Uncivil Society Research Articles

Confronting ‘Uncivil Society’ and the ‘Dark Side of Globalization’: Are Sociological Concepts up to the Task?

International terrorism is frequently categorized as one element of ‘uncivil society’ or as the ‘dark side of globalization.’ The paper examines these concepts, finding them unhelpful in understanding the context for the September 11 attacks in the US. Their weakness derives in large part from the uncritical usage of the terms ‘civil society?’ and ‘globalization’ characteristic of much contemporary sociological work. In consequence, sociology is in danger of being marginalized from public debate about the most important issues of our day.

Networks, netwars and the fight for the future

Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the attack on America perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better. This paper is largely drawn (with updates added) from Chapter 10 of our forthcoming book, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (RAND, 2001), which will also be available online soon at www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1382/.

Modern European Democracy and Its Enemies: The Threat of the Extreme Right

Political dynamics in recent decades have posed a new extreme right-wing threat to the stability of democracies. This threat, which we will call the 'uncivil society', is far more fluid in nature than its predecessor, the subversive political party. It presents a (idiosyncratic) challenge to regimes seeking to assure stability. Contrary to the 'party decline' and 'trade off' theses, we will argue that the 'uncivil society' and extreme right-wing parties operate jointly to promote similar goals and thus present a double threat to liberal democracies: one operating within the parliaments and the other operating from the surrounding environment. The first part of this article will explore the changing structure of the political process which has allowed the expansion of democracy's enemies. The second part will identify old and new enemies of democratic regimes and evaluate the level of threat each poses to democracy. Finally, we will assess whether 'uncivil society' has replaced the (subversive) political party as the principal source of extremism, or whether it co-operates with this same extremism.

Legal Weapons for the Weak? Democratizing the Force of Words in an Uncivil Society

First Amendment absolutists and proponents of speech regulation are locked in a normative stalemate over the best way to diminish racial “hate speech.” I argue that this stalemate can be overcome by considering a more expansive theory of the “force of words” and the risks the right of free speech entails for individuals. Drawing on a cultural theory of symbolic power, I discuss the merits and limitations of two recent texts which redefine hate speech as discriminatory conduct. As an alternative to this strategy, I develop an analytical framework for describing the social risks the right of free speech entails, and propose juridical and deliberative-democratic remedies that might redistribute and attenuate these risks. Cultural and legal theory can find common ground in the analysis of the undemocratic effects of symbolic power. Such common ground can be achieved if legal theorists consider the force of words as a problem for democracy and if cultural theorists consider the resources provided by democratic institutions and practices for the redistribution of the social risks of speech.

Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481-751

Although often depicted as a barbaric and uncivilized society, Merovingian Gaul was clearly a Christian society and a direct continuation of Roman civilization in terms of social standards, morals and culture. Using insights provided by social history, archaeology, palaeography and anthropology, this book studies the problem of Christianization in early medieval Gaul from a cultural point of view. The author does not confine himself to a functional analysis of various cultural and religious activities in Merovingian Gaul, but goes on to assess the consequences and implications of such activities for the people themselves, and for the subsequent developments in the Carolingian period.

Civil society: old images, new visions

Openings. Democracy. Gramsci. Global Trends. Disputes. Nationalism. Uncivil Society. Power and Publicity. Endings. Index.

A LEGACY OF COLONIALISM: THE UNCIVIL SOCIETY OF AOTEAROA / NEW ZEALAND

This article considers the legacy of Enlightenment and Empire in settler society as a conflict of cultural values,at once a problem of justice and identity. Aotearoa/New Zealand is an exemplary case: the failure of the court system to fully acknowledge that settlement was founded on negotiation with indigenous people threatens to return this society, in constitutional and social terms, to a state of nature. I consider the problem raised by the claims to justice of indigenous Maori through the viewpoint of a major historian, and white New Zealander or Pakeha, J. G. A. Pocock. The progressivism of enlightenment history still evident in his thinking undergirds a view of Maori history as a primitive dreamtime. This misconception belies the refusal of Pakeha to acknowledge the extent to which their own view of history is a product of enlightenment myth-making. The negative British view of Maori in the nineteenth century shows the continuity of racial stereotypes since Captain Cook's encounter. Today, the judicial failure to countenance different cultural values reorients questions of justice. The state of nature returns as the absence of a constitutional framework for negotiating specifically cultural differences. The abstract universalism of liberal justice – Pakeha think justice cannot be culturally inflected – is part of the problem, and fuels Maori grievances. Yet Pakeha are increasingly turning to Maori insignia to establish a sense of national identity. Historical justice and questions of national identity remain inseparable in settler societies. The failure to consider settlement in terms of competing cultural values, evident in the problem of history, creates the conditions for an uncivil society. In this context I question the grounds for regarding acts of indigenous violence as unjustified.

Citizenship after liberalism

Contents: Karen Slawner and Mark E. Denham: Citizenship After Liberalism - Roberto Alejandro: Impossible Citizenship - Matteo Gianni: Taking Multiculturalism Seriously: Political Claims for a Differentiated Citizenship - William J. Meyer: The Politics of Differentiated Citizenship - Karen Slawner: Uncivil Society: Liberalism, Hermeneutics and Good Citizenship - David J. Kahane: Liberal Virtues and Citizen Education - Elizabeth Wingrove: Educating for Citizenship: Reflections on Pedagogy as Conservation and Critique - Ed Wingenbach: Justice After Liberalism: Democracy and Global Citizenship - Margarita Balmaceda: Re-creating Identity After Homo Sovieticus: Language and the Definition of a New Pan-Russianness - Ronald Beiner: Citizenship and Nationalism: Is Canada a Real Country?

Paths to Uncivil Societies and Anti-Liberal States: A Reply to Shenfield

Paths to Uncivil Societies and Anti-Liberal States: A Reply to Shenfield

Uncivil society, capitalism and the state in Africa

State and society do not stand apart in Africa ‐ or anywhere else. Neither do they exist in precarious balance. This article explores the ways in which elements of the state are connected to civil society, and how elements of civil society are not merely affected by the state, but are seated in the state. Privileged place is given to capitalist phenomena. An examination of clashing theoretical views of civil society is followed by critical evaluations of contemporary Africanists and concludes with a brief discussion of the Senegalese‐Mauritanian conflict and its bearing on the evolution of capitalism and democracy in Africa.

Post-communism: an introduction

List of Figures and Tables. Preface. List of Acronyms and Abbreviations. Terminology and Map. Part I Theories and Approaches. . 1. On Communism and Post--Communism. 2. Theories of the Collapse of Communist Power. Part II Transition to post--Communism: The Revolutions of 1989--1991. . 3. Eastern Europe. 4. The USSR. 5. The Survivors. 6. A Comparative Overview. Part III Early Post--Communism. . 7. Institutional Politics. 8. The Economies. 9. Social Policies and Problems. 10. Civil or Uncivil Societies?. 11. Changing Allegiances. Part IV Conclusions. 12. Some Concluding Remarks. Bibliography. Index.

La sécurité dans les villes d'Amérique Latine : sociétés (non) civiles sous la loi démocratiquePaulo

Safety in the Latin America Cities : Uncivil Societies Under Democratic Rule Paulo Sérgio PINHEIRO Democratic governance has been unable in this continent to implement or to propose reforms for those institutions, as the judiciary, the public prosecutors office and the police. Violent crime and delinquency have increased in Latin American societies, particularly in the 1980's and the 1990's. Crimes against life and physical integrity - homicide, assault, rape - have risen sharply. There is a strong correlation between the places where the poor live and violence, and violent death. Those districts of the city of Sao Paulo with the worst social indicators are precisely those with the highest numbers for homicides. The rule of law which is discussed here must not be equated with the enforcement of criminal law, precisely because one of the cardinal features of the criminal law is its discriminatory character. Despite ail the obstacles which we discussed and analysed here and the failure of present State institutions to enforce the rule of law, it is important to acknowledge that civilian rule and « formal democracy »- to use Agnes Heller expression with all its limitations in Latin America has opened new perspectives for democratic consolidation processes which now necessarily encompasses the appropriation of rights by the underprivileged.

Social capital in civic and stressful societies

This article examines social capital with particular reference to societies where distrust of institutions has been the norm. The first section describes alternative relationships between individuals and institutions in civil and uncivil societies. The second makes clear the important distinction betweensocial network capital andorganizational capital. The former can be used to achieve freedom from the state; the latter implies a trustworthy state. The third section presents empirical survey data from the New Democracies Barometer in nine post-Communist societies; the data measure trust, scepticism and distrust in fifteen institutions. The following sections use multivariate analysis to account for differences in individual levels of trust, and discuss the implications for theories of civic democracy.

Happy ever after in the marketplace: non‐government organisations and uncivil society

This following declaration, about NGOs and civil society, is typical of the hallowed tones used to discuss both. This article sets out to examine what I have called the ‘NGO phenomenon’ which has arisen in the last decade. It is not a critique of NGOs per se,but a critique of the way in which development policy has focused on NGOs, to the extent that expectations of NGO performance are unrealistically high and exclude other options for development.

Un-civil society: The politics of the 'informal people'

Un-civil society: The politics of the 'informal people'

Reading North by South: on Latin American literature, culture, and politics

Part 1 Occupation texts: teaching Caribbean texts - outline for a counterhegemonizing pedagogy people without history - central America in the literary imagination of the metropolis. Part 2 Sui generis: narrating the trujillato Boom novel and the Cold War in Latin Part 3 Uncivil society: sport as civil society - Argentina's generals play championship soccer hegemony or idelogy? observations on Brazilian fascism and the criticism of Roberto Schwarz. Part 4 Recolonizations: aesthetics and the question of colonial discourse phenomenology and colony - Edmundo O'Gorman's The Invention of America. part 5 Culture and nation: split nationalities indigenism, cultural nationalism, and the problem of universality nation and narratin in Latin America - critical reflections. Part 6 Postmodernity: latin America and postmodernism - a brief theoretical inquiry postmodernism and imperialism - theory and politics in Latin Part 7 Cultural studies: the cultural studies movement and Latin America - an overview transcultural/subpolitical - pitfalls of hybridity Brazilian critical theory and the question of cultural studies.

Reviews

Uncivil society: ‘race’ and murder in Nazi Germany Tim Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the ‘National Community’, ed. Jane Caplan, introd. Ursula Vogel, trans. John Broadwin. Oxford and Providence, Rl: Berg, 1993. xxviii+434pp. Notes. Append. Bibl. Ind. £50.00. David F. Crew (ed.), Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945. London and New York: Routledge, 1994 (Rewriting Histories series). xi+316pp. Notes. £11.99. It's the real thing Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context. Volume 1: The Holocaust and Mass Death in the Modern Age. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. xviii+702pp. Bibl. Ind. Notes. £40.00. True adventures of court Jews Eli M. Rosenbaum with William Hoffer, Betrayal. The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover‐Up. New York: St Martin's Press, 1993. xx+522pp. Ind. $25.95. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace. Jews and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. x+266pp. Ind. $22.00. Columbus and the legacy of 1492 Zia Sardar, Ashis Nandy and Merryl Wyn Davies, Barbaric Others. A Manifesto on Western Racism, London: Pluto Press, 1993. 95pp. Bibl. £7.95. Dutch ambivalence Allison Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World. The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993. xx+327pp. Notes. Ind. Maps. Illus. £32.50. Agile Italian evasions Daniel Carpi, Between Mussolini and Hitler: The Jews and the Italian Authorities in France and Tunisia. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1994 (Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series, 17). x+341 pp. Notes. Bibl. Ind. £35.00/$59.95. What colour are Jews? Milton Shain, The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa. Charlottes‐ville, VA and London: University Press of Virginia, 1994. xii+203pp. Notes. Bibl. Ind. $45.00. Surveying European racism John Wrench and John Solomos (eds.), Racism and Migration in Western Europe, Oxford and Providence, RI: Berg, 1993. x+293pp. Bibl. Ind. £34.95.

Civil Religion in an Uncivil Society

Civil religion denotes a religion of the nation, a nonsectarian faith that has as its sacred symbols those of the polity and national history. Recent scholars have portrayed it as a cohesive force, a common canopy of values that helps foster social and cultural integration, but this perspective may now be at odds with a complex reality. Ours is an increasingly differentiated society with the rise of group politics and subcultures. The forms of civil religion remain, but the cultural cohesion it purportedly reflects is dissolving. Civil-religious discourse has become a tool for legitimating social movements and interest-group politics. A critical examination of the current uses of civil religion must lead to a critical reanalysis of the society at large as well as the concept itself.

Khomeini and Criminal Justice: Notes on Crime and Culture

It requires little imagination to insert a character from the old American Wild West into the imagery of Khomeini's justice, with the exception that this hero would ride into town with a gun instead of pen and ink, and would do his own enforcing. The simplicity and clarity of justice in both images surely tempts the romantics among us. The essential difference between the folklore figure and the Ayatollah Khomeimi, however, is that the western hero depicts the uneducated, raw man of the frontier, bringing an innocence, a freshness to the uncivilized society of the Wild West. He represents, really, a kind of justice-a highly optimistic and benign view of man's nature, yet a nature without God. Khomeini, on the other hand, depicts the opposite: a highly educated man, a man who stands for 1,380 years (or thereabouts) of learning, who represents not human justice, but divine justice. In Khomeini's view, Iranian society is decivilized rather than uncivilized. His people have been corrupted by the wrong laws and values of the United States, whereas those folks in the Wild West had simply been separated from their laws--a situation of no law, rather than the wrong law. How is it that two vastly different roles produce strikingly similar

Rousseau (review)

258 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Maximilian Forschner. Rousseau. Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1977. Pp. 221. This is one of those "introductions" with an eye to those already introduced. In many respects it is an effective presentation of Rousseau's political thought. Forschner manages , with considerable adroitness, to give thematic continuity to his chronological discussion of the major works. The First Discourse and its polemical offshoots lead effortlessly to the "materialistic" philosophy of history of the Second Discourse (p. 161). This philosophy is then applied to the property rights conferred both by the inequitable social contract at the end of the Second Discourse and by the constitution envisaged in the Discourse on Political Economy. According to Forschner, the formal right of property is determined by the contract alone. The material rightness of the social order, however, is determined by the historically conditioned effects of that contract on the capacity of the contractees freely to determine their existence within a harmonious collective system of needs and resources (cf. pp. 47, 80-83). The formal and material conditions of such self-determination, and therefore of a morally as well as formally legitimate state, are the theme of the Social Contract (p. 59). But since the conditions specified in that work are nearly always lacking in reality, one must also know how to live in an uncivil society, an institutionalized collection of individuals but no true polls. The best way of life for these circumstances is outlined in Emile, which portrays the formation of a "natural," but not asocial individual. The later autobiographical writings are taken to indicate the abandonment of this ideal in favor of an imaginative autism. Forschner does an exceptionally good job of unifying Rousseau's work into a coherent theory of history, society, politics, and morals. Most people could probably find reasons for saying that the theory is not Rousseau's, but the author of a wide-ranging introductory work can hardly be expected to pre-empt all his critics. Unfortunately, after all allowances have been made, there are three defects that prevent Forschner's book from being a good introduction to Rousseau9 The first flaw is minor but disconcerting: Forschner is given to sudden and inexplicable outbursts of historical arm-waving. Thus on the first page of the text we are told how, by challenging the prevailing Zeitgeist, "Rousseau in his First Discourse places himself in a tradition linked with such names as Diogenes the Cynic, as Socrates, Jesus, Seneca, Cato, or even Francis of Assisi" (p. 7). Mercifully this line of inquiry is not pursued, but then why initiate it? Why bother, a little while later, to treat amour de sol as a "naturalistic " development (p. 31), via Hobbes, of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Thomist conceptions of love--all in one paragraph and without any textual comparisons? Forschner's allusions are probably based on considerable study, but they provide nothing but a guide for the pretentious. Second, though Forschner never shrinks from citing thorny passages, he has a tendency to gloss over the difliculties they present. Take, for example, his treatment of the well-known salute to property in the Discourse on Political Economy: 9 le fondement du pacte social est la propri~t6, et sa premiere condition, que chacun soit maintenu dans la paisible jouissance de ce qui lui appartient.' This passage threatens to mar Forschner's portrayal of Rousseau as critic of Lockean natural rights by suggesting that Rousseau did indeed share Locke's views on individual property. After citing equally familiar passages which give the contrary impression i Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres compldtes, Bernard Gangebin and Marcel Raymond, eds., 4 vols. to date (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 3:269f. Henceforth 0(2 3. BOOK REVIEWS 259 (OC 3 :367, 391), Forschner attempts to exorcise the offending statement by means of his above-mentioned distinction between (positive, contractual) "formal" right and (substantial , moral) "material" right, which makes rough equality of possessions the precondition of a truly just state (pp. 60f.). The trouble is that Forschner always speaks as if it is material right that really counts: zit is always "not merely formal but material" rather than vice versa (pp. 47, 61). He admits, however, that a universally accepted law...