Civil society in the Arab world

In an article for the Journal of Democracy 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 leading the Arabs to the ‘promised land’ of democratization. This belief in the positive role of civil society activism stemmed from three factors. First and foremost was the acceptance of the theoretical assumption that civil society activism is per se conducive to democratization where authoritarianism exists and to the maintenance of democracy where democracy already exists (Putnam, 2000). In this respect it is worth mentioning that, according to the dominant normative understanding of the concept, ‘without a well developed civil society, it is difficult, if not impossible, to have an atmosphere supportive of democracy’ (Entelis, 1996: 45). Second, the historical experience of processes of democratization in the 1980s and early 1990s seemed to prove the assumption correct, as the cases of Eastern Europe and Latin America are very rarely analysed without mentioning the importance of civil society in restoring democracy in both regions. In fact, ‘Eastern Europe and Latin America … can in a sense claim “ownership” of the revival of the civil society idea in the 1980s.’ (Glasius et al., 2004: 3). Finally, the majority of countries in the Arab world had seen the emergence of a significant number of civil society organizations engaged in the promotion of very diverse issues ranging from human rights to governmental accountability and from business transparency to environmental protection (Howe, 2005). This prompted the genuine belief that ‘the explosion’ of civil society activism was the precursor and the necessary factor for democratic political change in the region. Thus, assumptions about the crucial role of the link between civil society and democratic governance within democratic theory, the example of Eastern Europe and Latin America, and the ‘arrival’ of civil society activism in the Arab world, combined to strengthen the belief that the way to Arab democracy passed through strengthened civil society organizations. This has proven to be one of the most important policy approaches of international donors, as the need for Arab democratization has preoccupied and still preoccupies the international community and particularly the Western world. It is believed that the lack of democratic governance and respect for human rights in the region

lead to instability, economic underdevelopment and, crucially, political violence, both at the domestic and international level. In order to transform the authoritarian regimes of the region into acceptable democracies (i.e. not ruled by Islamist parties), the international community has focused its attention on building democracy from below, through the building-up of civil society, understood as a sphere of liberal and democratic learning. The focus on the linkage between civil society and democratization has not, however, gone uncontested. Within democratic theory, the assumption that civil society is per se a posi-

tive development leading to democratic governance, or to the strengthening of democratic rule where it already exists, has come under severe criticism (Encarnacion, 2006). In addition, the experiences of Eastern Europe and Latin America have been empirically re-evaluated and a degree of scepticism has emerged regarding the actual importance of civil society activism in transitions to democracy in both regions (Tempest, 1997). Finally, the explosion of civil society activism in the Arab world itself has met with considerable scepticism from regional experts, who interpret it in the following terms: a creation of the regimes in place in order to display some liberal traits that would satisfy the international community (Wiktorowicz, 2000); a depoliticization of important issues (Langohr, 2004); a safe haven for liberal activists who are marginalized by Islamist activism in the wider society and are in need of new channels of communication with the regime (Cook, 2005). The absence of meaningful democratic changes in the Middle East and North Africa, despite almost two decades of engagement with and support for civil society activism, is a testament to the practical failure of such a policy approach when it comes to macro-political outcomes. Thus, the role of civil society in the potential democratization of the Arab

world is highly controversial from a scholarly and a policy-making point of view. Such controversy has generated a number of important studies that are largely anchored to the wider literature on democratization and theories of transition. This study, while reliant on many of the insights that the literature on democratization provides, attempts to go beyond its rather narrow confines and, building on the idea of post-democratization, presents, through a number of case-studies, a picture of civil activism and its dynamics as they are, and not of how they should be. When examining the Middle East and North Africa there is often the tendency to look at all phenomena through the prism of democratization, while neglecting the possibility that they might not be linked to it in any meaningful way. It is more productive to analyse existing political dynamics to see how they might inform our understanding of the region without necessarily linking this to a normatively-driven vision of what we might wish to see. Specifically, in focusing on civil society activism, it is particularly important to examine critically the normative meaning that is attached to the concept, because it represents an obstacle to a more genuine, and hopefully more neutral, understanding of the dynamics of civil society in the Arab world and beyond.