Civil Societies and Social Movements. Potentials and Problems

Abstract

Civil society has become a widely-used concept that represents what is considered to be an indispensable element of a good society and polity. Indeed, civil societies are venerated for contributing to democratization and good governance, to active citizenship and community development, to social relations and societal integration. The success of this concept can be attributed also to its ability to embrace previously distinct research strands and debates, which focussed, e.g., on non-governmental, non-profit and/or voluntary organizations, on the Third Sector, on social movements and on social capital, amongst others. However, as a conceptual umbrella, it risks to lack empirical and analytic precision. Moreover, most debates on civil society tend to blur analytic and normative questions. In fact, civil society has not only been a scientific category for analyzing societies, but also a programmatic tool for policy-making. The collective volume edited by Derrick Purdue contributes to a demystification of the concept ‘civil society’. The authors draw a differentiated picture of civil societies around the globe by highlighting their merits and weaknesses. While most chapters are national case studies, in sum, findings corroborate what scholarly writing on civil society is proposing generally: civil society is marked by internal cleavages and fragmentations along class, ideology, culture and race; civil society is dependent on the market and the state, and is thus exposed to commercialization and political instrumentalization; civil societies still cluster geographically in specific regions, because they are strongly shaped by socio-economic and political conditions at the national level. The underlying argument of the book has strongly benefited from the decision to link the study of civil society to scholarly writing on social movements. On the empirical level, this allows contributors to analyze and compare civil societies in a more focused way, given the fact that social movements are the more politically active and contentious element of civil society. This also allows differences across time and countries to be highlighted more clearly. On the analytic level, scholarly writing on social movements has provided very helpful theoretical tools (in particular, the concept of political opportunity structures), which are effectively used in this book to describe and explain the fates of civil societies in different national contexts.