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.

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. "

“South America is not the poorest continent in the world, but it may very well be the most unjust.” This statement by Ricardo Lagos, then president of Chile, at the Summit of the Americas in January 2004 captures nicely the dilemma that faces Latin American countries in the wake of the transition to democracy that swept across the continent in the last two decades of the twentieth century. While political rights are now available to citizens at unprecedented levels, social and economic rights lag far behind, and the fledgling democracies struggle with long legacies of poverty, inequality, and corruption. Key to understanding what is happening in Latin America today is the relationship between the state and civil society. In this ambitious book, Philip Oxhorn sets forth a theory of civil society adequate for explaining current developments in a way that such controversial neoconservative theories as Francis Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism or Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” cannot. Inspired by the rich political sociology of an earlier era and the classic work of T. H. Marshall on citizenship, Oxhorn studies the process by which social groups are incorporated, or not, into national socioeconomic and political development through an approach that focuses on the “social construction of citizenship.”

The principles of the modern foundational economy and its role in renewing citizenship and informing public policy are explored for the first time in this instructive collection. Challenging mainstream social and economic thinking, it shows how foundational economy experiments at different scales can foster radical social innovation through collective, rather than private, consumption. An interdisciplinary group of respected European academics provide case studies of initiatives and interventions around policy cornerstones including housing, food supply and water and waste management. They build a judicious evidence base of the growing relevance of foundational economic thinking and its potential to provide a new political and social outlook on civil society and social justice.

In this book, Tamar Groves and Inbal Ofer explore the effects of social movements' activism on the changing practices and conceptions of citizenship. Presenting empirically rich case studies from Latin America, Asia and Europe, leading experts analyze the ways in which the shifting balance of power between nation-state, economy and civil society over the past half century affected social movements in their choice of addressees and repertoires of action. Divided into two parts, the first part focuses on citizenship as a form of political and cultural participation. The three case studies that make up this section look into the ways in which social movements' activism prompted a critical re-evaluation of two central questions: Who can be considered a citizen? And what forms of political and cultural participation effectively enable citizens to exercise their rights? The second section focuses on citizenship as a form of community building. The three case studies that are included in this section address the ways in which activism fosters new forms of advocacy and communication, leading to the emergence of new communities and assigning qualities of fraternity to the status of citizenship. Throughout most of the 20th century social movements' literature focused on the challenges these entities posed to the state, since it was the state that had the capacity and willingness to grant social and economic concessions. This situation started to shift in the late 1960s. By the 1980s the existing configuration between the state, civil society and the economy was increasingly challenged by market penetration. Accordingly, we witness a proliferation of social movements that no longer target state institutions, or do so only partially. Their repertoires of action interact continuously with everyday practices, re-shaping demands within specific organizational, legislative and political contexts. As a result, such activism expands the understanding of the concept of citizenship so as to include demands relating to livelihood; division of resources; the production and dissemination of knowledge; and forms of civic participation and solidarity. Written for scholars who study social movements, citizenship and the relationship between the state and civil society over the past half century, this book provides a fresh insight on the nature of citizenship; increasingly framing the condition of being a citizen in terms of performance and on-going practices, rather than simply in relation to the attainment of a formal status.