Civil Society in Question

Jeffrey J. Cormier, Ph.D., specializes in Canadian society at McGill
University.

Civil Society in Question is a perceptive, wide-ranging, and richly
textured reflection on the role of civil society in contemporary global
politics. The ideas for the essay were drawn largely from a 1997 forum
held by the South Asia Partnership (SAP) entitled “Strengthening Civil
Society: Progressive Strategy or Smokescreen?” The task of organizing
the many ideas, analyses, and reports from the conference into a
coherent, layperson’s handbook on civil society went to Kingston,
Ontario, writer Jamie Swift.

Swift moves within development circles, and this pushes his analysis of
civil society toward addressing current concerns over the role of
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and local grassroots protest
movements against powerful trends in nation-state neoliberal market
policy, globalization, and the international free flow of capital. The
new role for civil society within this ever-changing global context,
according to Swift, is to provide a social space within which the people
most hurt by these economic trends can mobilize and restore some sense
of justice and dignity to their lives. Traditionally, political
theorists have defined civil society as a buffer against an overbearing
authoritarian state. Swift’s important addition to the debate is to
point to a more recent threat to civil society: the retrenchment of the
welfare state and the cognate reliance on free-market economic policies.


There is one major weakness in this essay. Swift seems to cast his
definitional net too widely. While it is true that a social movement
organization engaged in mobilizing people to protest a dam in India is
part of civil society, its actions, strategies, and activities deserve a
separate treatment from one dealing with civil society proper.
Otherwise, this book provides a fine overview of its topic.