Citizenship Civil Society And Development

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

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.

This is the first book to explore the different relationships between active citizenship and civil society, particularly the third sector within civil society. In what ways can the third sector nurture active citizenship? How have the third sector and active citizenship been constructed and reconstructed both locally and internationally, over recent years? To what extent have new kinds of social connectedness, changing forms of political engagement and increasingly complex social and environmental problems influenced civil society action? Written by experts in the field, this important book draws on a range of theory and empirical studies to explore these questions in different socio-political contexts and will be a useful resource for academics and students as well as practitioners.

“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.”

State building is an ongoing process that first defines legitimate citizenship and then generates citizens. Political analysts and social scientists now use the concept of citizenship as a lens for considering both the evolution of states and the development of their societies. In Citizenship as a Regime leading political scientists from Canada, Europe, and Latin America use insights from comparative politics, institutionalism, and political economy to understand and analyze the dynamics of contemporary policies and politics. This book celebrates Jane Jenson's work and many of her contributions to political science and the study of Canadian politics. Featuring Jenson's concept of "citizenship regime", the collected chapters consider its theoretical and methodological underpinning and presents new applications to various empirical contexts. Contributors present original research, critically assess the idea of a citizenship regime, and suggest ways to further develop Jane Jenson's notion of a "citizenship regime" as an analytical tool. Research essays in this volume consider various social forces and dynamics such as neoliberalism, inequality, LGBTQ movements, the rise of populism amid nationalist movements in multinational societies—including Indigenous self-determination claims—and how they transform the politics of citizenship. These collected contributions—by former students, collaborators and colleagues of Jenson—highlight her lasting influence on the contemporary study of citizenship in Canada and elsewhere. Contributors include: Marcos Ancelovici (UQÀM), James Bickerton (St Francis Xavier University), Maxime Boucher (Université de Montréal), Neil Bradford (Huron University College), Alexandra Dobrowolsky (Saint Mary's University), Pascale Dufour (Université de Montreal), Jane Jenson (Université de Montréal), Rachel Laforest (Queen's University), Rianne Mahon (Wilfrid Laurier University), Bérengère Marques-Pereira (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Martin Papillon (Université de Montréal), Denis Saint-Martin (Université de Montréal), and Miram Smith (York University).