10. Civil Society

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Ottaway
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Developing World ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
European Countries ◽  
International Assistance

This chapter examines the concept of civil society. During the 1990s, civil society was a relatively obscure concept familiar mostly to scholars of Marxism. It then evolved into a mainstream term freely used by social science analysts in general, and by practitioners in the international assistance field in particular. Several factors contributed to these developments, including the growing interest in the United States and many European countries in promoting democracy abroad at that time. The chapter first defines civil society before discussing traditional vs modern civil society. It then considers the rise of civil society as an entity separate from the broader society and from the state, along with the state-civil society relations in the developing world. Finally, it explores how the concept of civil society became an important part of discussions of democratization.

The Era of Distrust

2021 ◽  
pp. 217-248
Author(s):  
Jacob Darwin Hamblin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Developing Countries ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Energy Security ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Developing World ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Nuclear Technology ◽  
Government Interests

By the mid-1980s, the state-sponsored positive framing of the peaceful atom served a range of government interests. It enabled the United States and European states to use nuclear power as leverage against developing countries in a time when petroleum seemed to swing the pendulum of global resource dominance toward several so-called backward countries. It was useful to countries trying to prop up the legitimacy of their nuclear weapons programs, while secretly working on bombs, and it provided environmental arguments to those whose priority was actually energy security. The peaceful atom’s promise of plenty helped to maintain a veneer of credibility for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, at a time when the IAEA seemed to have become the treaty’s policing instrument. The more the United States relied on the IAEA, the more it recommitted to making promises of peaceful nuclear technology, especially to the developing world.

scholarly journals Embedding in the city? Locating civil society in the philanthropy of place

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine C Pill
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Policy Agenda ◽  
Philanthropic Foundations ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Policy Agendas ◽  
The City

Abstract Philanthropic foundations have become increasingly important actors in the governance of cities in decline in the United States. The relationships between foundation and other actors within city governance are illuminated via contrasting interpretations of state-society power relationships which highlight the mutability of ‘civil society’ as an oppositional or integrated part of the state. After detailing a typology of philanthropy of place, the twofold role played by foundations in the governance of neighbourhood revitalization in the cities in which they are embedded is explored: not only as an important source of funding and support for neighbourhood-based organizations, but as contributors to the creation of neighbourhood revitalization policy agendas. Considering the cities of Baltimore and Cleveland reveals that the policy approaches adopted have tended to align with the predominant neoliberal policy agenda rather than revealing foundation actors as activists who assist the organizations they support in exerting agency to contest or seek to transform the prevailing hegemony. This makes clear the need for rigour in defining what constitutes civil society, and points to the importance of embedded philanthropic practices in enabling civil society agency.

Affirmative Action and the Demands of Justice

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Scott Arnold
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Theories Of Justice ◽  
Political Justification

This essay is about the moral and political justification of affirmative action programs in the United States. Both legally and politically, many of these programs are under attack, though they remain ubiquitous. The concern of this essay, however, is not with what the law says but with what it should say. The main argument advanced in this essay concludes that most of the controversial affirmative action programs are unjustified. It proceeds in a way that avoids dependence on controversial theories of justice or morality. My intention is to produce an argument that is persuasive across a broad ideological spectrum, extending even to those who believe that justice requires these very programs. Though the main focus of the essay is on affirmative action, in the course of making the case that these programs are illegitimate, I shall defend some principles about the conditions under which it is appropriate for the state to impose on civil society the demands of justice. These principles have broader implications for a normative theory of social change in democratic societies.

State, Centre and Bureaucracy

1981 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Birnbaum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Social System ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ideal Type ◽  
The State ◽  
Weak State ◽  
The Social

THE STATE, IN THE STRONGEST MEANING OF THE WORD, IS NOT indispensable to the functioning of civil society. Indeed society can often so organize itself as to prevent the emergence of a state intent on establishing itself as an absolute power. The very existence of the state itself, the consequence of particular sociohistorical processes, upsets the whole of the social system which is henceforth ordered around it. The relationships between the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the working class or, today, the middle classes, differ profoundly according to whether these groups were confronted by a strongly institutionalized state or a centre which exercised essentially co-ordinating functions. Still today the political systems which have simultaneously a centre and a state (France) can be distinguished from those which have a weak state without a real centre (Italy) or a centre without a genuine state (Great Britain, the United States) or neither centre nor state (Switzerland). In the first two cases, in varying degrees, the state dominates and manages civil society; in the two latter, civil society manages itself. It is therefore possible to distinguish societies in which the state attempts to dominate the social system by endowing itself with a strong bureaucracy (ideal type: France; paralle development: Prussia, Spain, Italy) from those in which the organization of civil society makes it impossible for a powerful state and a powerful dominating bureaucracy to emerge (ideal type: Great Britain; parallel development: the United States and the consociational democracies like Switzerland). Without claiming to retrace methodically the history of each of these states or of their political centres, I should like to sketch a broad outline of their evolution with the object of showing that the different relations by which the many governing groups are linked together within the different social systems depend sometimes on the formation of the state and sometimes on the simple formation of a political centre.

The Comparative Policy Agendas Project: theory, measurement and findings

2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Dowding ◽  
Andrew Hindmoor ◽  
Aaron Martin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Policy Agenda ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Coding Method ◽  
Policy Agendas

AbstractThe Policy Agendas Project (PAP) was developed in the United States in the early 1990s as a means of collecting data on the contents of the policy agenda. The PAP coding method has subsequently been employed in the United Kingdom, a number of European countries, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, as well as the state of Pennsylvania (http://www.comparativeagendas.org/). What does PAP measure? How does it measure it? What does it find? How does it explain what it finds? We use these questions to structure our review.

scholarly journals Multicultural constitutionalism - squaring circle

2014 ◽  
Vol 66 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 249-264
Author(s):  
Miroljub Jevtic
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Specific Situation ◽  
Political Model

A number of European countries, as well as the United States, Canada and Australia in the second half of the 20th century, received many immigrants from Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic region. This has created a specific situation which did not exist at the time of the formation of these states. At a time when those states were formed the vast majority of the population belong to the Christian political culture. As a result, secular constitutions were created. Because Christian theology can accept the secular principle of organization of the state .Immigrants have brought their cultural and political model. For example, an Islamic political model excludes secularism and demand theocracy. Thus, if the question of eventual transformation of the constitution is posed autochthon population and Muslims can not make a compromise, if each side insists on its model. This means that the multicultural constitution is impossible.

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