ABSTRACT
Civil society as a topic attracts attention from a variety of scholars including political scientists, sociologists and, of course, anthropologists. From the ancient Greek philosophers, where civil society as a notion was equated with participating as active citizens in state affairs, to the Scottish and Continental Enlightenment, where a number of political theorists developed the idea that civil society was a domain separate from the state, theories of civil society have diverged according to contextual variations in post-socialist American, European and Middle Eastern countries.
