Is the concept of civil society relevant in non-Western contexts? There is a widespread assumption of the global relevance of the concept of civil society to strengthening development and democracy. This article, from the London School of Economics, considers the usefulness of the concept of civil society in Africa. It argues that the concept is useful in the analysis of contemporary politics and because it has the capacity to inspire action.
There are two different civil society traditions. There is the Gramscian tradition that civil society is the arena in which different organisations and ideologies challenge and uphold the existing order. The other tradition views the role of civil society as creating an equilibrium in relation to the state and the market. It is this view that has been most influential among agencies. The idea of civil society tends to be deployed in ways that limit the diversity of local civil society understandings and struggles. It also tends to play down the conflictual implications of the Gramscian version and the political nature of the concept itself.
Is the concept of civil society useful in Africa? Four possible answers are identifiable in a review of the literature:
- The prescriptive universalist view that civil society is desirable as part of the project to build and strengthen democracy around the world. This view has been deployed in support of the crude export of outsider versions of civil society by Western aid donors and is flawed.
- The Western exceptionalism view that the concept of civil society has little meaning outside Western Europe and North America. This view underestimates the analytical and inspirational power of the concept.
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The adaptive prescriptive approach that there is a middle way between the crude imposition of the concept from outside and its total abandonment. Widening the concept of civil society to include involuntary membership and kinship relations opens up the concept to locally specific institutions and processes.
- The view that this is the wrong question to ask. Civil society has always been relevant to questions of African governance and citizenship because it was used as an organising principle by colonial administrators. It is more useful to analyse the historical processes which have shaped civil society and the form these processes have taken.
The latter two positions are the most persuasive. A distinction should be made between the concept as an analytical term and the set of actual groups organisations and processes active on the ground. The concept of civil society may be useful to analyse political and social realities and inspire action on the ground.
- An adaptive, historically contextualised view of the concept of civil society is analytically useful because its re-emergence is linked to wider structural changes and state transformation.
- The concept of civil society allows us to connect local and global dimensions of political struggle.
- The interest in civil society may focus attention usefully on human rights, citizen action and institutions. Efforts to build civil society need to embrace the political aspects of civil society.
- The concept has a striking capacity to inspire. It is animating discussion and action, for example, in the construction of a new Somali government.
- There is the need for more micro-studies of actually existing civil society.
