Secular-Religious Encounters as Peacebuilding

2015 ◽  
pp. 123-145
Author(s):  
Slavica Jakelić
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
State Power ◽  
Peace Studies ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Moral Orientation ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
Religious Actors

This chapter seeks to broaden the focus of peace studies in its considerations of religious-secular relations by retrieving a thicker meaning of secularism. According to an emerging consensus in the field of peace studies, the secularist paradigm has long excluded religious actors from peacebuilding. This chapter argues that although critique of this dynamic and the larger critique of secularism are necessary the field of peace studies must also move beyond them and probe the potential of the encounters between secular and religious actors for building justpeace. By considering Solidarity, a 1980s social movement in Communist Poland, the chapter retrieves a more nuanced meaning of secular agency and secularism and expands the horizons of peace studies in two ways. First, it describes the possibilities of religious-secular encounters among local actors in civil society and rather than on the levels of states or religious institutions. Second, the chapter retrieves a form of secularism that is not just a matter of power or ideology but a a moral orientation and practice that discloses rather than legitimizes state power.

What Is a Religious NGO?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evelyn L. Bush
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Nongovernmental Organizations ◽  
Religious Organizations ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
International Variation ◽  
State Relations ◽  
Religious Actors ◽  
Second International

This chapter addresses definitional and classificatory problems that emerge in collecting data on transnational religious NGOs (nongovernmental organizations). It shows how the parameters used to define “religious NGOs” are not only of practical, methodological importance but also speak to underlying theoretical concerns about the boundaries between the religious and the secular, and between government and civil society. Of particular significance are, first, organizational variation in the relationships to religious institutions proper and, second, international variation in religion-state relations. Taken together, these variations make it difficult to determine whether particular religious actors are best conceived as NGOs, religious organizations proper, or extensions of government. These variations can also compromise the reliability of data used for international and interreligious comparisons of “religious NGOs.”

scholarly journals Civil Society and Pro-Democracy Social Movements: Troubled Relations Within Authoritarian Regimes?

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murad Nasibov
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Organic Solidarity ◽  
Mechanical Solidarity ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Conceptual Relationship

This article tries to conceptually lay down the troubled relations between civil society and social movements within authoritarian regimes. This is done by, first, bringing clarity to the conceptual relationship between civil society and social movement and, then, applying it to the authoritarian context, still theoretically. Following the “hints” of the Eastern European intellectuals of the late 1970s and the 1980s and building on the appropriation of Durkheim’s differentiation between mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity, the article distinguishes two types of solidarity: associative solidarity and action and collective solidarity and action. Civil society is proposed to emerge on associative solidarities (and their actions), while social movements build on collective solidarities (and their actions). Furthermore, associative and collective actions are identified to be progressive and transgressive, respectively. Consequently, the proposed theoretical account is applied theoretically to the authoritarian context and several hypotheses are proposed on the relationship between civil society and pro-democracy movement within authoritarian regimes.

scholarly journals The ‘drifting Generation’ without a Helmsman. Main obstacles in shaping the Relations between the Political Parties and the Youth in Poland

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 319-351
Author(s):  
Radosław Marzęcki
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Young Generation ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Democratic Culture ◽  
Efficient Communication ◽  
Eastern European Countries ◽  
Discourse Understanding

Abstract In the article the author presents data to identify the most important obstacles hindering efficient communication between political parties and Polish youth. The main assumptions accepted by the author are related to the belief that the Central and Eastern European countries are still trying to figure out ways of dealing with the key challenges related to transformation – the (re)creation of the civil society and a new, democratic culture of political discourse. Understanding that all social change is evolutionary and is a part of some social movement, the author assumes that the post-communist societies now face a chance to meaningfully accelerate this process. The chance is related to the young generation of citizens – often of the same age as the democracies themselves.

Foucault and the state

2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-164
Author(s):  
Stephen W. Sawyer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
International Law ◽  
State Power ◽  
Global Civil Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Global Finance ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Popular Power

For those attentive to the epochal shifts of globalization, the state has been either serving global capital or on its way out for decades. Neo-liberalism prones new scales of economic and political organization and the promise of a global civil society while international law ostensibly undermines the traditional functions of state power. The inadequacy of the state has found an equally sharp echo among populists who have reaffirmed democracy at the expense of a robust state. And in an odd déjà-vu, social scientists are once again pushing elsewhere: the state would seem at once the all-powerful protagonist of global finance or entirely insufficient for integrating popular power in our contemporary democracies.

Social Mobilization for Public Accountability

2019 ◽  
pp. 136-150
Author(s):  
Kuldeep Mathur
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Social Mobilization ◽  
Democratic Accountability ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Adequate Information ◽  
Right To Information ◽  
The Right

This chapter examines administrative accountability through the democratic pillar of public transparency. One of the pillars of democratic accountability is the availability of adequate information in the public domain about the functioning government. It has taken a social movement for transparency in government to establish people’s right to information through the passage of the Right to Information Act in 2005. However, traditional administration has not reconciled to its demands and PPPs are kept out of its purview on the plea that they are not public authorities. The Lok Pal (ombudsman) Bill has been passed in response to another struggle of civil society.

Religious Freedom and the Churches: Contemporary Challenges in the United States Today1

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-204
Author(s):  
Richard W. Garnett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
General Decline ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Right

A crucial, but often overlooked, dimension of the human and constitutional right to religious freedom is the autonomy of religious institutions, associations and societies with respect to matters of governance, doctrine, formation and membership. Although the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed this autonomy in the context of American constitutional law, it is vulnerable, and even under threat, for a variety of reasons, including a general decline in the health of civil society and mediating associations and a crisis of confidence and authority caused by clerical sexual abuse and churches’ failure to respond to it.

scholarly journals Prefigurative Partaking: Employees’ Environmental Activism in an Energy Utility

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (9) ◽  
pp. 1257-1283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annika Skoglund ◽  
Steffen Böhm
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Organizational Politics ◽  
Environmental Activism ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Large Corporation ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Individual Professional

The separation between an ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of organizational politics has become untenable in a rapidly changing political landscape, where people engage in environmental activism in many different domains. To understand contemporary environmental activism, we situate ourselves empirically within an energy utility, Ordalia [pseudonym], a large corporation active across Europe and heavily criticized by external activists for its carbon emitting operations. By merging Rancière’s method of equality and notion of ‘partaking’ with literature on prefiguration in social movements, we analyse everyday green actions pursued by Ordalia’s employees, which we conceptualize as ‘prefigurative partaking’. By focusing on six characterizing themes of prefigurative partaking – aspirational, individual, professional, critical, loyal and communal – we have found that employee activism is incremental, horizontal and boundaryless. We discuss these findings in relation to recent calls for more fruitful exchanges between social movement theory and organization studies, arguing that Rancière’s conceptualization of politics can help us study actions that span civil society and business. This complements and expands our understanding of environmental activism as a dispersed set of actions that can take place anywhere, and hence also at work.

Civil society and Islam: a sociological perspective

2001 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
MASOUD KAMALI
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
State Power ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
Muslim Countries ◽  
Islamic Countries ◽  
Complex Development ◽  
Islam And Modernity

Recent political developments in Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Algeria, among others, suggest the possible emergence of an indigenous Islamic path of democratic formation. However, the conventional western interpretations, of religion, and in particular of Islam, leave little room for the recognition of the actual, complex development of such Islamic countries. Defining Islam and modernity as two more or less incompatible phenomena fails to recognize the potentialities of developing modern democratic Islamic societies with their cultural elements and particularities. Many Muslim countries themselves fail to see or are unwilling to recognize their own civil societies and their dynamic potentialities and to accept, in Locke's term, ‘the sovereignty of civil society’. Although the notion of a traditional civil society in the Islamic countries is controversial, I contend that neither individualism nor democratic institutions have been or are necessary for a civil society to exist. The basis of a civil society is the existence of influential civil groups and their institutions that can, through established mechanisms counterbalance state power. Analyzing civil society in Muslim countries requires that we recognize Islam not only as a religion, but also as a political theory and the major source of a legitimization of political power.

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