Civil Society Struggles Research Articles

Вплив соціал-демократів на формування та розвиток української політико-правової думки в Галичині у період проголошення та занепаду ЗУНР (1918-1923 рр.)

This article is devoted to the analysis of the influence of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party (USDP) on the formation and development of political and legal opinion in Galicia during the period of the proclamation and decline of the ZUNR (1918-1923). The role and place of iconic Ukrainian social democrats in the socio-political life of the region and the peculiarities of the evolution of the USDP to the political course of the ZUNR, the Polish state through the prism of the short period of Ukrainian power and the specifics of the occupation regime are highlighted. It was found that during the period under study, the development of Ukrainian political and legal thought was influenced by tectonic social and political events: the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy; Ukrainian revolutions in Galicia and Trans-Dnieper Ukraine; the proclamation of the West Ukrainian People's Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic; Zluka ZUNR and UNR; occupation of Galicia by Poland; assimilation policy of the Polish government; the struggle of civil society and legal political forces for the restoration of Ukrainian national statehood. It is emphasized that the USDP was directly related to these historical processes, because from the moment of its creation, it was one of the first legal parties of Austria-Hungary to proclaim the idea of the right of the Ukrainian people to state and political independence and made efforts to implement the programmatic position of the party in practice by forming the legal consciousness of Ukrainians Galicia Combining the national idea with Marxism, the social democrats sought to achieve the national and social liberation of the Ukrainian people and build an independent Ukrainian socialist state. It is emphasized that the idea of a unified and cathedral Ukraine became the core during the national liberation struggle of 1917-1923.

Европейский конституционализм: развитие идеи и правовых средств ограничения публичной власти

The article actualizes the problem of formation, development, the current state of the constitutionalist idea and the corresponding legal means of limiting public power. This is not about numerous constitutionalist political and legal doctrines, its definition or classification: the thesis characterization of the historical stages of the struggle of civil society against the despotism of the state, competing or affiliated institutions (economic, military and spiritual) allows us to reveal the patterns of dialectics of the essential idea for constitutionalism and appropriate legal means of limiting public authority. The author used the historical-comparative, formal-logical, method of legal dogmatics and specification of legal cases (description of specific cases). The use of these methods made it possible to investigate the embodiment of the constitutionalist idea of limiting public power that corresponds to the legal culture of a particular era; the main legal means of limiting public power in the past and present; the potential for updating the constitutionalist idea and legal means of limiting public power. The idea and legal means of limiting public power are concretized on the materials of the most developed legal systems of the past and present, recognizing and implementing European-type democracy as the basis of the political and legal structure.

We need to talk about political society: subaltern resistances beyond civil society in Eastern Europe and Eurasia

ABSTRACT This article points out the need to talk about the political society, or the politics and resistances, of subaltern groups in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Existing literature frames diversity marginalized struggles as civil society struggles or decries the weakness of donor-driven, disembedded civil societies, reproducing the understanding of political life in the region in terms of absences, voids and deficiencies. Challenging this subsumption or dismissal of subaltern struggles, I advance two arguments. First, I argue against broadening the civil society concept to include various subaltern struggles as this approach risks overwriting differences between those groups that mobilize as rights-bearing citizens and the ones that are not recognized or treated as civil society. Instead, I propose acknowledging the historically and spatially contingent character of civil society and the defining role of the state and other actors in shaping which struggles fall within or beyond institutional and discursive frameworks of legality and legitimacy. Second, I argue that Patra Chatterjee’s concept of ‘political society’ can serve better as a meta-vocabulary to account for a diversity of struggles shunted as backwards, premodern and uncivilized, and to refocus research from what is absent to what is present, towards understanding counter-hegemonic discourses and practices.

Venturing sustainability: Political lessons from civic engagement and transformative learning in Asia

Current studies on civic engagement offer a critical examination of global civil society's struggles for a sustainable future. The liberal conception of civic engagement sees citizens as voluntary and participatory political subjects in their capacity to achieve a sustainability agenda. In Asia, such conceptions meet with the complex nature of power relations. Using a Gramscian approach and interpretive analysis, this paper draws on the struggles for hegemony, where power relations manifest subtly in state policy, market economy and civil society domains. Learning from the transformative learning experiences of various civil society actors, this study argues that in Asian realities, civic engagement is deeply concerned with the underlying structure of power, forms of negotiation and power dynamics. Political asymmetry is often made implicit by the privileged or uncritically internalized in civic life. There is a need to examine civic engagement as part of "the political", in which antagonism and contradiction are constitutive to social change. Furthermore, civic engagement can, and does, stimulate citizens' deliberate and concerted action against inequality, injustice and indignity.

The seductions of Europe and the solidarities of Eurasia

Almost 40 years ago, when I was doing fieldwork in Poland, the word Solidarity was on everyone’s lips. One of the popular rallying cries, here and elsewhere in the region, was that of “rejoining Europe”. Similar ebullience was found in many Western countries at the time, justified by the increasingly progressive politics of the European Economic Community (as it was known at the time) and by the intellectual vogue for “civil society” as a key component of the continent’s liberal Enlightenment heritage. Today, in Poland and elsewhere in Europe, scepticism toward the idea of solidarity at the level of the EU runs deep. Populist politicians thrive and liberal civil society struggles. Why is this happening? Where else in the contemporary world can solidary solutions to the problems of the planet be forged? The answer given in this lecture will be radically Eurosceptic. Without denying the remarkable accomplishments of Europe since classical antiquity, it is necessary to place them in wider contexts. The landmass should be conceived as Eurasia, of which Europe is an important macro-region; it is an equivalent of China, not of Asia. The lecture will touch briefly on Axial Age theory, when social solidarities emerged on an unprecedented scale across the landmass, accompanied by ideas of moral universalism. It will also expound Jack Goody’s thesis concerning “alternating leadership” between East and West since the urban revolution of the Bronze Age. If we follow Goody by abandoning the rhetoric of a “European miracle” and look instead to Eurasian commonalities over the last three millennia, we shall be in a better position to create the geopolitical and moral solidarities urgently needed by humanity.

Glyphosate: The European Controversy – A Review of Civil Society Struggles and Regulatory Failures

Glyphosate: The European Controversy – A Review of Civil Society Struggles and Regulatory Failures

The Tale of Post-Arab Spring in Egypt: The Struggle of Civil Society Against a Janus-Faced State

The Tale of Post-Arab Spring in Egypt: The Struggle of Civil Society Against a Janus-Faced State

Migrants and Violence in South Africa : The April 2015 Xenophobic Attacks in Durban

In 2015, a wave of xenophobic attacks swept across South Africa. The violence was at its worst in Durban, where thousands of immigrants, mainly from Africa, were attacked by their fellow South Africans, their businesses looted and people Jailed. This article looks at the sparks for the violence, while unpacking the complex relations between locals and African immigrants against the backdrop of an earlier episode of violence in 2008/9. The latter part of the article focuses on the struggle of civil society to build a strong anti-xenophobic front against the background of growing inequality and a government determined to pursue high-end mega projects.

Prefiguring the Realm of Freedom at Occupy Oakland

In recent decades a powerful discourse has taken hold, celebrating the struggle of civil society against the state, and many have attempted to read the Occupy movement through that lens. This essay draws on Marx's critique of liberalism in “On the Jewish Question” to denaturalize the neoliberal imaginary implicit in such readings and to suggest an alternative account that foregrounds the prefigurative nature of the movement as an attempt to create freedom in community with others.

Nigerian Civil Society and Democratic Struggles under Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sanni Abacha: A Call for Renewed Commitment

Nigeria has gone through an intense period of political transformation and reconstitution since independence. Central to the political transformation was the struggle to combat military authoritarianism which held the nation captive for about three decades. The period of military autocracy was mostly characterized by some phoney transition programmes most of which never saw the light of the day. However between 1989 and 1999, Nigerian civil society entered the political scene with unimaginable force and bravery, to demand an end to military authoritarianism and the enthronement of democracy. This paid off as the country was returned to democratic government in May 1999. But after the enthronement of democracy in 1999, civil society seems to have gone into recess. It is now devoid of vibrancy and coordination with which it fought for democracy, forgetting the fact that the task of securing new democracy is as demanding as initiating it. Hence, this paper aims at revisiting the tortuous, brave and determined struggle of civil society to enthrone democracy, with the intention of making it serve as a wake- up call to civil society to renew its vibrancy in order to defend and strengthen the nascent democracy which it laboured so much for.

The Demand for Healthy Eating: Supporting a Transformative Food “Movement”

To the extent that social science scholarship engages real-world developments it remains grounded and better able to resist elite agendas. With this in mind this article argues for the critical encounter with what I argue is the most significant struggle around food and agriculture today-the amorphous and broad-based movement that strives to resist the further degradation of food environments and ensure healthy eating in society. This struggle is inevitably engaged with contemporary neoliberal agendas that have transformed and degraded food environments as they have privileged profit making over healthy diets. The article considers different sites where the struggle over healthy eating is taking place, both at the level of the state and more extensively in civil society. It considers the debate over bovine growth hormone in Canada and the wider efforts to turn around school food environments as examples of state-centered and civil-society struggles, respectively, that illustrate different dimensions of the healthy-eating movement today. In each case the agendas of transnational food corporations are seen to be directly contradicting efforts to ensure healthy diets. The article considers some notable successes among advocates of healthy eating, in the United States and Canada and most notably in Britain, and examines some of the factors that may account for this success. Overall, I argue that this struggle has the potential to challenge the hegemony of neoliberal discourse in fundamental ways. The article concludes with a call for academics, and rural sociologists in particular, to give a much greater priority to healthy-eating struggles, and considers a number of areas where academic practitioners can aid activists' efforts to resist the further degradation of diets and establish healthier food environments.

A Brief Overview of Buddhist NGOs in Japan

AT THE OUTSET, it should be noted that the term NGO, as it is adopted by Japanese civil society and socially-minded Buddhist organizations, has a specific meaning that differs from the Western conception. Non-governmental organization usually refers to a civic or civil society group active within a society. However, in the Japanese context, NGO refers specifically to a group engaged in cooperation activities (kokusai kyoryoku katsud6 HM9t AMt) and not directly focused on domestic issues within Japan (SHIMIZU 1999, p. 699). This rather unique understanding of the NGO speaks to the marginal nature of Buddhist NGOs as actors in domestic Japanese civil society. It also shows the broader struggle of civil society in Japan in the development of a public sphere autonomous from the state and corporate affiliations. Japanese Buddhist NGOs first emerged in the early 198os in response to the intensifying crisis in Indo-China with the boat people from Vietnam and the mass of Cambodian refugees living on the border of Thailand. Groups like the Buddhist Aid Center (BAC), created in 1982 mainly by priests from the Nichiren sect, were in part a response to criticism in the mainstream media that Buddhism had become irrelevant to modern society and that Buddhist priests had no concern for the general well-being of people. Another factor was the increasing international exposure that Japanese, and Japanese priests in particular, were getting as the economy prospered. Many Buddhist priests active in international aid expressed the shock and