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Women in Civil Society: Key Issues in the Middle East
Abstract
This book investigates how indigenous forms of interaction and participation can assist in reaching a broader conception of civil society and also addresses inadequacies and biases in the application of the civil society concept. It studies the participation of women as a major sector of the population that until recently has remained unaccounted for in mainstream political science. In applying a civil society framework focused on UAE women, the book seeks to incorporate a gendered perspective of marginalized groups essential to the comprehensive understanding of politics and change. Thus, the question: Does UAE women’s activism play a significant role in the development of civil society? If so, what does this mean for the civil society concept in explaining this process?
... Within the context of the NGOization debate, the decline of voluntarism in NGOs against the rise of professionalism is also discussed in the Middle Eastern context (see Krause, 2008 ). Al-Ali claims that one of the major impacts of both donor institutions and the international women's movement on the Egyptian women's movement has been the 'professionalization of the previously voluntary welfare sector' . ...
... Empirical studies would be benefi cial to conduct in order to take a snapshot of the current situation in Turkey in terms of women activists. ( 2002 ); Lewis ( 2001 ); van Rooy ( 1998 ) and Altan-Olcay and İ ç duygu (2012) 2 For further critical discussion of the gendered bias of civil society, see the following: Pateman ( 1988Pateman ( , 1989; Fraser ( 1992 ); Benhabib ( 1992 ); ; Mulligan ( 2003 , 2005 ); Hagemann, Michel and Budde ( 2008 ); Phillips ( 1999Phillips ( , 2002; Stevenson ( 2005 ); Young ( 2000 ); Weldon ( 2005 ); and Eto ( 2012 ). 3 For instance, see Krause ( 2008Krause ( , 2012; Al-Mughni ( 1997 ); Al-Ali ( 2003 ); and ...
... Th e rising authoritarianism of Prime Minister Erdo ğ an was seen as the key reason for the emergence of the protests, as well as the disproportionate force used by the police, the infringement of democratic rights and the restriction of civic freedoms (Bilgi ç and Kafk asl ı , 2013: 8). 8 For example, see Navaro-Yashin ( 1998a, 1998b; Abdelrahman ( 2004 ) ( 2011 ); and Krause ( 2008Krause ( , 2012. 9 Th ere are two ways of reading the history of modernization in Turkey. ...
... Studies in the Arab Middle Eastern context focus on various social and cultural factors to explain the low participation of women in the labor force and their inferior conditions of employment. Such factors include the patriarchal and male-dominated culture, the conservative nature of Islam, strict codes of gender segregation, strength of family ties and social definition of women's role as that of wife and mother, and cultural restrictions on women's mobility (Moghadam, 1998;Miles, 2002;Krause, 2008;Shallal and Abdalla, 2012). ...
Purpose
– The labor force participation rates of females have been increasing steadily over the past few decades in the UAE and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and are expected to continue to increase due to increasing levels of education and social change. While, there is a substantive amount of literature on the issues of gender gap in wages and employment conditions in Western developed economies, the evidence from developing economies – especially in the Middle East – remains very scant. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to contribute to bridging this gap by examining gender-based differences in employment conditions for local and expatriate workers in the context of the GCC region.
Design/methodology/approach
– The authors utilize a data set from the 2007 cross-section Dubai Labor Market Survey which covers a stratified random sample of employees in the UAE labor market. In addition to descriptive statistics and cross-tabulations of the data by workers’ gender, nationality, and various characteristics of their employment conditions, two empirical models intended to investigate factors that influence access to employment and wage determination of male and female workers in the UAE labor market were estimated.
Findings
– The findings of the study reveal that there are gender-based differences and inequity in employment in the UAE labor market. The authors highlight specific impacts of contextual factors on the employment conditions of women compared to men. The gender gap in the UAE context is compounded by nationality effects; whereby gender-based differences become less apparent in the case of foreign workers compared to UAE nationals.
Originality/value
– This paper is one of very few studies that addressed the gender gap in employment conditions in the Arab Middle Eastern or GCC context. The paper uses quantitative data from a large random sample of workers in the UAE.
This article seeks to challenge some assumptions made concerning civil society as it appears in the work of Hegel and Marx, a challenge raising questions concerning how one thinks about class, capitalism and citizenship in relation to civil society. It argues that the state-civil society distinction remains throughout Marx's work but that it exists in tension alongside the base-superstructure model. It then seeks to explore how part of Marx's critique of civil society rests on his concept of the social, and the differences between this and the idea of the social as it functions in sociological thought.
This article focuses on the interplay of the women's movement and the pro-family movement with state delegates in the negotiations on the International Criminal Court. It discusses the origins of their interest in the ICC, their presence at the ICC negotiations, the manner of their lobbying activities, and their relations with other NGOs and state representatives. It then discusses two issues in the negotiations in which these two movements were on opposite sides: the use and definition of the term 'gender' and the inclusion of 'forced pregnancy' as a crime in the ICC statute. In the conclusion, the article assesses this episode in order to draw some general conclusions about the right to participate in UN forums as 'civil society representatives'.
Some scholars suggest that the Middle East's oil wealth helps explain its failure to democratize. This article examines three aspects of this “oil impedes democracy” claim. First, is it true? Does oil have a consistendy antidemocratic effect on states, once other factors are accounted for? Second, can this claim be generalized? Is it true only in the Middle East or elsewhere as well? Is it true for other types of mineral wealth and other types of commodity wealth or only for oil? Finally, if oil does have antidemocratic properties, what is the causal mechanism?
The author uses pooled time-series cross-national data from 113 states between 1971 and 1997 to show that oil exports are strongly associated with authoritarian rule; that this effect is not limited to the Middle East; and that other types of mineral exports have a similar antidemocratic effect, while other types of commodity exports do not.
The author also tests three explanations for this pattern: a “rentier effect,” which suggests that resource-rich governments use low tax rates and patronage to dampen democratic pressures; a “repression effect,” which holds that resource wealth enables governments to strengthen their internal security forces and hence repress popular movements; and a “modernization effect,” which implies that growth that is based on the export of oil and minerals will fail to bring about die social and cultural changes that tend to produce democratic government. He finds at least limited support for all three effects.
Sheila Carapico's book on civic participation in modern Yemen makes an authoritative contribution to the study of political culture in the Arabian peninsula. Relying on in-depth documentary and field research, the author traces the political dynamics of recent years, culminating in Yemeni unification, focuses on efforts to develop the political, economic and social structures of a modern, democratic government. Her wide-ranging analysis of the legal, institutional and financial aspects of state building and of popular dimensions of political liberalization, protest and participation challenge the stereotypical view of conservative Arab Muslim society. The political economy approach to the study which reveals a surprising degree of 'activism in Arabia' also helps to interpret the nature of civil society from a broad theoretical perspective. This is an important book which promises to become the definitive work on twentieth-century Yemen.
An understanding of women’s participation in civil society in Egypt is important in light of several developing trends. Egypt is currently witnessing some movement in the direction of democratic transformation. Since women constitute half of the population, it is essential to understand the extent of their participation in the organizations of civil society. This is especially true since indicators on women’s political participation in Egypt over the last two decades (both as voters and candidates) indicate a decrease in female candidates and voters.
In the aftermath of the cold war, political commentators spoke ebulliently of the triumph of liberal democracy over its ideological rivals. Shortly thereafter, however, a surge of ethnic and religious violence raised doubts about whether democracy could survive outside Western culture. Similar concerns were soon raised even in Western nations by widespread citizen disengagement from the political process. Voter apathy, ideological conflict, and debates about cultural diversity intensified doubts about the continuing viability of democratic institutions. Throughout the whole world, then, few questions have come to define more clearly the challenge of our age than this: how to facilitate civil, free, and democratic interaction among citizens of multicultural societies. Democratic Civilityexamines the core requirements necessary to make democracy work. Subtly interweaving case studies and theoretical reflection, Hefner and his contributors examine the ideals, culture, development, and organization of civil democracy. Against a historical background, they consider today's challenges to democracy, asking whether international politics is destined to lead to a clash of civilizations, or whether civil and democratic ideas are indeed realizable in a multicultural world. Essays by Adam B. Seligman, Robert Wuthnow, Brigitte Berger, and Anton C. Zijderveld address subjects germane to the "culture wars" controversy in the United States and other Western countries. And Daniel Chirot, Jose Casanova, Robert P. Weller, and S. Gordon Redding examine the prospects for democracy in non-Western, post-communist societies, in particular Chinese society and the Muslim world. Hefner's highly readable volume reaches the core of the ongoing debate between Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History--whether liberal democratic values are generalizable to non-Western societies, or realizable only in the West. Democratic Civility will be of interest to those in the fields of anthropology, sociology, history, political theory, and philosophy.
Contrary to Kumar, the sociological variant of civil society is not equivalent to Habermas's public sphere in so far as it concerns association, autonomy and civility as well as communication. The movement from civil society against the state in Poland to civil society in constructive relation with a reformed state will be slow. Civil societies accommodate differences of interest and sensibility and that is their virtue.
Civil society has been on the lips of many theoreticians of the 1989 revolutions, in the West as well as in East Central Europe. The hope is that civil society, as a concept and a programme, will help post-communist societies out of their current political predicament. How reasonable a hope is this? How useful is the concept of civil society at the present time; either in the East or the West? This paper first considers the historical career of the concept. It then goes on to examine its fruitfulness in the current conditions of western and East European society.
Theories of rentierism argue that, because oil states do not depend upon the populace for taxation, the state is relieved of political accountability and can effectively buy off potential opposition. This rentier framework suffers from economic determinism. Oil wealth has been a catalyst for opposition rather than a means to placate dissent. Political choices on how to spend oil revenues shape development. In Saudi Arabia the state has fostered opposition to itself through the deployment of rent in five specific instances, all of which concern region or religion.
Journal of Democracy 6.1 (1995) 65-78
As featured on National Public Radio, The New York Times, and in other major media, we offer this sold-out, much-discussed Journal of Democracy article by Robert Putnam, "Bowling Alone." You can also find information at DemocracyNet about the Journal of Democracy and its sponsor, the National Endowment for Democracy.
Many students of the new democracies that have emerged over the past decade and a half have emphasized the importance of a strong and active civil society to the consolidation of democracy. Especially with regard to the postcommunist countries, scholars and democratic activists alike have lamented the absence or obliteration of traditions of independent civic engagement and a widespread tendency toward passive reliance on the state. To those concerned with the weakness of civil societies in the developing or postcommunist world, the advanced Western democracies and above all the United States have typically been taken as models to be emulated. There is striking evidence, however, that the vibrancy of American civil society has notably declined over the past several decades.
Ever since the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, the United States has played a central role in systematic studies of the links between democracy and civil society. Although this is in part because trends in American life are often regarded as harbingers of social modernization, it is also because America has traditionally been considered unusually "civic" (a reputation that, as we shall later see, has not been entirely unjustified).
When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, it was the Americans' propensity for civic association that most impressed him as the key to their unprecedented ability to make democracy work. "Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition," he observed, "are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types -- religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. . . . Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America."
Recently, American social scientists of a neo-Tocquevillean bent have unearthed a wide range of empirical evidence that the quality of public life and the performance of social institutions (and not only in America) are indeed powerfully influenced by norms and networks of civic engagement. Researchers in such fields as education, urban poverty, unemployment, the control of crime and drug abuse, and even health have discovered that successful outcomes are more likely in civically engaged communities. Similarly, research on the varying economic attainments of different ethnic groups in the United States has demonstrated the importance of social bonds within each group. These results are consistent with research in a wide range of settings that demonstrates the vital importance of social networks for job placement and many other economic outcomes.
Meanwhile, a seemingly unrelated body of research on the sociology of economic development has also focused attention on the role of social networks. Some of this work is situated in the developing countries, and some of it elucidates the peculiarly successful "network capitalism" of East Asia. Even in less exotic Western economies, however, researchers have discovered highly efficient, highly flexible "industrial districts" based on networks of collaboration among workers and small entrepreneurs. Far from being paleoindustrial anachronisms, these dense interpersonal and interorganizational networks undergird ultramodern industries, from the high tech of Silicon Valley to the high fashion of Benetton.
The norms and networks of civic engagement also powerfully affect the performance of representative government. That, at least, was the central conclusion of my own 20-year, quasi-experimental study of subnational governments in different regions of Italy. Although all these regional governments seemed identical on paper, their levels of effectiveness varied dramatically. Systematic inquiry showed that the quality of governance was determined by longstanding traditions of civic engagement (or its absence). Voter turnout, newspaper readership, membership in choral societies and football clubs -- these were the hallmarks of a successful region. In fact, historical analysis suggested that these networks of organized reciprocity and civic solidarity...
Joseph focuses on the ways in which ideas about family and family idioms, relationships, and practices ground and intersect with formal governmental policies and practices in the Middle East. Families and kinship are politically privileged in most Middle Eastern states and women and men are committed to their families in Lebanon in a manner that Joseph calls the "kin contract," a commitment reinforced by a care/control paradigm in which familial care is often enmeshed with the control by a family system organized around aged and gendered hierarchy. In the Middle East in general, Joseph argues, the citizensubject is embedded in kinship relationships rather than being an autonomous self. The gendered nature of the citizen-subject emerges thus from the implicit and legally encoded kin contract which reinscribes patriarchal kinship with the force of state and religious institutional and practical backing. Families are regulated in turn by state and religious institutions in Middle Eastern countries, a type of mutual support that further bolsters what she calls patriarchal connectivity-the privileging of the authority of males and elders in a system in which the boundaries of selves are often fluid and focused on relationality.
This article examines the impact of gender relations on democratization. It considers a number of key questions: what role do women's movements play in the transition to democratic rule and what impact does a return to competitive electoral politics have on women and women's movements. The starting point is a critique of the existing literature on democratization. That literature cannot provide a satisfactory analysis of the role of women in transition politics because of the narrow definitions of democracy used and the top-down focus of much of it. The article then develops a gendered analysis through a comparison of the different processes of transition in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. It highlights the significance of the relationship between civil society and the state and the existence of “political space.”
Civil society in the Arab world has revitalized itself in the last two decades due to internal, regional, and international factors. Internally, new socio-economic formations have been growing steadily, as the autocratic and/or populist regimes have no longer been able to accommodate or completely suppress them. Regionally, protracted armed conflicts have weakened the state, exposed its impotence in managing such conflicts, and drained its resources. Meanwhile, other regional developments have unwittingly empowered new and old constituencies within each Arab state. Internationally, the patron-client relationship between Arab regimes and the two superpowers has either ended or been greatly altered. The global wave of democratization has also had its marked demonstration effect on the expanding Arab middle class. The responses by Arab regimes to their civil societies indicate as many prospects for further democratization as against it. The modernizing monarchies, namely of Jordan and Morocco, have impressively engineered a smooth transition toward more democratic governance. Their example may tilt the balance toward greater democratic prospects in the entire region, prospects that promise to enhance the peaceful settlement of some of the region's protracted conflicts while also growing in strength from such settlements.
The author focuses on an informal Sufi group of women in Istanbul, with only peripheral connections to the traditional established orders. The women in the group studied instead have organized their activities in the form of a religious endowment offering regular prayer meetings and basic religious education and charity work to other women in their neighbourhood. The group is an example of the many independent religious non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have emerged in Turkey since the early 1980s. By offering social space for networking, a ritually proper place for joint worship and access to theological knowledge, the group has given individual women access to religious authority otherwise restricted to men in this local environment.
Journal of Democracy 8.3 (1997) 62-76
Most political scientists acknowledge the connection between higher levels of economic development and stable democratic institutions. In sub-Saharan Africa, only South Africa has a truly industrial economy, which many analysts view as a prerequisite for democracy. Yet several other African states have achieved above-average levels of economic development through agricultural and mineral production. Of these countries, Botswana and Mauritius have developed stable democratic institutions while enjoying relatively high rates of economic growth. Thus it is fair to say that "middle-income" African states with economies based on commodity production have a better-than-average chance of achieving democratic transition and consolidation.
Broadly understood, "development" appears to facilitate democratic politics in at least two ways: First, it brings higher living standards and incomes, which are thought to make citizens more tolerant of political competition. Second, it typically enlarges the middle class, which is often seen as the chief support of democratic institutions. Development also makes it possible for elites who are voted out of office to continue living comfortably. Of course, mineral production, even on a vast scale, is not the same as industrial development. Yet while mineral revenues have led only to modest industrialization in Africa and the Middle East, they have substantially raised living standards in both regions.
In sub-Saharan Africa, only three states combine a relatively small population with substantial mineral wealth: Gabon, Botswana, and the Republic of Congo (as distinguished from the Democratic Republic of Congo, the new name recently given to Zaire by victorious rebel leader Laurent Kabila and his Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire). Congo is a particularly fascinating case because it experienced a real and promising change of regime in 1991. This transition in turn led to free elections for the presidency and a new legislature in 1992. Yet Congo's transition was not trouble-free, and the country has since faced a series of crises, including armed ethnic conflict. Indeed, serious clashes between ethnically based militias re-erupted in early June 1997 during the run-up to the presidential election scheduled for July 27, and the consolidation of democracy is very much an open question. During these critical years in Congo's political development, oil wealth has had mixed consequences for the processes of democratic transition and consolidation.
Like other former French colonies, Congo began its independent existence in 1960 impoverished but nominally democratic. The country's first president, Fulbert Youlou, exemplified the conservative, neocolonial personality. Youlou sympathized with the separatist regime of Moïse Tshombe in the Katanga region, in what has until recently been known as Zaire, but deferred to France on most other matters. Moreover, Youlou had no comprehensive vision for Congo's economic development. The population was relatively urbanized, educated, and sophisticated by African standards, and was thus impatient with his policies. As a result, Youlou was forced to resign after civilian street riots during three days in 1963, now known as les trois glorieuses.
Youlou was succeeded by a former schoolteacher, Alphonse Massemba-Débat, who was acting speaker of Congo's Parliament. Under pressure from his more youthful and left-wing supporters, Massemba-Débat created a new single party for Congo, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), which was conceived as a force for the social and economic transformation of Congolese society. Under Massemba-Débat, the religion-based school system was replaced with a radical, secular one, and some foreign enterprises were nationalized. The United States and Congo broke off diplomatic relations in 1965 when the Massemba-Débat government failed to protect U.S. diplomats who were assaulted by hostile Congolese citizens. Massemba-Débat also established relations with the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, even while maintaining ties with France.
As the 1960s wore on, Congolese society became increasingly polarized between those elites favoring a truly Leninist path to development and those favoring more conventional approaches. Moreover, the failure of the economy to live up to expectations after independence exacerbated preexisting ethnoregional tensions. Massemba-Débat lacked the force of personality to overcome these cleavages in Congolese society, and he...
Journal of Democracy 6.3 (1995) 155-163
Although the Arab world is lagging behind in the current global trend toward democratization, many Arab countries have joined the process, even if sluggishly and halfheartedly. In this class, one may include Jordan, Yemen, Morocco, Kuwait, Mauritania, Tunisia, and Egypt. Others that have resisted the global trend, such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the Sudan, at least possess a modest if erratic heritage of political pluralism. It is likely that in the future they too will witness growing pressures for wider political participation.
A major reason for the slow and uneven pace of democratization in the region is the relative weakness of civil society. In the Arab world, less-than-vibrant civil societies have often proven incapable of consolidating democratic gains, finding themselves easily outmaneuvered and rendered ineffectual by resurgent despotisms. Algeria and the Sudan offer dramatic illustrations.
Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, has felt growing global pressure for democratic transformation and has seen the state conduct a gradual retreat from public life. Although this juncture in its history remains a time of turbulence -- rife with persistent poverty, a lack of societal vision, and political sclerosis -- a budding civil society has recently begun to manifest heretofore-latent energy, and is now competing with other social forces (most notably a rising wave of Islamic activism) for a share of the public space that the state used to occupy.
Autonomous research organizations and think tanks -- a relatively new phenomenon in the Arab world -- are an integral part of this growing civil society. At the time of its founding in 1988, the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies (ICDS) was the first private, professional research organization in the history of Egypt. For its founder Saad Eddin Ibrahim, professor of political sociology at the American University in Cairo, it represented the realization of a lifelong dream: an independent institution for applied social-science research and sophisticated policy advocacy in the service of positive social change. The opportunity to make his vision a reality came to Professor Ibrahim in 1985, when the emirate of Kuwait gave him an award for achievement in the social sciences that totalled almost 300,000. This makes ICDS a nongovernmental organization (NGO), and formally differentiates it from nonprofit charitable associations and private voluntary organizations (PVOs), which according to Egyptian law come under the often-stifling authority of the Ministry of Social Affairs.
The Ibn Khaldoun Center devotes most of its attention to the relationship between civil society and democratization. To clarify and supplement this primary focus, the Center also examines socioeconomic shifts, the external situation, and the Egyptian state itself. ICDS seeks to effect positive social and political change both through its work and through the example that it furnishes of an independent approach to societal development. The research and ideas that the Center produces are targeted at key decision-making sectors in Egypt, the Arab lands more generally, and the developing world at large. Nor should the importance of the Center's example be underestimated, for private research and advocacy organizations are still comparatively rare in the Arab world. The first professional research organizations to appear did so under government sponsorship, sharing in both the strengths and the weaknesses of the postcolonial Arab state. Lacking the massive resources of the state to draw on, organizations like ICDS are by the same token blessedly free of the bureaucratic impediments under which state-sponsored institutions often labor.
The Center takes its name from the great fourteenth-century thinker Abdel Rahman Ibn Khaldoun, the founder of Arab social science. Its charter is similar to that of the French newspaper Le Monde. It is privately owned, with overall direction provided by a core staff and Board of Trustees. Dedicated to promoting democracy in the larger society, ICDS employs democratic methods in its own internal governance. From its inception, it was meant to be free of the...
This article explores the aims, activities and challenges of women's movements in the Middle East. It demonstrates the similarities among movements, which are related to both the historical emergence of women's movements, and in particular their close affiliation to nationalist struggles, as well as contemporary circumstances such as ambiguous government policies, repression of civil societies and prevailing authoritarian political cultures. This contribution also looks to the specific factors and conditions that shape women's movements in particular countries differently, thereby highlighting the great degree of heterogeneity among women's organizations in the Middle East. An analysis of the actual goals and activities of women's groups in various countries, such as Jordan, Egypt and Palestine reveals that women activists tend to get mobilized around issues related to modernization and development. Issues such as women's rights to education, work and political participation have traditionally been both the accepted demands of women activists as well as part of the discourses of male modernizers and reformers. However, the more sensitive issues of women's reproductive rights and violence against women, for example, have been taken up by only a few women's organizations in recent years. The relationship of women's organizations to the state is key to the analysis of women's movements in the region. Varying levels of dependence and autonomy can be detected not only in the comparison of one country with another but also within given country contexts.
In the immediate aftermath of the fall of state socialism in Eastern and Central Europe, many western observers eagerly awaited the justification of the liberal democratic/capitalist model in the emerging social and political environments. The concept of "civil society', idealized by both western and eastern European political theory, was central to the discourse of transformation, and the voices of hitherto marginalized and repressed peoples were expected to emerge from the ruined regime of state-organized collectivity. The mobilization of women in particular, disproportionately affected by the social and economic hardship of transition, was keenly anticipated. This article looks at the ideological construction of civil society, which provided the context in terms of the language and identities available for political activism. It explores both the material and the ideological conditions that affected women's ability to mobilize and to form political and/or feminist identities during the process of transformation. It also contextualizes women's activism in relation to liberal-democratic politics and feminism. Two country case studies, Poland and Yugoslavia, provide empirical examples of the ways in which women formed groups and the kinds of political questions they posed. Further, they illustrate the impact of cross-currents, in which the transformation from socialism to democracy and a market economy met the ideological constraints of religious traditionalism and nationalism respectively. Placing the concepts of civil society and political identity in specific historical and cultural contexts in this way will help to explain the perceived "absence' of a women's movement in the region at this time.
Until recently, Manoilesco's confident prediction could easily be dismissed as yet another example of the ideological bias, wishful thinking and overinflated rhetoric of the thirties, an événementielle response to a peculiar environment and period. With the subsequent defeat of fascism and National Socialism, the spectre of corporatism no longer seemed to haunt the European scene so fatalistically. For a while, the concept itself was virtually retired from the active lexicon of politics, although it was left on behavioral exhibit, so to speak, in such museums of atavistic political practice as Portugal and Spain.
SINCE MONTESQUIEU, WRITERS ON POLITICS HAVE BEEN aware that there might be an association of particular moral qualities and beliefs with particular political regimes. The association between virtue and republican governments, although duly recorded by students of Montesquieu's thought, has however been passed over. The disposition to participate in politics, the sense of political potency or impotence, certain traits of personality such as could be summarized in the term ‘authoritarian personality’, etc., have all been studied by theorists of democracy. Virtue, or public spirit or civility, has been neglected.
I would like to take up Montesquieu's theme once more. I wish to enquire into the place of virtue or what I call civility in the liberal democratic order, which Montesquieu referred to as the republican type of government. Latterly the term ‘civil society’ has come to be used very loosely as equivalent to ‘liberal democratic society’. They are not entirely the same and the difference between them is significant. In civility lies the difference between a well-ordered and a disordered liberal democracy.
In this exploratory article, we ask how states come to be understood as entities with particular spatial characteristics, and how changing relations between practices of government and national territories may be challenging long-established modes of state spatiality. In the first part of this article, we seek to identify two principles that are key to state spatialization: verticality (the state is "above" society) and encompassment (the state "encompasses" its localities). We use ethnographic evidence from a maternal health project in India to illustrate our argument that perceptions of verticality and encompassment are produced through routine bureaucratic practices. In the second part, we develop a concept of transnational governmentality as a way of grasping how new practices of government and new forms of "grassroots" politics may call into question the principles of verticality and encompassment that have long helped to legitimate and naturalize states' authority over "the local."
This article explores the politics and practices of a state-initiated, feminist-conceived empowerment program for rural women in India through the lens of neoliberal governmentality. Structured as a government-organized nongovernmental organization (GONGO), the Mahila Samakhya (MS) program seeks to empower and mobilize marginalized women for self-development and social change. The program's GONGO form and empowerment goals articulate with neoliberal logics of self-care and destatized rule to reshape the postcolonial liberalizing state and governance in India. Neoliberalism and the everyday practices of the MS program construct the Indian state as a distinct and vertically encompassing, if ambiguously gendered, entity. The organization's hybrid form and its employment arrangements and work practices end up reinforcing some of the very social inequalities and welfare-based ideologies that its empowerment focus seeks to challenge. Nonetheless, collaborative governmental projects for subaltern women's empowerment, which involve feminist, activist, and state actors, offer spaces of political possibility as well as risks in a neoliberal context.
Video-based media spaces are designed to support casual interaction between intimate collaborators. Yet transmitting video is fraught with privacy concerns. Some researchers suggest that the video stream be filtered to mask out potentially sensitive ...
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- Lootah-Hessah Abdullah
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- Janine A Clark