Since its publication in 2004, Civil Society has become a standard work of reference for all those who seek to understand the role of voluntary citizen action in the contemporary world. In this thoroughly-revised edition, Michael Edwards updates the arguments and evidence presented in the original and adds major new material on issues such as civil society in Africa and the Middle East, global civil society, information technology and new forms of citizen organizing. He explains how in the future the pressures of state encroachment, resurgent individualism, and old and familiar forces of nationalism and fundamentalism in new clothes will test and re-shape the practice of citizen action in both positive and negative ways. Civil Society will help readers of all persuasions to navigate these choppy waters with greater understanding, insight and success. Colleges and universities, foundations and NGOs, public policy-makers, journalists and commissions of inquiry – all have used Edwards’s book to understand and strengthen the vital role that civil society can play in deepening democracy, re-building community, and addressing poverty, inequality and injustice. This new edition will be required reading for anyone who is interested in creating a better world through citizen action.

How historically rooted power dynamics have shaped the evolution of civil society globally. The civil society sector—made up of millions of nonprofit organizations, associations, charitable institutions, and the volunteers and resources they mobilize—has long been the invisible subcontinent on the landscape of contemporary society. For the past twenty years, however, scholars under the umbrella of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project have worked with statisticians to assemble the first comprehensive, empirical picture of the size, structure, financing, and role of this increasingly important part of modern life. What accounts for the enormous cross-national variations in the size and contours of the civil society sector around the world? Drawing on the project’s data, Lester M. Salamon, S. Wojciech Sokolowski, Megan A. Haddock, and their colleagues raise serious questions about the ability of the field’s currently dominant preference and sentiment theories to account for these variations in civil society development. Instead, using statistical and comparative historical materials, the authors posit a novel social origins theory that roots the variations in civil society strength and composition in the relative power of different social groupings and institutions during the transition to modernity. Drawing on the work of Barrington Moore, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and others, Explaining Civil Society Development provides insight into the nonprofit sector’s ability to thrive and perform its distinctive roles. Combining solid data and analytical clarity, this pioneering volume offers a critically needed lens for viewing the evolution of civil society and the nonprofit sector throughout the world.

Publisher Description

In this first serious work on the theory of civil society to appear in many years, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato contend that the concept of civil society articulates a contested terrain in the West that could become the primary locus for the expansion of democracy and rights. In this major contribution to contemporary political theory, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato argue that the concept of civil society articulates a contested terrain in the West that could become a primary locus for the expansion of democracy and rights.

This book is among the first comprehensive efforts to collectively and academically investigate the legacy of the Euromaidan in conflict-torn Ukraine within the domain of civil society broadly understood. The contributions to this book identify, describe, conceptualize, and explain various developments in Ukrainian civil society and its role in Ukraine's democratization, state-building, and conflict resolution by looking at specific understudied sectors and by tracing the situation before, during, and after the Euromaidan. In doing so, this trailblazing collection highlights a number of new themes, challenges, and opportunities related to Ukrainian civil society. They include volunteerism, grassroots community-based activism, social activism of churches, civic efforts of building peace and reconciliation, civic activism of journalists and digital activism, activism of think tanks, diaspora networks and the LGBT movement, challenges of civil society relations with the state, uncivil society, and the closing of civic space.

Between kinship ties on the one hand and the state on the other, human beings experience a diversity of social relationships and groupings which in modern western thought have come to be gathered under the label 'civil society'. A liberal-individualist model of civil society has become fashionable in recent years, but what can such a term mean in the late twentieth century? Civil Society argues that civil society should not be studied as a separate, 'private' realm clearly separated in opposition to the state; nor should it be confined to the institutions of the 'voluntary' or 'non-governmental' sector. A broader understanding of civil society involves the investigation of everyday social practices, often elusive power relations and the shared moralities that hold communities together. By drawing on case materials from a range of contemporary societies, including the US, Britain, four of the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe, Turkey and the Middle and Far East, Civil Society demonstrates what anthropology contributes to debates taking place throughout the social sciences; adding up to an exciting renewal of the agenda for political anthropology.