ABSTRACT
In 2000, Laith Kubba proclaimed that the ‘awakening of civil society’ in the Arab world would be the decisive factor in challenging the authoritarian regimes in the region and eventually lead Arabs to the ‘promised land’ of democratisation. This belief in the positive and pro-democratic role of civil society activism has characterised much of the scholarship on civic activism. There are two main factors that contribute to explain how Kubba framed the rise of civil society activism in the Arab world. First, is the widespread acceptance of the theoretical assumption that civil society activism is per se conducive to democratisation where authoritarianism exists and to the maintenance of democracy where democracy already is in place (Rau, 1991; Putnam, 2000). Second, the historical experience of the 1980s and early 1990s processes of democratisation seemed to prove the assumption correct, as a number of cases in Eastern Europe and Latin America indicated. The belief in the emancipatory and democratising power of civil society activism is however not limited solely to the Arab world, with scholars of authoritarianism in other contexts such as China, Burma, Cuba, Vietnam and Central Asia also emphasising the importance of ‘growing’ a local civil society in order to weaken authoritarianism. There is no doubt that the attachment to the notion of civil society as both a concept and tool of change is significant in the context of Eastern Europe and Latin America, but even in these seemingly clear-cut cases the notion that civil society was the instrument of democratic change has been contested (Tempest, 1997).
