Remaking the State or Creating Civil Society? Vietnamese Migrant Associations in Poland

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-72
Author(s):  
Grażyna Szymańska-Matusiewicz

In this essay, I analyze Vietnamese migrant associations in Poland, which have been routinely classified as “non-governmental organizations.” And yet, through their involvement in networks of relationships with a broad range of actors, including transnational connections with institutions back in Vietnam, they are in fact positioned in a liminal zone between the state and civil society. On the one hand, migrant associations are to a large extent entangled with the politics of the Vietnamese state through various channels, including the embassy, and through personal and institutional connections maintained with mass organizations such as the Fatherland Front and the Women’s Union. On the other hand, they are able to retain some degree of autonomy and pluralism, remaining active agents engaged with the fraught social and political activities of Vietnamese diasporics in Poland.

Author(s):  
Hannah Smidt ◽  
Dominic Perera ◽  
Neil J. Mitchell ◽  
Kristin M. Bakke

Abstract International ‘naming and shaming’ campaigns rely on domestic civil society organizations (CSOs) for information on local human rights conditions. To stop this flow of information, some governments restrict CSOs, for example by limiting their access to funding. Do such restrictions reduce international naming and shaming campaigns that rely on information from domestic CSOs? This article argues that on the one hand, restrictions may reduce CSOs’ ability and motives to monitor local abuses. On the other hand, these organizations may mobilize against restrictions and find new ways of delivering information on human rights violations to international publics. Using a cross-national dataset and in-depth evidence from Egypt, the study finds that low numbers of restrictions trigger shaming by international non-governmental organizations. Yet once governments impose multiple types of restrictions, it becomes harder for CSOs to adapt, resulting in fewer international shaming campaigns.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-98
Author(s):  
Mahmut Ulas Gozutok

Non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) play a key role for providing a platform for citizens to raise their discontents in democratic settings. NGO activities for encouraging democratic public engagement pose no threats against stability in consolidated democratic regimes with effectively functioning political parties. On the other hand, they can be acontentious issue in countries with shaky foundations of democracy. In fact, Huntington mainly champions in one of his most widely cited works by the civil society literature the idea that associations of social capital such as civil society can have detrimental repercussions on stability and order in infantile democratic regimes since political parties in such contexts are argued to be ill‐equipped to handle challenges brought bymodernization. On the other hand, primary elements of social capital (i.e.civil society) are acknowledged to be the prerequisites for effectivefunctioning of democracies.Keywords: NGOs, democracy, civil society, social capital


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-604 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yana Gorokhovskaia

Conventional wisdom holds that civil society is a sphere of activity separate from the state and the private realm. Due to a combination of historical, developmental and institutional factors, Russian civil society today is dominated by the state. While not all interactions with the state are seen as harmful, scholars acknowledge that most politically oriented or oppositional non-governmental organizations today face difficult conditions in Russia. In response to the restrictions on civil society and the unresponsive nature of Russia’s hybrid authoritarian regime, some civil society actors in Moscow have made the transition into organized politics at the local level. This transition was motivated by their desire to solve local problems and was facilitated by independent electoral initiatives which provided timely training and support for opposition political candidates running in municipal elections. Once elected, these activists turned municipal deputies are able to perform some of the functions traditionally ascribed to civil society, including enforcing greater accountability and transparency from the state and defending the interest of citizens.


2015 ◽  
pp. 8-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miikka Pyykkönen

This article gives an analysis of Foucault’s studies of civil society and the various liberalist critiques of government. It follows from Foucault’s genealogical approach that “civil society” does not in itself possess any form of transcendental existence; its historical reality must be seen as the result of the productive nature of the power-knowledge-matrices. Foucault emphasizes that modern governmentality—and more specifically the procedures he names “the conduct of conduct”—is not exercised through coercive power and domination, but is dependent on the freedom and activeness of individuals and groups of society. Civil society is thus analyzed as fundamentally ambivalent: on the one hand civil society is a field where different kinds of technologies of governance meet the lives and wills of groups and individuals, but on the other hand it is a potential field of what Foucault called ‘counter-conduct’ – for both collective action and individual political action.


2006 ◽  
pp. 29-56
Author(s):  
Michal Sládecek

In first chapters of this article MacIntyre?s view of ethics is analyzed, together with his critics of liberalism as philosophical and political theory, as well as dominant ideological conception. In last chapters MacIntyre?s view of the relation between politics and ethics is considered, along with the critical review of his theoretical positions. Macintyre?s conception is regarded on the one hand as very broad, because the entire morality is identified with ethical life, while on the other hand it is regarded as too narrow since it excludes certain essential aspects of deliberation which refers to the sphere of individual rights, the relations between communities, as well as distribution of goods within the state.


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 595-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Moore ◽  
Zenzo Moyo

Research on NGOs in rural Zimbabwe suggests that ideas of automatic opposition between ‘civil society’ and/or non-governmental organizations and authoritarian states are too simple. Rather, relations between state and non-state organizations such as those referenced in this article, in the rural district of Mangwe about 200 kilometres south-west of Zimbabwe’s Bulawayo, are symbiotic. This contrasts with urban areas where political histories have led to more contested state-civil society relations in the last two decades, during which social movements with a degree of counter-hegemonic (or counter-regime) aspirations were allied with many NGOs and opposition political parties. Gramsci’s idea of ‘rural intellectuals’ could complement the widely used notion of ‘organic intellectuals’ to examine the members of the intelligentsia appearing to be at one with subordinate groups in the countryside and at odds with the state. Likewise state workers distant from the centre and close to their class peers in NGOs as well as their ‘subjects’ may operate with autonomy from their masters in ruling parties and states to assist, rather than repress, citizens and also to co-operate with NGO workers. This research indicates that discerning how hegemony works across whole state-society complexes is more complicated than usually perceived, given the many regional variations therein.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aris Hardinanto

<em>This article seeks to compares different ideas concerning Indonesian statehood as put forth by our founding father in sessions of the Dokuritsu Zyunbi Tyosa Kai (Investigating Body for Preparing Indonesia's Independence). The author notes that there is doubt as of the authenticity of documents recording the debates and the speeches made during meetings held by this body (28 may-1 June 1945 &amp; 10 July-17 July 1945).  On one side, there is the preparatory documents of the 1945 Constitution as issued by Muhammad Yamin and which is regarded by the State Secretariat as the one and only authentic source (from 1959-1992).  On the other hand, notes collected by Pringgodigdo and Yamin was latter used as the basis for the publication of the Body’s minutes of meetings in 1995.  The author observes that both collections (Yamin and Pringodidgo) differs in its exposure of ideas on the Indonesian statehood put forth during the Body’s meetings.</em>


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 199-211
Author(s):  
Jorge Arturo Velázquez Hernández ◽  
Jorge Adán Romero Zepeda ◽  
Rosalía Alonso Chombo ◽  
Epigmenio Muñoz Guevara

The objective of this work is to analyze the feasibility of creating a university incubator (INCUERUAQ) aimed at benefiting the rural and indigenous population of the state of Querétaro. On the one hand, INCUERUAQ would represent the propitious scenario so that current students and those who are graduating, have the necessary spaces in order to face and solve problems of a technical and economic nature that may exist in their communities, always counting on the guidance of its professors and, on the other hand, the Autonomous University of Querétaro (UAQ) would establish a permanent link with rural and indigenous communities, providing them with continuous advice in areas such as legal, administrative, marketing, etc., providing for this, the necessary infrastructure that allows them to carry out their ventures successfully, facilitating, among other things, training to access the various sources of financing, when required. The methodology with which it is intended to work is participatory research, whose initiation will be marked by a diagnosis that helps to visualize how feasible this project would be, it would also allow to devise the best incubator model to implement, in such a way that they can be carried out in practice the pre-incubation, incubation and post-incubation periods. This article aims to reflect an advance of the initial stage of the link, the diagnosis.


Kurios ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 305
Author(s):  
Joas Adiprasetya

This article discusses the idea of a hospitable church that struggles under the sacred canopy of the state, especially in the Indonesian context. By using Stanley Hauerwas’ social ethics and ecclesiology that views the church as an exemplary community, this article proposes an ecclesial model that maintains the tension of being true to its nature on the one hand and being political on the other hand. Such a model is demonstrated through its four dimensions: beholding, becoming, belonging, and befriending. The paper ends with a conclusion, in which the author reflects on the four dimensions by using the perspective of the four classical marks of the church (notae ecclesiae). AbstrakArtikel ini membahas gagasan mengenai gereja dengan identitas-ramah yang berjuang di bawah kanopi suci negara, khususnya dalam konteks Indonesia. Dengan menggunakan etika sosial dan eklesiologi Stanley Hauerwas, yang memandang gereja sebagai komunitas eksemplaris, artikel ini mengusul-kan model gerejawi yang mempertahankan ketegangan antara menjadi setia pada hakikatnya di satu sisi dan menjadi politis di sisi lain. Model semacam itu ditunjukkan melalui empat dimensinya: beholding, becoming, belonging, dan befriending. Makalah diakhiri dengan kesimpulan yang di dalamnya penulis merefleksikan empat dimensi di atas dengan menggunakan perspektif empat tanda klasik gereja (notae ecclesiae).


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