisation of new subjectivities. This article investigates how, through play, transgression and protest, these inoperative communities have reshaped the culture and society of South Korea in the post‐authoritarian era.     

Constraining Is Enabling? Exploring the Influence of National Context on Civil Society Strength

This article analyses the influence of national context on civil society strength based on four key dimensions: level of democracy, political stability, rule of law and economic development. Whereas existing studies mainly focus on Western and post-communist countries, we explicitly include developing countries in our analysis. We use associational membership as proxy for civil society strength and include data of 53 countries. Rule of law, economic development and (to a lesser extent) political stability emerge from our multilevel regression models as the main factors affecting civil society membership. Unlike previous studies, we show that these relations are quadratic instead of linear. This means that where existing theories predict a drop in memberships in developing countries, we find a rise. In other words, harsh conditions actually strengthen civil society in terms of membership levels. We argue that this could be the case because reasons for CSO membership are essentially different in the developed and in the developing world. Contrary to theoretical assumptions, democratic rights do not appear critically important for civil society membership.     

After the Paris Declaration: Taking on the Issue of Power

The new approach to assisting developing countries inspired by the Paris Declaration emphasises greater recipient control over the funds provided, thus confining donors’influence to upstream points in the policy process, where political aspects of development co‐operation become more important. Understanding better the role that power plays in the aid relationship will be critical to the implementation of the Declaration. This article shows how the political science literature can inform this set of issues. It argues that an understanding of aspects of power illuminates the challenges involved in transforming relations between donors and recipient governments as well as between governments and civil society organisations.     

Re-conceptualizing Civil Society: Towards a Radical Understanding

The article examines problematic aspects of contemporary theoretical thinking about civil society within a Western liberal-democratic context. The impact of neo-liberalism upon narratives of civil society, the assumption that civility resides more conspicuously within the world of associational life, and the tendency to conflate ‘civil society’ with the ‘third sector’ are areas critically discussed. Such conceptual incongruities, it is argued, obscure the path to a more radical theoretical understanding of civil society. In the second part of the article an alternative model of civil society is proposed. Supporting Evers premise that ‘every attempt to narrow down civil society to the third sector seriously impoverishes the very concept of civil society’ (Evers, Voluntary Sector Review 1:116, 2010), it is argued that civil society is best understood as a normative political concept, as being contingent in nature and distinct from the third sector.     

Modernity, Civil Society, and Sectarianism: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Takfir Groups

By emphasizing civil society’s ambiguous relationship with modernity, the author proposes a discursive definition of civil society that draws on conflict theory. The author distinguishes between a civil society and a sectarian approach to politics from a theoretical perspective. Accordingly, a juxtaposition of the Muslim Brotherhood and its splinter groups in the Egyptian political arena epitomizes the opposing ideals of a civil society and a good society. Thus, the author moves away from the theoretical debate on the compatibility of Islam and democracy and suggests the possibility of a learning process of democratic practices by means of participating in the public sphere.     

Nonprofits and Democratic Development: Lessons from the Czech Republic

This article argues that existing concepts of the civil society–democracy relationship are misleading guides for analyzing political development because they incorporate limited perspectives on the nature and activities of civil society, particularly the nonprofit sector. First, three contemporary conceptualizations of civil society are critiqued, and a contradiction is noted between the importance assigned to ideational functions and the inadequacy of reliance upon elections and party systems. Particular emphasis is placed on civil society's involvement in policy formation, for it is there that a weak state–society connection may be discovered, with significant ramifications for democratic development. Second, recent political instability in the Czech Republic is related to negative trends in political attitudes, indicating a weak connection. Third, the general nature of Czech policy-making processes is examined, and then a closer look is taken at the formation of nonprofit legislation and environmental policy. Finally, implications for the future development of Czech democracy are drawn.     

Making Civil Society Sustainable: The Legacy of USAID in Croatia

What makes civil society sustainable? This paper examines USAID “Legacy Mechanisms”—programs designed to support a stable civil society after USAID withdraws aid—in the context of post-war Croatia to reconceptualize civil society sustainability in terms of resilience. Rather than examine whether specific legacy mechanisms remained intact, this paper looks at how Croatian civil society organizations adopted, adapted, and dropped these legacy programs to respond to novel crises and a changing political and social environment once USAID exited Croatia. Drawing on archival data from USAID’s time in Croatia and interviews conducted between 2008 (the year after USAID withdrew) and 2016, this paper shows that the long-term impact USAID had on civil society lay not within the formal institutions and organizations it supported, but in the resilience, creativity, and cooperation it fostered in the civil society sector.