ABSTRACT
Despite the pessimism expressed by scholars such as Ernest Gellner (1994), Adam Ferguson (1980) and Adam Seligman (1992) about the utility of the concept of civil society as an analytical variable in discourses on non-Western societies including Africa, studies of civil society in Nigeria have blossomed particularly from the early 1990s. The resurgence of prodemocracy movements and human rights organizations following the country’s stalled transition to civil rule programme from the mid-1980s was the launching pad for most of the new works on civil society in Nigeria. This should not be a surprise; after all, ‘civil society’ became the buzzword in social science circles in Europe and North America in the post-1989 period following the successful struggle to dislodge communist rule and military oligarchy in Eastern Europe and Latin America. The emergence of similar trends in Africa in the 1990s, with the opening up of the democratic space in various countries on the continent, similarly produced a wave of studies that presumably inadvertently reinforce the conceptualization of civil society solely as the domain of free association in independent opposition to the authoritarian state. This partly explains the needless epistemic hurdle that Gellner’s proposition, if fully subscribed to, constitutes to the existence and/ or discourse of civil society in nonWestern societies including Nigeria.
