Non-Western Model of Civil Society in the Middle Eastern Context: Promises and Discontents

Abstract

The article analyzes the specific experience of civil society development in the Middle East, which remarkably exposes the dilemma underlying the civil society concept as a matrix of working democracy. This concept limits the understanding of the very phenomenon of civil society and peculiarities of its functioning in the region. An analysis of the Middle Eastern specifics requires a functional approach and a hybrid definition of civil society. This approach has a number of heuristic advantages over both liberal and critical theories. The article outlines the Middle Eastern model of civil society and postulates the key characteristic of illiberal civil society—it becomes conducive to the reproduction of authoritarian regimes even despite its institutional diversity. The analysis shows the ambivalence of civil society in the Middle East as a space of limited freedom of political/non-political activity and as a testing ground for the development of various tools designed to curb civic initiative. The liberal model of civil society, directly incorporated in state-building, is turned upside down in the Middle East. Civil society organizations in this region are hardly functional as an outpost for promoting liberal democratic values because they prove to serve the interests of the elite or alternative political forces much more than the interests of ordinary citizens.