Civil Society And The State In Africa

This text examines the potential value of the concept of civil society for enhancing the current understanding of state-society relations in Africa. The authors review the meanings of civil society in political philosophy, as well as alternative approaches to employing the concept in African settings. Considering both the patterns of emerging civil society in Africa and issues relating to its further development, they give particular emphasis to the cases of Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire.

The essays in this important new collection explore the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa. In a substantial introduction, anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff offer a critical theoretical analysis of the nature and deployment of the concept—and the current debates surrounding it. Building on this framework, the contributors investigate the "problem" of civil society across their regions of expertise, which cover the continent. Drawing creatively on one another's work, they examine the impact of colonial ideology, postcoloniality, and development practice on discourses of civility, the workings of everyday politics, the construction of new modes of selfhood, and the pursuit of moral community. Incisive and original, the book shows how struggles over civil society in Africa reveal much about larger historical forces in the post-Cold War era. It also makes a strong case for the contribution of historical anthropology to contemporary discourses on the rise of a "new world order."

Strong states and strong civil societies are now increasingly hailed as the twin drivers of a ‘rising Africa’. Current attempts to support growth and democracy are part of a longer history of promoting projects of disciplinary, regulatory and liberal rule and values beyond ‘the West’. Yet this is not simply Western domination of a passive continent. Such an interpretation misses out on the complexities and nuances of the politics of state-building and civil society promotion, and the central role of African agency. Drawing upon critical theory, including postcolonial and governmentality approaches, this book interrogates international practices of state-building and civil society support in Africa. It seeks to develop a theoretically informed critical approach to discourses and interventions such as those associated with broadly ‘Western’ initiatives in Africa. In doing so, the book highlights the power relations, inequalities, coercion and violence that are deeply implicated within contemporary international interventions on the African continent. Providing a range of empirical cases and theoretical approaches, the chapters are united by their critical treatment of political dynamics in Africa. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African politics, development studies, postcolonial theory, International Relations, international political economy and peacekeeping/making.

Civil society is one of several Western political and social concepts that have not traveled successfully to Africa. Revived in response to the search for democracy in Eastern Europe during the late Soviet era, Western donors promoted and funded new civil society organizations in sub-Saharan Africa, regarding them as an essential grounding for African democratization. Most of these new civil society organizations had little in common with African associational activity. Focusing on the characteristics and behavior of longstand-ing African organizations would appear a better starting point for developing a useful concept of an African civil society. One candidate worth serious investigation is the Buganda Kingdom Government. This organization violates most distinctions central to Western notions of civil society. Yet it continues to behave like a civil society organization. Its political and conceptual collisions offer guidance toward a useful notion of African civil society and understanding Ugandan politics.

The balance of power between an individual and the state they live in is the key to any country's political process. Concepts of citizenship, reciprocity of rights and citizen's duties intertwine in the struggle for assertion. With its largely collective citizenship, the civil society in Africa is alive and vibrant. But in the face of continuing global recession, the present phase of the African crisis is expected to sharpen contradictions within the continent's states. New paradigms have to be sought to explain the formations and realities. The ten chapters in this book, all written by African scholars, question the western, ethnocentric model of development and look at the wide diversity of African experience. From the Ormo cosmic framework and street-begging in Nigeria, through the role of labour and the part played by wage demands in the African crisis, this volume is a major contribution to the debate on Africa's future.

This book examines the liberal conception of civil society and its applicability to the context of Africa. Although it acknowledges the reality of civil society as a paradigmatic way of thinking about democracy and good governance, it questions the conception of civil society and its use for development in Africa. The book argues that if the concept of civil society is to be successful, it has to capture fully and correctly most aspects of Africa's associational life without leaving out major portions of the socio-political mosaic. Only then, can the concept of civil society be a legitimate tool for recognizing groups and associations and organizing their problems and claims for a sustainable democracy. The African experience is different from the liberal context of civil society. The liberal argument of civil society springs from the Western conception of state-society relationships. In this convention, power, authoritarianism and exploitation are the exclusive property of the state, while society belongs to the realm of freedom, rights, and liberty To examine this argument, this study uses Senegal as a case study to explore how the idiosyncrasy of societal development in this country has constructed and produced different types of associational life and how they fit within the liberal conception of civil society. Senegal was selected as an ideal case because it is widely regarded as a vibrant model of civil society and democracy. In essence, the question is whether the civil society that exists in Senegal conforms to the liberal argument of civil. The findings reveal that, in Senegal, civil society differs in many forms from the liberal propositions.

This book is a study of the issues of democracy and democratization in Africa, with emphasis on the roles of civil society and the state in the democratic transition. After clarifying the meaning of democracy as a universal principle of governance and the applicability of the concept to Africa, the book examines the major problems facing the democratic transition on the continent as a whole.