Rethinking Global Civil Society and the Public Sphere in the Age of Pro-democracy Movements (original) (raw)
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The past two decades witnessed the emergence of a new range of transnational social movements, networks, and organizations seeking to promote a more just and equitable global order. With this broadening and deepening of cross-border citizen action, however, troubling questions have arisen about their rights of representation and accountability—the internal hierarchies of voice and access within transnational civil society are being highlighted. The rise of transnational grassroots movements, with strong constituency base and sophisticated advocacy capability at both local and global levels, is an important phenomenon in this context. These movements are formed and led by poor and marginalized groups, and defy the stereotype of grassroots movements being narrowly focused on local issues. They embody both a challenge and an opportunity for democratizing and strengthening the role of transnational civil society in global
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The argument developed in this paper starts by recognizing that the theoretical interchanges between the social movements and the civil society literatures have not been always explicit, despite several continuities between them. Therefore, by analyzing the development of key elements found in the current debate in both literatures, this paper traces some parallels between the two fields and defends that the identification of such similarities may foster a more fruitful dialogue between them.
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Introducing the special issue on global protest and democracy since 2011, this article surveys the key dimensions of the debate. It provides a critical overview of significant protest events in the post-2011 period and explores a range of the analytical tools that may be used to understand them, before proceeding to identify, disaggregate and draw into question some of the major claims which have emerged in literature on the post-2011 mobilizations. The articles contained within this volume are then outlined, revealing the novel and nuanced insights provided by the contributors with respect to the post-2011 protests' composition, mobilization forms, frames, democratic practices, and interrelationships with other actors in pursuit of democratic reform. The article concludes with a discussion of the opportunities for further research into protest and democracy.
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Civil society around the world is in flux. New forms of civic activism have taken shape, ranging from protest movements to community-level forums and online campaigns by individual activists.This analysis charts how civic activism is evolving across eight countries:* Brazil* Egypt* India* Kenya* Thailand* Tunisia* Turkey* Ukraine.These case studies reveal crosscutting themes relevant to the future of civil society support:* While there is a global wave of new protests and innovative citizen movements, many civic struggles are increasingly rooted in specific national issues.* New and older forms of civic activism coexist and intertwine in a variety of ways.* Some new activism is highly political and confrontational; some is very practical and pragmatic about trying to circumvent the shortcomings of mainstream politics.* New civic activism includes groups espousing an increasingly wide range of ideological positions.* While the new activism has been effective on some specific issues, ...
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n the 1980s, the work of Hungarian and other Eastern European intellectuals 1 was responsible for renewed attention to one of the core concepts of modern Western history, the idea of civil society. The events of 1989 catapulted this concern from academic circles to the broader public discourse. The phrase is now on the lips of foundation executives, business leaders, and politicians; it seems as though every university has set up a study group on civil society and the phrase finds its way into half the dissertations in political sociology. Too often, "civil society" is invoked without sorting out whether it means Milton Friedman's capitalist market policies or social movements like Solidarity or the sort of "political society" or "public sphere" beloved of thinkers from Montesquieu to Tocqueville to Habermas and once thought to exist mainly in cafes and coffeehouses.' The resurgence of the notion of civil society has brought it to the fore in discussions of the North American and Western European democracy as well as of the transition (one hopes to democracy) in Eastern Europe. Even more strikingly, the notion of civil society has begun to inform a range of new discussions of the practice and possibilities for democracy in East Asia. Analysts of the 1989 democracy movement in China, for example, locate one of the social bases of the protest in the emergence of new "civil society" institutionssmall entrepeneurs,