The civil society gaze

Abstract

In this conclusion to the book, the editors draw together and consolidate the floating themes in the book and reflect on the methodological considerations of civil society studies emerging from the participatory book editing process. Most prominently, the 'civil society lens'—a conceptual instrument for studying associational activity—is theorized and directly put to use by the editors in analyzing the cross-cutting themes illuminated in the book contents. In addition to a summary of the contents, conclusions and innovations from each contributing author, the editors investigate the various points of departure employed in each chapter and elaborate how civil society functions as a 'boundary concept' for facilitating inter- and transdisciplinary exchange. In this respect, the process of assembling the book contents, selecting areas of study, and the dynamics of academic exchange are opened up for scrutiny. The editors conclude this chapter by analyzing the political and ethical implications of employing a civil society lens in research and of identifying or labelling civil society in various contexts.

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15 Conclusion
The civil society gaze
Hart Feuer, Phuong Le Trong and Judith Ehlert
The challenge we laid out as editors for this book was to assess, in a very func-
tional sense, how practitioners, academics and other observers have dened,
implemented, and evolved the concept of civil society over the past few decades.
We did so in this collaborative book project by gathering together a diverse and
interdisciplinary group of people either explicitly or implicitly working on civil
society, who were tasked with exploring the ways in which the concept was
applied in their (primarily empirical) work. While we do not ignore the lively
debate about civil society that lies in the background of these efforts, we felt that
the endogenous development of the theory of civil society, alongside its mani-
festations, often results in ‘chicken or the egg’ dilemmas that leave academics
chasing their tails. What can at least be said is that the phenomenon of civil
society, as a material object of study and as a conceptual sphere, is informed by
temporally and spatially relevant factors. While theoretical conceptions of civil
society are helpful and have proved salient in certain contexts, they may or may
not prove particularly relevant in other contexts, except perhaps as a means for
comparison. As a result, even if an encompassing denition for civil society
could be found, applying it in any meaningful way would still require adaptation
to match underlying characteristics of each setting, such as the composition of
the state, historical trends, and inuence of external discourses (all of these, inci-
dentally, are discussed in various chapters in the book).
The individual authors in this volume complement and challenge many pre-
vailing assumptions about the development, role, and persistence of civil society
through their embedded research, much of which has focused on novel forms of
civil society. Furthermore, as endogenous actors themselves (i.e. as researchers
on the ground) in the ongoing conceptualization of civil society, the authors
must reveal their personal views and theoretical comprehension of civil society
through their selection of a topic, conceptual framing and methodology. The
diverse frames and points of departure of the contributing authors’ works suggest
that civil society is often used as a lens (or an instrument) for studying associa-
tional activity a given domain. As some authors have suggested, this has also
become the case for studies of what could be perceived as global civil society
(Amoore and Langley 2004). More generally, however, we argue that observers
often cast a civil society gaze on broader themes such as religion, HIV, human
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rights enforcement, or development programmes, which more often than not
leads to explorations of the evolving types of associational activity generated in
these areas.
The diversity of civil society
The original purpose of the book was to explore the bounds of the civil society
debate by drawing inspiration from two neighbouring, but in many ways very
different, countries. Many of the similarities and differences between Cambodia
and Vietnam are reected in the diverse regional and disciplinary backgrounds
of the contributing authors, some of whom do not explicitly study civil society
or even subjects typically encountered in civil society literature. Reecting this,
the resulting contributions are a collage of civil society that is both aligned with,
and divergent from, contemporary research trends and theory. Some authors are
well- steeped in contemporary civil society theory and chose to test the limits of
various conceptions in practice. Others study phenomena that could readily be
called civil society- like in the going debate, but they had not previously identi-
ed with nor applied the terminology of civil society in their work. Hiwasa, who
had carried out an ethnography of women’s groups and the engagement of
women in local and national advocacy, primarily identied her work as contrib-
uting to feminist studies. Although her work empirically speaks to civil society,
she had previously not elected to take on board the terminology or interface with
normative denitions of civil society. In contrast, the civil society dimension in
the contribution of Bourdier, who studied very similar associational activity in
Cambodia, is very strongly pronounced. Feuer, similar to Hiwasa, identied his
original research on large NGOs as a study of the environmental movement and
social change, rather than on civil society. His contribution to this book,
however, explicitly engages with debates in civil society and looks at typical
subjects found in civil society literature, such as the relationship between gov-
ernment and NGOs. As a preliminary conclusion drawing from these cases in
Cambodia, we suggest that, at least in empirical work, the civil society lens does
not arise naturally from the subject matter but is rather a personal choice based
on the orientation and goals of the author, which are, in turn, inuenced and con-
strained by international and local conceptions of civil society.
In Cambodia, popular conceptions of civil society generally correspond to
denitions and programmes that have been developed and implemented in the
context of international aid and reconstruction. Indeed, in his survey of the evo-
lution of civil society in Cambodia, Öjendal (this volume) suggests that develop-
ment and advocacy activities are hegemonic in discussions of civil society. The
civil society lens employed by many observers of Cambodia, therefore, tends to
focus on formal organizations, human rights groups and other typical forms of
civil society, such as unions. This emphasis comes through strongly in the con-
tributions by Feuer, Hiwasa and Bourdier. Ehlert’s work, in contrast, explicitly
challenges this trend in her study of embedded religious- sphere associational
activity. She argues that the predominance of development assistance in the
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Conclusion: the civil society gaze 255
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conception of civil society has caused local institutions to slip between the
cracks. Her work, like many from the authors writing on Vietnam in this book,
takes the perspective that associational activities are inherent to society and that
it is the task of observers to seek it out, highlight it, and thereby bring it into
larger debates about civil society (including for foreign audiences). The contri-
bution by Thim similarly tries to challenge dominant conceptions of civil
society. In his chapter, what begins as a small local group of concerned citizens
dealing with ooding becomes a signicant and well- recognized civil society
group through continual differentiation, formalization, and networking at mul-
tiple scales. Thim suggests that the actors themselves become aware of the legiti-
mating power of being labelled ‘civil society’. Wells- Dang, in his chapter on
civil society networks in Cambodia and Vietnam, also seeks to uncover and
legitimate informal associational activity. Through his comparison of meta- level
associational activity and cooperation in Cambodia and Vietnam, he tests the
boundaries of popular conceptions that have largely viewed civil society as
diffuse groups acting unsystematically within bounded areas of interest. Like
Ehlert, he argues that more (forms of ) engagement, activism and coordination
are undertaken by Cambodian and Vietnamese actors than is commonly
recognized.
Many of the authors in this book writing about Vietnam similarly attempt to
search for and identify emerging associational activities as civil society, or high-
light the civil society content of well- established institutions and ideas. As pre-
sented in the discourse analysis by Phuong Le Trong, Vietnamese ofcials and
academics are complicit in twisting around the concept of civil society in order
to situate it in socialist historiography and in contemporary political- cultural
ideology and social organization in Vietnam. Bach Tan Sinh’s overview of the
sprawling state and non- state associations demonstrates how this is, in practice,
carried out. State- sponsored associational activity, such as the Vietnam Women’s
Union (elaborated in Pistor and Le Thi Quy), is ofcially seen as the core of
civic participation in the Vietnamese conception of state–society interface. Pistor
and Le Thi Quy, however, contend that breakdowns and evolving hybrid
arrangements at the local level of implementation (in the case of gender advo-
cacy) are evidence that top- down groups, in spite of their intentions to do so, are
not fullling the diverse local aspirations for civic participation. And further-
more, as Waibel and Benedikter suggest, the growing and diversifying cohort of
community- based organizations in southern Vietnam is indicative of expanding
notions and relevance of alternative forms of civil society.
In contrast to authors in this volume seeking out and explaining existing asso-
ciational activity in terms of civil society, two contributors take a critical stance
against the aptitude of civil society explanations more generally. In her chapter,
Reis questions whether turning the civil society lens on all types of associational
activity in Vietnam is really just paying lip service to the core concept of civil
society based on the division between state and society. She argues that many of
the fundamental premises of civil society emerging from its historical manifesta-
tions in western Europe cannot naturally be merged with the cultural context and
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political economy in Vietnam. Even in Cambodia, where development aid has
apparently transferred more Western conceptions of civil society, Ou and Kim
argue that associations and organizations, which are popularly understood to
constitute civil society, are often empty shells, bereft of the social orientation,
volunteer spirit and grassroots focus that is hoped for in international civil
society discourse. While the arguments made by Reis, and by Ou and Kim, may
hold if one strictly compares the ‘content’ of civil society to various socially
constructed ideals, most of the authors outlined above allowed the denition of
civil society to emerge from empirical realities. In other chapters a middle course
was taken, whereby the civil society lens was purposively applied, but the ana-
lysis ultimately shied away from normative comparisons concerning the content
of civil society. This suggests that the civil society gaze is both a product of indi-
vidual authors’ thematic and conceptual points of departure, as well as a reec-
tion of the contested discourse of civil society at the national level.
Micro themes, macro tendencies
While the backgrounds of the authors, their country of study, and their respec-
tive areas of expertise condition them to select certain ‘micro themes’, and inves-
tigate them in certain ways, their work often goes towards examining broader
‘macro themes’. The authors gravitated toward two such macro themes: (1) ana-
lysing changes in political space, particularly through advocacy, and (2) teasing
out the traces and tendencies in associational activity emerging from the political
and cultural context as well as from foreign intervention. These macro themes
are illustrative of two common ways the authors investigated civil society.
Authors falling into macro theme 1 generally took an outward- orientation –
looking at the goals and results of various activities. Authors falling into macro
theme 2 had a more introspective orientation, looking at the structural and con-
ceptual make- up of different activities. In short, some authors elected to look at
what civil society tries to accomplish while the others looked at what underlies
and inuences civil society.
The predominance of these two macro themes is not surprising when one con-
siders how the concept of civil society is commonly instrumentalized in devel-
opment discourse. In mainstream development, ‘civil society’ is hoped to be a
facilitator of liberal development goals such as good governance and decentral-
ization, which leads to aid for advocacy and activism, and non- state service pro-
vision (Goetz and O’Brien 1995; White 1994). Historical conceptions of civil
society also speak to the question of carving out political space for citizens in the
public sphere. And with so much aid channelled to advocacy, thereby creating
physical objects to study (usually formal organizations), it is to be expected that
many observers tend to focus on advocacy and political space (macro theme 1).
The discussions taking place as part of the authors’ writeshop reected this –
with frequent, and often vigorously defended, references to the competitive, or
even hostile, relationship between the state and civil society. However, when the
dust settled after these debates, and the different experiences within and between
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Conclusion: the civil society gaze 257
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Cambodia and Vietnam had been represented, it was evident that the divide
between public and private, and between state and society, does not manifest as
a zero- sum relationship. One the one hand, although the state perceives that civil
society plays a positive role in the governance of social welfare, poverty allevi-
ation, public health, environmental protection, business administration and the
organization of academic and cultural activities, the state is commonly prompted
to act pre- emptively and reactively to control civil society because of its one-
dimensional competitive view of local power. On the other hand, authors shared
many instances of ‘mutual’ relationships between the state and civil society, in
which emerging social groups and civil society organizations form a social
space, even the infrastructure, for socio- economic development that both the
state and civil society can also leverage to their own ends.
A corollary assumption coming out of historical views of civil society is that
the growth of associational activity (often in the form of organizations) is a uni-
versal part of development (Lewis 1997; SustainAbility 2003; Tandon 1994) and
helps to make transparent local people’s needs and aspirations (Edwards et al.
1999; Farrington and Bebbington 1994; Sen 1999). This optimistic view of civil
society was followed by critical perspectives concerning ‘uncivil society’ and
the hijacking of civil society discourses in international development for polit-
ical purposes (Boyd 2004; Monga 2009; Stewart 1997). One prominent strand of
this critique warily views the directed support for non- state actors as a thinly
veiled way of pushing a neo- liberal agenda (Gill 1998; Kamat 2004) and/or pro-
moting Western political values using technocratic- oriented organizations (Fer-
guson 1994: 66; Judge 2003). It is therefore also not surprising that many
observers, including those in macro theme 2 who are ostensibly investigating
civil society, look at the underlying drivers and cultural roots of various associa-
tional activities.
Utility of the civil society lens
If, as in the case of this book, observers of civil society are already attached to
various disciplines and well conceptualized subject areas, what is the purpose of,
and intention behind, explicitly employing a civil society framework? Why not
express the subject in simpler terms using traditional theoretical frameworks,
such as ‘the political economy of agriculture policy in Cambodia’ (Feuer) or
‘institutional analysis of the Vietnam Women’s Union’ (Pistor and Le Thi Quy)?
Based on ideas suggested in the country overview chapters by Öjendal and Bach
Tan Sinh, and drawing from the cohort of contributing authors to this volume,
we have garnered a few cross- cutting rationales of researchers and practitioners
for bringing the concept of civil society into empirical work, namely: claiming
legitimacy; exploring the political dimension of civil society; and understanding
the ethics of identifying civil society.
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Claiming legitimacy
Due to its illustrious historical pedigree and its strong presence in contemporary
nation- building and development discourses, the term civil society is more than
just a conceptual container. For academics, governments, development agencies,
and local people, civil society wraps a layer of meaning and signicance around
certain activities, elevating their relevance and legitimacy. For governments,
civil society may be viewed as a threatening sector of activism, but it is also
often viewed as a universal part of state–society relations and an integral partner
in service provision. The entry by Phuong Le Trong elucidates how Vietnamese
academics and ofcials transform and co- opt potentially destabilizing foreign
concepts in order to render them politically palatable and useful in Party policy.
In Cambodia, ‘civil society’ has been viewed by the state as a partner in service
delivery and policy (see Öjendal and Feuer, respectively) as well as a challenge
to state monopoly on power (see Thim). For contemporary researchers and prac-
titioners, the aura of civil society can also be useful in branding one’s own work.
Appropriating the terminology of civil society to frame your research or devel-
opment project can often bring legitimation and recognition from academic
circles and donors. In this case, recognition would be largely a strategic endeav-
our relating to the availability of funding and popularity of certain denitions of
civil society. Because international aid agencies have become increasingly inter-
ested in supporting certain types of initiative that they deem to be part of civil
society (NGOs, human rights organizations, environmental groups, etc.),
research or development projects that t these descriptions are often more fund-
able. The contribution by Bourdier, which describes the mobilization of people
living with HIV/AIDS and the growth in anti- retroviral treatment programmes,
highlights how the identication with civil society is employed as a means to
legitimize their activities and to conceptualize their growing institutionalization.
Doing so makes individual initiatives seem to be part of an inevitable and
socially relevant process in society. As Wells- Dang’s overview of civil society
networks highlights, the impacts of identication as civil society vary with the
audience. On the one hand, popular civil society discourses in Cambodia bear
connotations of grassroots resistance, as exemplied by an activist quoted in the
chapter: ‘We will rise up and speak for the people. We are Cambodia’s civil
society.’ On the other hand, Wells- Dang also follows networks of activists that
purposefully avoid formal registration as an organization because it would draw
unwanted political scrutiny to local organizers. In general, however, the high
prole of the civil society debate can provide incentive for academics to ostens-
ibly study civil society, as well as for practitioners to promote activities that can
be dened as civil society. The prominence of civil society in leading develop-
ment agencies, in addition to academic discourse, sends a signal to practitioners
that aligning with this conceptual space may lead to support.1 In academia, as
one scholar noted, civil society has become ‘a growth industry in Chinese
studies’ (Nevitt 1996) and the same observation can be made elsewhere. In fact,
this book itself contributes to this process.
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Conclusion: the civil society gaze 259
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Exploring the political dimension of civil society
If one distils many of the empirical chapters in this book (particularly those in
the section ‘Advocacy and Political Space’) down to the core developmental
themes being investigated, one often nds politically or socially controversial
processes under way. These range from local people seeking justice and com-
pensation in transnational diplomacy (Thim), to negotiating the role of women in
decentralization (Pistor and Le Thi Quy; Hiwasa), to the evolving inuence of
independent scientists and ecological movements in natural resource manage-
ment (Wells- Dang; Feuer). Often, however, the political controversies and
debates inherent to these topics can become obscured by the focus on civil
society. As Ferguson (1994: 253–65) wrote in his seminal work on Lesotho,
international development agencies often seek to sequester the normative polit-
ical dimension of their interventions in technocratic projects and jargon. Sup-
porting various activities under the guise of civil society can be exploited as an
indirect way of, among others, promoting liberal political regimes, interfering in
national politics, or transferring social ideology such as feminism (Bui The
Cuong 2005). In the programming of various agencies, these intentions are
advertised with differing degrees of discretion. The United States Agency for
International Development (USAID), for example, explicitly promotes civil
society as an aspect of democratization and governance, while the World Bank
more generally conceives of civil society as the respective activities of various
organizations, movements and unions.2 The governments of Cambodia and
Vietnam are nonetheless becoming increasingly aware of the political nature of
civil society but are forced to balance their responses. In Vietnam, as highlighted
by Bach Tan Sinh and Phuong Le Trong, there is the sense that civil society is
something of a moral imperative – a social concept to be adapted and included in
ideology, albeit with modications for the political and cultural context. This
includes, as described by Waibel and Benedikter, decrees aimed at regulating,
integrating and co- opting these developments. In Cambodia, in contrast, after
initially being ooded by organizations and interventions from the early 1990s
(see Öjendal; Ou and Kim), the government has recently taken legal steps to
assert political control over civil society. Although undoubtedly responding to
overtly political activities carried out by human rights organizations and unions,
the attempt to pass an ‘NGO Law’ in Cambodia is likely also an acknowledg-
ment that the government is increasingly aware of, and concerned with, the
everyday politics of development initiatives (see Bratton 1989; Kerkvliet 2009).
As evident in the contributions on Vietnam (with the exception of that of Reis),
the government and Party have already subsumed much of the civic space of tra-
ditional practices and go further by attempting to co- opt Western civil society
discourse (see Phuong Le Trong); ofcial initiatives nevertheless struggles to
match the dynamism of new civil society initiatives. In both the Cambodian and
Vietnamese cases, the state is increasingly forced to control civil society from a
distance by shaping (and restricting) the environment in which associational
activity can emerge.
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Understanding the ethics of identifying civil society
Although conceptions of civil society remain unsettled in theoretical debates,
decisions are nevertheless made regarding who or what constitutes civil society
in many publications, initiatives and policies. Because they are made within a
context of contestation and uncertainty, the decisions themselves become inter-
esting subjects of research. As discussed above, being labelled as civil society
either through self- identication or by external parties, has political con-
sequences and can inuence a group’s legitimacy. State–non- state boundaries
can also be forged in this context, resulting in socially constructed conceptions
of autonomy and the public/private divide. Scholars who write about various ini-
tiatives using a civil society lens, or publish in a book about civil society (par-
ticularly if they enumerate it), are thereby constituting a reality whether they
intend to or not. This goes beyond Hann and Dunn’s (1996) critique about
judging local activities on the basis of Western models of civil society, and
refers instead to judging local activities using any model of civil society. With a
civil society lens, the object of research cannot be studied independently of
various preconceptions and notions of civil society. Bourdier addresses this point
in his chapter, arguing that assessments about the effectiveness of the HIV/AIDS
interventions are interchanged with judgements about the grassroots and embed-
ded nature of the attendant organizations and groups. Whether one eventually
concludes that the objects of study are genuinely part of civil society or not, an a
priori assumption has already been made that various social phenomena have
something to do with civil society.
All of the contributions to this book speak to different aspects of this
dynamic. A typical point of departure, which is critically discussed in the chapter
by Ou and Kim and more generally elaborated upon by Bach Tan Sinh (2011),
are reports that physically ‘count’ civil society, usually by tallying the numbers
of certain organizations or the amount of funding received in various sectors. As
Ou and Kim demonstrate, forcing a denition of civil society for the sake of tal-
lying not only pays lip service to the diversity in institutional dynamics within
various organizations, it also makes implicit judgements as to the legitimacy of
various associational phenomena. Waibel and Benedikter, similarly, chronicle
how ofcial recognition (and registration) as CBOs often leads to integration
into, or at least intervention from, the government. In other words, counting not
only legitimizes, it also makes groups transparent, for better or worse. Another
point of departure considers the agency of the actors in managing their identi-
cation as part of civil society. In this regard, the contributions by Ehlert, Hiwasa
and Thim complement each other. Thim describes how a regional network of
civic groups grows, differentiates their activities, and deliberately tries to gain
ofcial recognition so that they can be taken more seriously in national debates.
Ehlert, in contrast, argues that many embedded and pagoda- based associational
activities are not recognized as civil society by development agents and the state
but that they nonetheless play a critical role in communal relations in Cambodia.
Hiwasa complements this view, viewing village- level women’s groups in
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Conclusion: the civil society gaze 261
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Cambodia as opportunistic platforms for communication, empowerment and
civic participation even when they dissolve as formal groups. In sum, whether
groups are perpetuated or dissolved, become registered or stay under the radar,
announce their membership in civil society or keep to themselves, remains a
contentious process that parallels other discussions about what civil society is or
what it does.
Conclusion
The primordial attraction of scholars to the ideas surrounding civil society
stretches back to Aristotle and Cicero, and weighs heavily on contemporary dis-
courses on political transition and development. Co- editor Judith Ehlert once
described the concept as having a certain ‘charisma’. Indeed, this book is an
attempt to draw together scholars and practitioners to write about Vietnam and
Cambodia with the expectation that the concept of civil society would create a
unied platform for academic exchange. The authors, who are mostly not experts
in civil society per se, can nevertheless leverage the terminology and a general
layman’s familiarity of civil society to create dialogue with the other authors.
Although the editors originally assumed that the contributors would write about
civil society in a literal sense, it turned out that civil society became more of
what Mollinga (2008) has termed a ‘boundary concept’. In interdisciplinary
studies, boundary concepts ‘allow us to think, that is conceptually communicate
about, the multidimensionality of the issues we study and address’ (Mollinga
2008: 23). In the summary above we referred to this primarily as the ‘civil
society lens’ – a shared set of concepts that, although dened by each author and
in each empirical setting, facilitate interdisciplinary and cross- thematic dialogue
about the respective associational activities we study. This is, however, not
strictly an argument that civil society does not exist as such, but merely that it
manifests through debate, contextual adaptation, and external inuence. While
certain manifestations may crystallize over time under specic circumstances,
such as the NGO- dominant denitions popular in Cambodia, they also become
destabilized and renegotiated as new authors and new cases test the boundaries
of the concept.
This book is an experiment in testing the boundaries of civil society as they
have been variously conceptualized and applied in Cambodia and Vietnam. We
purposefully drew authors from a variety of national backgrounds and discip-
lines to write on their respective areas of expertise. When possible, we solicited
works on themes or ‘forms of civil society’ that were relatively underserved in
contemporary literature. Although some of these authors had not previously
written using a civil society lens, their topic areas covered some part of the asso-
ciational realm in Cambodia and Vietnam. The overviews written by Joakim
Öjendal and Bach Tan Sinh are meant to serve as reference points, presenting
the range of activities studied and the perspectives in use over various periods in
the two countries. In their topics and in their analytical perspectives, however,
the authors often diverged from, or expanded on, many of the national trends.
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Their themes ranged from topics that are more routinely covered, such as state–
society relations, organizations and associations, and political activism, to
themes that emerged from the specic context, such as women’s empowerment,
associational activity embedded in the religious sphere, and health sector mobil-
ization. More importantly, however, the authors studied what they knew, while
framing the cases with a civil society perspective. Consolidating this range of
perspectives, both in their diversity and in their commonality, is the primary goal
of this volume.
Even contributions that outwardly appear to be investigating the concept of
civil society itself are actually exploring more general social processes. The
chapter by Reis, for example, characterizes the Vietnamese social imaginary and
its openness to foreign concepts of social organization by looking at confrontation
between Western and Vietnamese cultural precedents and political economy. The
contributions can be largely clustered into two macro- level themes: advocacy and
political space, and traces and tendencies in civil society. In the former, authors
tended to focus on how people and their associational activities draw attention to
their causes in the political sphere, while in the latter, authors described how
culture, history and the political environment left an imprint on associational
activities. However, while the collective focus on advocacy and political space is
more clear- cut among chapters on this theme, a political dimension permeates
almost all of the chapters. The activities studied are themselves often of a political
nature, as are the mechanisms of development and international aid that incentiv-
ize, generate, or inspire them. The governments of Cambodia and Vietnam have
also recognized this, taking measures to regulate, co- opt, or discursively nullify
the activities of civil society that they view as undesirable. As many of the con-
tributing authors demonstrate, this and other considerations shufe the incentives
for actors to formalize or ofcially announce their membership in civil society.
On the one hand, transparency, i.e. ‘being counted’, allows for open political
manoeuvering, legitimation and support from development agencies. On the other
hand, this can lead to government intervention or draw unnecessary attention to
local or embedded initiatives.
This last point raises the question of the academic’s (or development agen-
cy’s) ethical role in writing about and researching civil society. While civil
society can be a useful boundary concept for interdisciplinary studies and col-
laboration, and naturally lends charisma to one’s work, the act of carrying out
research into civil society draws attention to, and often implies legitimacy of,
certain activities. Regardless of which of the varied models of civil society
researchers in a developing country context select, this book argues that civil
society research, in itself, is a political act.
Notes
1 The World Bank publishes a biannual report on engagement with civil society, as well
as providing a fund for civil society. Many bilateral agencies and foundations also
provide specic programmes for civil society, such as the UK Department for
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International Development (DFID), Irish Aid, the US Agency for International Devel-
opment (USAID), the Global Fund and the Carnegie Endowment, to name a few.
2 Referenced from the following programme websites for USAID (http://transition.usaid.
gov/our_work/democracy_and_governance/technical_areas/civil_society/) and the World
Bank (http://go.worldbank.org/PWRRFJ2QH0) (accessed 24 August 2012).
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