Abstract

Since the emergence of the dissident “parallel polis” in Eastern Europe, civil society has become a “new superpower,” influencing democratic transformations, human rights, and international co-operation; co-designing economic trends, security and defense; reshaping the information society; and generating new ideas on the environment, health, and the “good life.” This volume seeks to compare and reassess the role of civil society in the rich West, the poorer South, and the quickly expanding East in the context of the twenty-first century’s challenges. It presents a novel perspective on civic movements testing John Keane’s notion of “monitory democracy”: an emerging order of public scrutiny and monitoring of power.

Lars Trägårdh is Professor of History and Civil Society Studies at Ersta Sköndal University College in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2011 he was appointed to the Commission on the Future of Sweden led by the Prime Minister of Sweden, Fredrik Reinfeldt. 

Bron Taylor is Professor of Religion and Nature at the University of Florida, and a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich.

“This is an ambitious effort to capture and contextualize highly diverse broad-ranging trends of contemporary and emerging civil society worldwide and to open a debate on how to theorize these trends. It provides a set of conceptual and theoretical inroads as well as a variety of empirical cases on state–civil society relations and is a welcomed contribution to the field of civil society studies and democratization studies.”  ·  Jens Stilhoff Sörensen, Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Stockholm

“[A]collection of original and sophisticated chapters. The combination of theoretical and empirical chapters – addressing and debating political activism (understood here through the concept of ‘civil society’) and the state and nature of contemporary democracy in various different contexts – is convincing and makes the collection an attractive and valuable contribution to our understanding of contemporary political dynamics.”  ·  Sabine Selchow, London School of Economics

Nina Witoszek is Research Professor and Research Director at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo.