Three stages of civil society development in the Global East: Lessons from Montenegro, 1989–2020

Abstract

Despite the growing body of scholarly work on the Global East, there has been a surprising lack of research that systematically explores the “civil society building” during postsocialist transformation, particularly in terms of identifying and explicating its distinct developmental stages. Seeking to address this gap, this article utilizes contemporary Montenegro as a case study for investigating the form and content, sites and scales, and dynamics and interactions of civic engagement, associational life, and protest politics against the backdrop of the intricate processes characteristic of the “postsocialist condition”: political transition, economic restructuring, and social transformation. By examining the development of an actually existing civil society in the Global East over the course of three decades, this article identifies its three stages and demonstrates the ways in which functionalist (civil society as a democratizing force), normativist (civil society as a civilized society), and structuralist (civil society as the civic sector) conceptualizations tend to be reductive, often obscuring rather than illuminating the empirical realities of civil societies. Conversely, by emphasizing practices, relations, and processes, this article broadens the symbolic (and thus political) boundaries of civil society, while simultaneously avoiding conceptual stretching that could compromise precision in producing analytical tools tailor-made to the evolving realities in the Global East.