The book strives to assess the health, viability, and role of civil society today and identify key challenges and opportunities facing civil society on a global scale."--BOOK JACKET.

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.

In East and Southeast Asia, the creation of civil society is a crucial yet most difficult issue. Europeans have had the luxury of centuries in a slow-moving world characterised by weak governments in which the foundation institutions, norms and values of civil society could ferment and develop. Asia, however, faces this task when a nation's currency can devalue in seconds, destabilising its government, and when states have far more effective means of surveillance, suppression and terror. This book examines these issues and shows that a better understanding of civil society in the Asian context is central to promoting contemporary political, social and economic reform in Asia. It will appeal to students and teachers of politics, law and sociology because it provides new perspectives on how to understand civil society drawing on Asian examples, as well as indications for rethinking what civil society means in Asia. Individual chapters combine theoretical and empirical issues in a way which fills a major gap in the literature. Henceforth, works about 'civil society' will need to take more account of the Asian evidence and Asianists will need to have a clear idea of what civil society in Asia means.

Civil society - comprising the activities of non-state organizations, institutions and movements - has in recent years emerged as the major force for change in the realms of politics, public policy and society both globally and locally. Yet, despite the crucial importance of this political phenomenon to the principle and practice of democracy, it eludes definition and systematic understanding. This book provides a comprehensive and flexible framework for the definition, measurement, analysis and interpretation of civil society based on the innovative 'Civil Society Diamond'. Written as a guide for both practitioners and academics, the book presents precise and insightful solutions to the issues of how to understand the concept of civil society, where to locate it theoretically and empirically, and which techniques are best suited to its measurement. The approach presented here has been successfully adopted across a wide range of civil society organizations in over 30 countries. The author draws on and applies a diverse repertoire of indicators, tools and data - suitable for various organizational forms, practical contexts and theoretical perspectives - which measure the effectiveness of civil society initiatives and reveal certain strategic and policy options. The aim is to promote and facilitate structured, informed and fruitful dialogue within civil society organizations and between them and the governmental, corporate and academic actors with whom they are now so integrally linked.

This book introduces radically alternative models of civil society that have been developed outside the liberal democratic frame of reference, models which suggest that civil society does offer new and non-statist democratic possibilities. Drawing on a wide range of civil society theory-practice from Eastern Europe and Latin America (including the Zapatistas in Mexico), and from visions of global civil society too, this book is uniquely positioned to consider the questions posed by these alternative voices for democratic theory and practice. * Are there alternatives to the liberal democratic vision of civil society? * Is a democracy located in civil society rather than the state either possible or desirable? * How and why has the concept of civil society come to be used so widely today? * Can global civil society further the struggle for democracy initiated by national civil societies?

Since the end of the Cold War, activists and scholars alike have celebrated the phenomenal growth of transnational social movements across the globe. For some, this new eruption of grass-roots political activism on a world scale – from the Rio Earth Summit to the Seattle anti-globalization protests – represents the emergence of a global or transnational civil society. This book provides a critical survey of recent approaches to the study of civil society and international relations, presenting an alternative historical and sociological account of the interaction between these two spheres. It makes a theoretical case for the importance of social movements in world politics arguing that modern social movements emerging out of civil society have been instrumental in shaping the contemporary international system. In this wide-ranging engagement with past and present controversies in international relations, Colás shows how a renewed conception of international civil society can illuminate future possibilities for international social movement activity. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, political sociology and social history, as well as those who seek to play a part in global politics.

In 2003 and again in 2005, the international community was called to take part in a World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). This two-phase United Nations summit placed an unprecedented global spotlight on information and communication issues. Civil Society, Communication and Global Governance provides a sweeping portrait of the players, structures and themes of the WSIS, as well as a critical analysis of the summit's first phase, the issues it raised and the groundbreaking role played by civil society. Including an extensive bibliography, list of relevant web sites and key documents, this will be a basic reference source for everyone interested in the role of information and communication on shaping twenty-first-century societies.

By demonstrating that Western conceptions of 'civil society' have provided the framework for interpreting societies in the Global South, Decolonizing Civil Society in Mozambique argues that it is only through a critical deconstruction of these concepts that we can start to re-balance global power relationships, both in academic discourse and in development practices. Examining the exclusionary discourses framing the support for Western-type NGOs in the development discourse - often to the exclusion of local social actors - this book dissects mainstream contemporary ideas about 'civil society', and finds a new means by which to identify local forms of social action, often based in traditional structures and spiritual discourses. Outlining new conceptual ideas for an alternative framing of Mozambique's 'civil society', Kleibl proposes a series of fresh theoretical issues and questions alongside empirical research, moving towards a series of new policy and practice arguments for rethinking and decolonizing civil society in the Global South.

This book is about both the symbolic and the real struggles for the control of the EU's agenda on participatory democracy in the last fifteen years. The book analyzes how civil society organizations contributed to an agenda which has implications for the regulation of interest groups to the institutions and for the democratic legitimacy of the EU.

Activists and academics look back over ten years of 'politics from below', and ask whether it is merely the critical gaze upon the concept that has changed – or whether there is something genuinely new about the way in which civil society is now operating.