ABSTRACT
The concept of civil society, which has its origins in early modern West European thought, was reinvented in Eastern Europe and Latin America in the 1980s and found its way into the policy language of international development agencies during the 1990s. Subsequently, the concept of civil society has travelled to all corners of the globe, through intellectual exchange, activist discourse, and the official policies of development donors and politicians. Taking a wide range of local, national and regional contexts from around the world this book considers the questions of whether and how the concept of civil society is being translated into different political and cultural contexts, and the impact of using the concept on the political development of different regions. Other important sub-questions and debates follow from this central concern. Is the civil society idea simply part of a neoimperialist project of imposing Western hegemony? Or does the ever-increasing talk of civil society instead reflect important and progressive trends in the radicalization of democracy and the redistribution of political power? Does the Western bias implied in the formulation of the civil society idea as secular and formally organized prevent recognition of local but different forms of civil society? Is it beneficial, finally, to be thinking of a ‘global’ civil society as a normative concept that embraces notions of non-violence, solidarity and active world citizenship?
