Citizenship And Civil Society

This book shows how legal, political, social, and participation rights are systematically related to liberties, claims and immunities.

The book investigates the intersection of citizenship, civil society, and development in today’s global world. The multi-disciplinary collection considers the notion of citizenship in connection with the neoliberal development agendas, participation, security discourses and legal environments. The contributions analyse the development-citizenship nexus grounded in empirical work in African, Latin American, European and global contexts. The book opens exciting avenues to reflect on the notion of citizenship and explores the following pertinent questions: Does citizenship matter for development research? Do international development policy and practice promote certain normative registers for how people should make sense of their social relations and, in particular, how they relate to public authorities? What are their responses? Contributors from various academic backgrounds, such as anthropology, law, and political science, affirm the importance of citizenship for the study of contemporary development processes. Chapters provide empirical analysis of the processes of water privatization in Ghana, the promulgation of new ‘NGO Law’ in Ethiopia, environmental politics in former Yugoslavia, and the global interconnections between the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement. The book is relevant for students and scholars of political science and development studies as well as development practitioners globally. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Civil Society.

This book provides readers – students, researchers, academics, policy-makers, activists and interested non-specialists – with a sophisticated understanding of contemporary discussion, analysis and theorizing of issues pertaining to conflict, citizenship and civil society. It does so through thirteen pieces of most recent in-depth sociological research that delve on: challenges to citizenship, civil society and citizenship in early and late modernity, the reflexive imperative in transformations of civil society, social conflict challenges to social science approaches, methodology and explanatory power, gender, minorities-immigrants-refugees and the extension of citizenship, violence in modernity, the place of civil society for sociology, and postcolonialism, trauma, and civil society.

"Devoting particular emphasis to Bolivia, Chile, and Mexico, proposes a theory of civil society to explain the economic and political challenges for continuing democratization in Latin America"--Provided by publisher.

This thought-provoking book conceptualizes the importance of civil society and citizenship in building a sustainable and participatory democracy. It considers the ways in which networks and organizations promoting common interests contribute to this mediating space between the public and private spheres, examining the impacts of the diversity of values and attitudes held by these organizations. Taking a normative position, Thomas P. Boje argues for the importance of social justice and civility in an active, liberating, equitable and participatory society. This book concludes with a detailed discussion of the conditions required for a participatory democratic system in which all citizens are involved in the planning, decision-making and implementation of crucial decisions.

" Writing the story of democracy might seem like writing a story of success. In more and more countries all over the world democracy has been established as the leading form of government. However, democracy also has a less positive and optimistic side. Political scandals and corruption continue to shatter people's trust in its promises and institutions. This brings us to the topic of active democratic citizenship and civil society. Since the late 1980s these topics have continued to rise in importance in the fields of social and political sciences, and their influence has yet to reach a peak. In comparison, civil society and citizenship remain relatively new topics for adult education, dating to the beginning of the 1990s. We also see that the respective national discourses within the different European countries differ immensely. Whereas the discourse on adult education and active democratic citizenship is quite lively in Great Britain or in Poland, in Germany there is only very little interest. ""Civil Society, Citizenship and Learning"", the second volume of the Bochum Studies in International Adult Education, presents a variety of different perspectives on the topics of citizenship and civil society. The goal of this book is to give an overview of the European discourse on citizenship and civil society as well as on the discourse in some selected countries. Agnieszka Bron ist Professorin am Institut für Pädagogik der Universität Bochum. "

No longer are people willing to leave it to governments and business to lead. Citizens are seizing the initiative and reclaiming their rightful place as the catalysts of social change. Written by academics and practitioners from around the world who are striving to create a global civil society, this book describes the challenges confronting civil society and provides inspiring examples of how these challenges are being met.