Colonial States and Civic Virtues in Africa: Essays in Honor of John Lonsdale

Political Thinking, Political Theory, and Civil Society

The great dreams of dissidents for civil society as a guarantee for a just life confront many economic, social, and political dilemmas. This state of affairs worsened in the Balkans following the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the United Nations sanctions against Yugoslavia, Initially, the resolution of all problems was associated with market values, while ascribing only secondary importance to civic virtues, A market economy depends on civil society, but market values do little for strengthening civic virtues in the region, leading to a vicious circle of rudimentary civic virtues and an underdeveloped economy. The growing non-governmental sector within civil society remains an artificial appendage, since it relies heavily on international financing and is likely to disappear if this support ceases for any reasons. The only probable way out of this predicament is for citizens not to abandon the ideal of civic, classical, and religious virtues, and be hopeful despite current conditions.

To translate the influence of political ideas in different contexts is a dangerous endeavor that casts the credibility of the historian of ideas into permanent doubt. Some contend that political ideas are rooted in certain contexts, and when transferred to different environments they undergo alterations that make them difficult to recognize. This book on the European Revolutions of 1848 and their influence in the Americas tries to do something still more complex—not only to trace the influence of the ideas that inspired the near-simultaneous uprisings in Europe but also show how the events themselves were models for social unrest and revolution. Six case studies (Argentina, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, and the United States) deal with the content of social republicanism, its reading in these countries, and the relationship between political events in the New World and the “spring of the people” in Europe. The book also contains two general surveys of the European revolutions and their influence in America. A final article is devoted to the Chilean Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna and his impressions of the events in Europe during his trips between 1852 and 1853.Most of the articles confirm Roger Magraw’s observation that the participation of a “radical republican stratum of the bourgeoisie” was the driving ideological and organizational force behind popular protest in France, rather than the artisanal character of the urban labor force. This is also true in Latin America—where, as Clara Lida suggests, the French political and social ideas of romanticism, utopian and democratic socialism, and republicanism penetrated through the bourgeois so-called liberals who organized the new states and gave content to the new nations. Although all these ideas had some effect on Latin American intellectuals, the vocabulary of republican democracy, understood as a widening of social and political participation, was the most influential. Most Latin American elites had adopted republicanism as the only alternative to monarchy without a clear definition of its political implications, especially regarding the boundaries of civil and political society. Until 1848, republicanism had no real liberal content, contrary to traditional historiography: the idea of the community and the common good, rather than individual rights, were the driving ideas behind all political discourse. The social republicanism of 1848 encouraged Latin American intellectuals and activists to widen the scope of participation in civil society. Artisans became the representatives of the “people,” since they were the new actors pressuring for incorporation into civil society.The authors suggest that the ideas behind 1848 seem to have been most influential in Chile, Peru, Uruguay, and Colombia. They were disseminated through the press, clubs, associations, and other social venues, such as freemasonry and the banquet as a place for political mobilization. Nevertheless, one must not forget that many of the ideas that occasioned the social uprisings in Europe had already been disseminated through different means, even in America. David Rock rightly points out how the Generación de 1837 in Argentina was already discussing romanticism and Saint-Simonian socialism. Francisco Bilbao published “Sociabilidad Chilena” in 1844, scandalizing Chilean society, attacking clericalism, proposing new forms of distribution of property, and despising the Spanish heritage as an impediment to modernity.The events of 1848, especially those of February, did have a major impact in Latin America, as described throughout the book. The news, by May, of France’s apparently peacefully transition toward the republic produced relief and hope among Latin American liberals under pressure for social democratization. Peruvian “true patriots” gave “glory to republican France,” as stated by Natalia Sobrevilla Perea (p. 199). We know that reactions in June were not as optimistic. Fear of the populus reappeared in the political discourse, and the possibility of revolution “à la française,” awoke conservative feelings about the natural order of society and a rejection of radical change. Clara Lida cites the Mexican Eco del Comercio as “ringing the alarm bells vis-à-vis ‘the principles of a most impassioned republicanism’ which took into account ‘the uneducated working clases’” (p. 68). Tim Roberts reports that in the United States, the New York Herald saluted the “suppresion of the mob,” while acknowledging that “U.S. exercises saluting Europe fell off significantly after early 1849” (p. 81). Therefore, the political influence of the events of 1848 was twofold. The events of February encouraged a republican discourse, while those of June terrified the intellectuals engaged in that discourse, demonstrating the contradictory effect of European events and ideas on the minds of Latin American intellectuals.What was the relationship between local democratizing pressures of the period and the influence of the events and ideas generated in Europe? Undoubtedly abolitionism was widespread and became more accepted in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru; artisans were recognized as members of civil society in Colombia and Chile, nurturing elite fear of their political potential; freedom of the press and freedom of association (which gave birth to modern political parties) became principles that admitted no ideological discussion. These are obvious consequences of the legitimization of a new republican pathos and a new social ethos. Nonetheless, internal dynamics were important in the sequence of events in different countries. Posada Carbó rightly argues that long unresolved problems surfaced in 1848 in Colombia, while Nara suggests that the Praia movement and opposition toward the Portuguese bureaucracy were related mainly to “matters of daily life and survival” in Brazil (p. 122). Natalia Sobrevilla Perea stresses the fact that 1848 fueled an ongoing debate among Peruvian intellectuals and provided support for the 1854 revolution that abolished both slavery and Indian tribute, as well as granted legitimacy to artisans as social and political actors.Neither slavery nor Indian tribute were part of the agenda of the “Quarantehuitards,” nor were most of the political and social events they influenced in Latin America. This shift in the political and social motivations for change, dependent on the particular realities of state formation and nation consolidation taking place in different Latin American countries, is a demonstration of the effects of what was mainly a cultural revolution in 1848. It introduced a new vision of the social and the political, forced a redefinition of republicanism and democracy, and blurred the traditional separation between civil and political society. Within this new context, local demands and internal dynamics in every country acquired a new ideological guideline that replaced traditional legitimizing forces with new rational parameters in which representation, citizenship, popular sovereignty, and political and social rights became accepted and undisputed requirements for a republican government. This book is an excellent compilation of articles illuminating this process in Latin America.

Civil society is non political sphere and individual made voluntary organization widely understood as the space outside the family, market and state. It is associated for welfare of state on the ground of civic knowledge, civic education and civic virtue. Civil society works and plays its role in the democratic regime. Democratic regime operates on the basis of democratic norms and values. Civil society plays roles in the democratic society relating to maintaining, promoting and strengthening good governance. It plays various roles like participating, mediating interest, mobilizing counter knowledge, influencing policy making, building commitment for public good, giving impetus to community building projects, motivating citizens, government towards co-operation, etc. It can play the communicative role, protective role, control role, socialization role, service delivery role and the global citizenship role in different cases. Major areas of good governance are democracy, rule of law, proprietary rights, corporate governance, human rights, welfare state and labor institution. And in these areas civil society can perform their respective roles. In the case of Nepal some roles have been managed under constitution and statutory law mainly in good governance operation and management act. But these provisions seem inadequate for showing their role visibly. Maintaining good governance through properly implementing fundamental rights, government has not made effective laws yet. Nepalese parliament has promulgated the act named good governance operation and management act 2008. Here some provisions relating to civil society's role in operating and managing process has been mentioned. In this article constitutional role as well as legal role has been taken in due consideration because civil society's constitutional and legal roles have not been duly recognised yet. Thus the study has given emphasis on description and analysis of content relating to civil society 's role managed under the constitution and statutory law act. To draw the conclusion in this study descriptive-analytical and content analysis methods has been used and information has been taken from secondary method. constitution of Nepal and good governance operation and management act 2008 have been taken as major contents for analysis of civil society's role in managing and operating good governance in Nepal.

1. In Search of Civil Society: John A Hall. 2. The Importance of Being Modular: Ernest Gellner. 3. Civil Society in Communist China? Private Business and Political Alliance, 1989: David Wank. 4. The Possibility of Civil Society: Traditions, Character and Challenges: Victor Perez-Diaz. 5. The Nature of Social Ties and the Future of Postcommunist Society: Poland after Solidarity: Wlodimierz Wesolowski. 6. Civic Nation, Civil Society, Civil Religion: Christopher Bryant. 7. Philosophers' Models on the Carpathian Lowlands: Christopher Hann. 8. Post-Marxism, No Friend of Civil Society: Hudson Meadwell. 9. Amimadversions upon Civil Society and Civic Virtue in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century: Adam Seligman. 10. Modernity, Late Development and Civil Society: Nicos Mouzelis. 11. From Controlled Inclusion to Coerced Marginalization: the Struggle for Civil Society in Latin America: Philip Oxhorn. 12. Civil Society and Islam: Serif Mardin. 13. Civil Society and its Future: Salvador Giner. Index.

Civic Virtues in the Restless Polity: Sir Walter Scott’s Fergusonian Vision of British Civil Society in Redgauntlet (1824)1 Katrin Berndt (bio) What model of civil society did Sir Walter Scott base Redgauntlet (1824) upon? Did he promote moral progress as an end in itself? Which civic virtues did he consider as essential for the well-being of the polity? In this article I explore how Scott’s novel can be understood anew as an allegorical representation of Adam Ferguson’s philosophy as articulated in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). In my discussion of the novel, I will identify Ferguson’s rejection of the idea of moral progress; his consideration of the good polity as an “imperfect reality”2 rather than as an anticipated, perfect future; and his veneration of civic virtues such as friendship, courage, civic passion and eloquence. I will challenge some of the conventional mainstays in Scott scholarship, particularly those that characterize his depiction of the Scottish nation as imbued with romanticized nostalgia. My analysis will show that Scott’s conceptualization of the future of Scotland was pragmatic, sober, and inclusive, because it relied on the continuous engagement of her citizens. Most critics position Sir Walter Scott as a writer who, in spite of his sympathies for Scottish passions and traditions, ultimately promoted the 1707 Union between Scotland and England as Great Britain rather than hewing to unilateral Scottish nationalism. As Duncan Forbes pointed out, Hanoverian Britain embodied the commercial, rational model of society that [End Page 115] Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith valorized—as did Walter Scott. This critical approach, introduced by Forbes’s seminal essay on “The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott” (1953), has been taken up by scholars who view Scott as accepting “the leading principle of conjectural history,” based on the “law of the necessary progress of society through successive stages.”3 That is, Forbes and others situate Scott as belonging to what would later be called the Whig view of history, a positivist ideology that emphasized society’s growing moral improvement, civility and tranquillity. This scholarly view has also emphasized the dualism in Scott’s fiction between “sentimental Jacobitism and pragmatic Hanoverianism in which the former ultimately succumbs to the latter”4 in a process referred to as the “cathartic assimilation”5 of Scottish heritage into Hanoverian Britain. For most of the twentieth century, Scott was also viewed as a novelist whose tales deliberately idealized Scottish history in order to provide both fictional reconciliation with, and nostalgic escapism to, a people who felt marginalized by the dominance of English culture. James Kerr described the use of romance as one of Walter Scott’s “favorite tricks,” which allowed him to “assimilate a violent past [by] transforming a bloody episode of British history into a series of sentimentalized pictures.”6 It is because of Scott’s (successful) attempt to integrate fabulously amplified versions of Scotland’s times of yore into Great Britain’s national narrative that “cultural critics often have been simultaneously fascinated and appalled by the author’s constructions of his native land,” as they felt that his fictions have “trapped Scotland in its past.”7 In the past two decades, literary criticism has begun to reappraise Scott’s novels, particularly from a new historicist angle, which has stressed the impact of romance on the recreation of history.8 Here, scholars have canvassed whether his fiction actually depicts (romanticized versions of) historical events, or merely renders the past and its fictional (re)invention useful for the present with recourse to the heightened imagery of the romance. According to Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Scott deserves to be reconsidered not only because he was more concerned about the future than the past, but also because his vision of Scotland was “not limited to any story of past or present, [but was] gesturing toward its realization in the ever opening tomorrow that is history.”9 In contrast to her positivistic recognition of Scott’s formative embrace of Great Britain, Julian Meldon D’Arcy identifies a subversive agenda in his writing when he claims that Scott, in fact, promoted Scottish nationalism through an array of hidden subtexts.10...

Reviewed by: Japan's Dual Civil Society: Members without Advocates Miranda A. Schreurs (bio) Japan's Dual Civil Society: Members without Advocates. By Robert Pekkanen. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2006. xvii, 252 pages. $24.95, paper. Civil society is central to the functioning of democratic polities. The health of a democracy and its degree of democratic consolidation are often measured in part by the vibrancy of its civil society. At first appearance, Japan rates rather poorly on this measure. As Robert Pekkanen notes: "Japan is an outlier. Japan has the least professionalized civil society among its peer nations" (p. 28), with fewer employed in the civil society sector than in other industrialized democracies. Yet Japanese actively participate in civil society groups. What Pekkanen suggests is that civil society in Japan is structured differently than in many Western democracies. Japan's civil society groups tend to be small and local. There are few of the large groups with professional staff that are commonplace in the United States and Europe. Pekkanen thus characterizes Japan's civil society as having a dual structure, one with many members but few advocates. It is this structure that led to the title of his book: Japan's Dual Civil Society: Members without Advocates. [End Page 118] Pekkanen's book is an important contribution to a still small but growing body of literature focused on an understudied aspect of Japanese society: the world of nongovernmental organizations, social movements, and public interest organizations. The book begins with a useful compilation of data related to Japan's civil society groups. Here we learn that Japan has many religious and political groups with legal status but relatively few non-profit organizations (NPOs) or think tanks that are recognized as legal persons under Japan's civil code. We also learn that employment in the civil society sector in Japan is considerably lower than in Australia, Western Europe, or the United States and that the largest Japanese NPOs pale in terms of both membership size and budgets compared to their U.S. and European counterparts. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of neighborhood associations, children's groups, elderly people's groups, and other civic groups operating without legal status. Moreover, a higher percentage of Japanese are members of organizations than are Americans. Pekkanen's primary goal is to explain the puzzle found in these data. If Japanese culture is as group oriented as is commonly accepted and Japanese people participate as actively in local civil society groups as the data suggest, why is civil society so much less professionalized in Japan than in most Western democracies? Why are there so few large NPOs? What accounts for the dual structure of Japan's civil society? Pekkanen argues that the answers to these questions are not so much cultural as they are institutional. Japan's civil code, which dates back to the Meiji era, is relatively open to the formation of for-profit organizations but places numerous constraints on the formation of public interest legal persons. Moreover, it makes no provisions for civil society groups that are not working for the public interest. Pekkanen shows how, prior to legal changes initiated in 1998, many civil society groups fell between the cracks and could not even apply to obtain status as public interest legal persons. Others were confronted by the government's highly ambiguous and, in practice, highly restrictive definition of what was in the public interest. The end result was that many groups never gained legal status. While this did not prevent many groups from nevertheless forming, it did limit the number and type that enjoyed the status of "legal person" under the civil code. Although the material presented here is not new, Pekkanen's presentation is clear and concise. He makes a strong case for why having legal status is critical: it gives groups the ability to enter into contracts, open bank accounts, hire employees, own property, and so forth. Without these benefits, it is extremely difficult for a group to develop into a large professional organization. This regulatory framework, he proposes, is the main reason there are so few large, professional civil society groups in Japan. Where...

Editorial Foreword by Dane R. Gordon Editors' Introduction Acknowledgments ONE Georgi FOTEV: Civil Society Against Balkanization TWO Dane R. GORDON, Ann HOWARD: Ethics and the Environment in Eastern Europe THREE Scott BROPHY, Charles TEMPLE, Kurtis MEREDITH: Can Civic Virtue be Taught? FOUR Edward F. McCLENNEN: Organizations, Institutions, and Reform FIVE Ugo VLAISAVLJEVIC: The War Constitution of Small Nations of the Balkans, or Who Is to be Reconciled in Bosnia and Herzegovina? SIX Agon DEMJAHA, Lulzim PECI: The Development of Civil Society in After the Kosovo Conflict SEVEN Obrad SAVIC: Concepts of Civil Society in Former Yugoslavia EIGHT Zagorka GOLUBOVIC: Traditionalism and Authoritarianism as Obstacles to the Development of Civil Society in Serbia NINE Silvano BOLCIC: Interests and Civil Action in Serbia in the Nineties TEN Vojislav STANOVCIC: Civil Society and Rule of the Law in Multi-Ethnic Communities ELEVEN Aleksandar BOSKOVIC: Tolerance and Alterity in Southeastern Europe TWELVE Maria DIMITROVA: The Intellectual and Society THIRTEEN Alexander GUNGOV: Wonderland in Southeast Europe: Civil Society in Bulgaria Emerging from a Crisis FOURTEEN Assen I. DIMITROV: Values and Stability During a Period of Social Polarization FIFTEEN David C. DURST: Civil Society in Bulgaria: Prospects for Reconciliation About the Editors and Contributors Index

Tunisian Exceptionalism:The Role of Civil Society in Tunisia's Transition Ayfer Erdoğan (bio) Introduction Even under authoritarian rule and despite several limitations, Tunisian civil society formed a counterweight to the state power by making up a sphere of civilian activity beyond the state. Unlike many other countries in the region, the authoritarian leaders in Tunisia allowed and even publicly encouraged the growth of some forms of civil society which were not disentangled from the liberal economic development strategy adopted by Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Tunisia was one of the first countries to disengage from "Arab socialism" and it pursued a liberal development strategy, creating a strong private sector and the cultural norms of entrepreneurship and individuality.1 Rather than repressing civil society entirely, Ali pursued a selective liberalization policy and adopted state-monopolized civil society framework, which enabled him to advocate for economic development and, at the same time, get rid of the pluralist effects and democratizing consequences of civil society.2 [End Page 67] Hence, civil society organizations mainly located in the capital Tunis and coastal cities, such as Sfax and Sousse, operated within the restrictions posed by the Ben Ali regime. Civil society could not reach its full potential, yet, in parallel to the state-monopolized civil society, there existed an informal activist network that grew underground. During Ben Ali's rule, the Tunisian public was actively involved in "formal and informal modes of resistance" through unions, social media, youth movements, and grassroots.3 Both formal and informal networks of civil society have generated a culture of dissent that created the basis for resistance against Ben Ali. In the case of post-revolution Tunisia, the new constitution and legitimate political institutions came into existence thanks to the involvement of a group of civil society actors including activists, unions, and non-governmental and women's organizations. In each phase of the transition, civil society groups have struggled to maintain the democratic nature of the transition. When political tensions arose, civil society actors mediated among different political groups and initiated a broad national dialogue. The inclusive and consensual manner in which the constitutional drafting took place owes a lot to Tunisia's strong civil society with its monitoring the draft laws and engaging with members of the assembly to reflect people's demands. Up to the present, civil society has maintained its role in checking on the government's policies and organizing protests and sit-ins when they are not in line with the objectives of the revolution. This article first analyzes the historical evolution of the Tunisian General Labor Union (Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail–UGTT), a primary actor of the uprisings that took place against the regime since the country's independence. Second, it continues with an analysis of the critical role played by civil society and unions during the Jasmine Revolution and the turbulent transition of Tunisia. Finally, it investigates civil society's role in the constitutional drafting process and the implementation of policies in the sphere of politics, economy, and transitional justice. The Historical Evolution of the Labor Movement Tunisia has an organized labor movement as embodied by the UGTT since 1946, and it has been unique in terms of its history, political influence, and social dimension in the MENA region. Throughout Tunisian history, the UGTT's sphere of influence was much larger than an average trade union, which simply advocates for workers' rights and demands. Farhat [End Page 68] Hached, the founder of the UGTT, learned about union activism in the French communist-leaning union, Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), where he had been a member for fifteen years before he founded the union in Tunisia. He resigned from the CGT due to its lack of support for Tunisians' struggle to gain independence from France, which clearly indicated that the UGTT has been more than a labor union from its inception.4 Besides, the labor movement has been rather independent compared to other labor movements in the region, as it does not owe its existence and origin to the state. Rather, the class of "formally free" wage earners and their introduction to trade union activism can...

Contemporary liberal democracies confront governance problems elicited by the discord between the principles of equality and difference, and between the concepts of majority and minority. Citizenship came to be recognized as a vital governance tool in response to this challenge evidenced by growing academic and political interest in the concept. The basic precept that citizenship refers to is a constitutionality-based relationship between the individual and the state, implying a unique, reciprocal, and unmediated bond between the individual and the political community. It is argued that citizenship has three main aspects. First is the legal status aspect, which enfolds citizenship in terms of civil, political, and social rights, plus duties such as obeying laws, paying taxes, and performing military service. The second aspect is the identity dimension of citizenship, which regards individuals' membership in different social and political groups in multiple categories of race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, profession, and sexuality. The third aspect is related to citizens' capacities, responsibilities, and willingness to cooperate, in short the civic virtue that the citizens possess and perform. The sense of identity that citizens have; their maneuvers to deal with competing identities; their willingness to participate in collective decisions and access to political processes; their sense of belonging to the social, political, and economic order; and their initiative potency all refer to different features of civic virtue. All in all, modern citizenship is perceived as the combination of legal status, social roles, and moral attributes that necessitate good citizenry. It has been suggested that these three aspects of citizenship—legal status, identity, and civic virtue—are interrelated; as the sensitivity to identities increases, demands for legal rights increase correspondingly. It is also claimed that identity affects the way people perform their duty of civic participation and their conception of responsibility. From another point of view, it is also argued that the three components of citizenship conflict with one another under certain circumstances. For instance, claims for cultural recognition of minorities may conflict with equal citizenship status. An empirical investigation of citizenship is complementary to understanding the interaction between these three aspects. This study undertakes the crucial task of providing evidence from the field to illuminate the complex correlations and divergences within citizenship and the relational bond between the legal status, identity, and civic virtue aspects. In this article, the results of qualitative research on a particular group of citizens—Turkish citizens with Jewish background—are discussed in the light of the parameters set above. The study provides empirical evidence to illuminate the dynamics at stake in the relationship between the legal status, identity, and civic virtue aspects in the specificity of Turkey's Jews and the conduct of Turkish citizenship. With the use of in-depth interviews conducted with the sample group of Jews, the study attempts to understand how being a non-Muslim minority group living in a Muslim-predominant society influences the perceptions and experiences regarding citizenship. The discussion developed in the article is presented in three parts. In the first part, an overview of Turkish citizenship and the status of non-Muslim minorities per se is put forth. This part also sets forth the essentials of Turkish citizenship with its legal status, identity, and civic virtue aspects. In addition, the paradoxical consequences of the dominant paradigms inherent in citizenship in Turkey regarding non-Muslim minorities are demonstrated. The second part focuses on the field research conducted with the Jewish community in Turkey. After a brief summary of methodology and a portrayal of the general characteristics of the sample group, it discusses how members of Turkey's Jewish community experience and perceive Turkish citizenship through its aspects of legal status, identity, and civic virtue. The respondents' perceptions and experiences regarding being Turkish citizens and a non-Muslim minority are also covered. The third part offers a discussion on Turkish citizenship in the light of the research results and gives a citizen-centric account through the lenses of respondents.

(1998). Civil society and civic virtue. Do democratically constituted communities require a socio‐moral foundation? International Review of Sociology: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 425-438.

Introduction This chapter is an overview for the theory section of this book and also prepares the theoretical ground for the volume. The first of four substantive parts discusses power (soft and hard) in the context of world politics. The second unfolds an academic genealogy for soft power, relating soft power to positivist and post-positivist moments in IR and selected post-positivist interests such as cooperation, civil society and civic virtue.2 A weak global republican confederacy is posited, to give shape to the contemporary world governance framework in relation to which cooperation and conflict take place. Civic virtues, for governing elites, influentials in civil society and ordinary citizens, provide the interactional framework for the confederacy.3 The third section examines moral constructions of soft power. Whether soft power and public diplomacy overlap in part or are interchangeable is also addressed4. The contingent relevance of high and low politics to soft power is discussed and definitions of public diplomacy and subsets of cultural and civil diplomacy are provided. The role of civic virtue in soft power aspirations is dealt with. Fourth, soft power’s passive and active forms are broken analytically into traditional and contemporary categories and three categories of multiplier mechanisms – mobility, media and cultural industrial. Following on from the humanist tradition of a republican political organization, qualitative values for soft power are proposed. This is followed by a conclusion.

ABSTRACT:Based on how notions of civil society and civic virtue were defined in Enlightenment Scotland, this article assesses how far these ideals shaped police development in Scottish towns,c. 1780–1833. It argues that both concepts provided a framework for the development of ‘police’ as a broad mechanism of urban government. Collectively, civil society and civic virtue offered a wide-ranging, intellectual backdrop presupposing ideas on police, improvement and polite society, with the new police model bearing a striking resemblance to how these ideals were imagined and constructed at the time.

1. Introduction: Dimensions of Civil Society Derrick Purdue Section 1: Civic Organizations between State and Society in Emerging Forms of Governance 2. Civic Organizations and the State in Putin's Russia: Co-operation, Co-optation, Confrontation Suvi Salmenniemi 3. What Happened after the 'End of History'? Foreign Aid and Civic Organizations in Ukraine Kateryna Pishchikova 4. Civic Organizations and Local Governance: Learning from the Experience of Community Networks John Diamond Section 2: Civic Societies and Social Movements from Local to Global: Arenas for Mobilization and Action 5. Social Movement Scenes: Infrastructures of Opposition in Civil Society Sebastian Haunss and Darcy K. Leach 6. Between Horizontal Bridging and Vertical Governance: Pro-Beneficiary Movements in New Labour Britain Manlio Cinalli 7. Networks of Protest on Global Issues in Greece 2002-3 Moses A. Boudourides and Iosif A. Botetzagias 8. Protest and Protesters in Advanced Industrial Democracies. The Case of the 15th February Global Anti-War Demonstrations Joris Verhulst and Stefaan Walgrave Section 3: Social Capital and Trust within Different Democratic Systems 9. On the Externalities of Social Capital: Between Myth and Reality Luigi Curini 10. Creating Social Capital and Civic Virtue: Historical Legacy and Individualistic Values. What Civil Society in Spain? Rafael Vazquez Garcia 11. Social Capital and Political Trust in New Democracies in Asia: Ingredients of Deliberative Communication and Democratic Governance Ji-Young Kim 12. Creating Social Capital through Deliberative Participation. The Experience of the Argentine Popular Assemblies Julien D. Talpin 13. Conclusion: Civil Society, Social Movements and Social Capital Derrick Purdue

Does the Middle East's presumed “exceptionalism” imply the disutility of “civil society” as a tool for political analysis? Although the term has gained wide usage in other areas of the world, the Middle East specialists have shown some reluctance to employ it in their own region. This reluctance stems in part from the perception that the term is ambiguous and politically loaded. Historically, “civil society” has signified everything from the peaceable society human beings enjoy under the protection of a Leviathan state (Hobbes), to the stratum of private associations that schools citizens in civic virtue (Tocqueville, Montesquieu), to the constellation of cultural institutions that guarantee the ideological hegemony of the ruling class (Gramsci). In contemporary political debate, the term has become a normative football, representing a bulwark of freedom and anti-totalitarianism to the survivors of communism's fall in Eastern Europe while signifying the spearhead of Western imperialism to those suspicious of efforts to “export democracy” to the developing world. But reluctance to use the term in the analysis of Middle Eastern politics goes beyond the problematic nature of the term itself and derives from a vision of the Middle East as somehow inhospitable to “civil society.” The Middle East is seen as riven by primordial cleavage, dominated by rent-swollen, power-mon-gering states, unpracticed in reverence for individual freedom and civil liberties. Sociology, economics, politics, and culture conspire to sabotage the development of civil society in the region and so, the reasoning goes, the term is best renounced to check premature expectations of its realization.