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Since the emergence of the dissident “parallel polis” in Eastern Europe, civil society has become a “new superpower,” influencing democratic transformations, human rights, and international co-operation; co-designing economic trends, security and defense; reshaping the information society; and generating new ideas on the environment, health, and the “good life.” This volume seeks to compare and reassess the role of civil society in the rich West, the poorer South, and the quickly expanding East in the context of the twenty-first century’s challenges. It presents a novel perspective on civic movements testing John Keane’s notion of “monitory democracy”: an emerging order of public scrutiny and monitoring of power.
“This is an ambitious effort to capture and contextualize highly diverse broad-ranging trends of contemporary and emerging civil society worldwide and to open a debate on how to theorize these trends. It provides a set of conceptual and theoretical inroads as well as a variety of empirical cases on state–civil society relations and is a welcomed contribution to the field of civil society studies and democratization studies.” · Jens Stilhoff Sörensen, Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Stockholm
“[A]collection of original and sophisticated chapters. The combination of theoretical and empirical chapters – addressing and debating political activism (understood here through the concept of ‘civil society’) and the state and nature of contemporary democracy in various different contexts – is convincing and makes the collection an attractive and valuable contribution to our understanding of contemporary political dynamics.” · Sabine Selchow, London School of Economics
Lars Trägårdh is Professor of History and Civil Society Studies at Ersta Sköndal University College in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2011 he was appointed to the Commission on the Future of Sweden led by the Prime Minister of Sweden, Fredrik Reinfeldt.
Introduction
Lars Trägårdh and Nina Witoszek
Chapter 1. The Dawn of Monitory Democracy
John Keane
Chapter 2. Civil Society in the Age of Crisis
John Clark
Chapter 3. Digital Deprivation: New Media, Civil Society and Sustainability
Paddy Coulter and Cathy Baldwin
Chapter 4. “Monitory” versus “Managed” Democracy: Does Civil Society Matter in Contemporary Russia?
Kathryn Stoner-Weiss
Chapter 5. Monitory Democracy and Ecological Civilization in the People’s Republic of China
James Miller
Chapter 6. Tenuous Spaces: Civil Society in Burma/Myanmar
David Steinberg
Chapter 7. Kenya’s Green Belt Movement: Contributions, Conflict, Contradictions, and Complications in a Prominent ENGO
Bron Taylor
Chapter 8. A New Direction in Transnational Civil Society: The Politics of Muslim NGO Coalitions
Zeynep Atalay
Chapter 9. Anti-Totalitarian Feminism? Civic Resistance in Iran
Nina Witoszek and Haideh Daragahi
Chapter 10. Associative Democracy in the Swedish Welfare State
Lars Trägårdh
Chapter 11. State Capture of Civil Society: Effects of Patronage in the Norwegian Aid Industry
Asle Toje
Chapter 12. Civil Society as a Driver of Governance Innovation: A Montesquieu Perspective
Atle Midttun
Chapter 13. Afterword: An Ounce of Action is Worth a Ton of Theory
Bill McKibben prefaced by Nina Witoszek and Lars Trägårdh
Bibliography
Index