All too often, the underlying ideas that frame public discourse and even policy remain unexamined. One of the most powerful of such ideas is the notion of civil society, which enjoyed particular prominence at the height of the new wave of democratization in the 1990s and early 2000s across much of the world including Africa. Civil society was generally seen as the repository of all that was positive and possible for Africa, which the heinous state had thwarted through its authoritarian inflexibilities, inefficiencies and instabilities.
The investment of civil society with the redemptive capacities that the state supposedly lacked reflected and reinforced the neo-liberal ideology of reining in or rolling back the state. The fall from grace of the postcolonial state was marked by the proliferation of epithets coined by scholars to describe its apparent pathologies. While many African intellectuals welcomed the explosion of social movements and NGOs seen as emblematic of the expansion of civil society that reenergized struggles for the "second independence", they were not persuaded that the postcolonial state had become irrelevant to the great historical and humanistic drama of remaking African societies.
Moreover, for them the dichotomy between state and society appeared too contrived, for it ignored the webs of intersection between the two, the mutualities of their constitution and reproduction. The evolutionary and economistic conceits of the discourse were also questioned, its normative assumptions that civil societies are symptomatic of developed market societies, that Euroamerican forms of civil society are universal in their desirability and applicability, which led scholars to search for their emerging exemplars in Africa ignoring the complex civil societies that actually already existed.
Above all, the civil society discourse ignored the realities that neither the state nor civil society has a monopoly on political truths, on either virtue or vice. As the pages of history around the world including Euroamerica drenched with civil conflict and unrest have amply demonstrated, civil societies can be uncivil. This is the subject of Celestine Monga's interesting reflections on the difficulties of defining civil society, which social realms and actors to include in its conceptual and ethical bosom, and how to assess the role of civil society and the production of social capital in both the generation and decomposition of democracy. PT Zeleza, Editor, The Zeleza Post
Abstract, Uncivil Societies: A Theory of Sociopolitical Change By Célestin Monga
In times of crises, it is always useful to revisit some of the paradigms that underlie collective thinking and action. For nearly 200 years, most social science has relied on the assumption that the emergence of strong and nurturing social capital through a vibrant civil society yields all kind of positive externalities to society. Following intuition and anecdotal observations from Alexis de Tocqueville, a large body of theoretical and empirical research has attempted to confirm that societies strive politically and economically when they are able to build strong non-state actors and community organizations. Many disciplines--mainly political science, economics, law, and international relations--have constructed influential analytical frameworks in support of that general proposition.
This paper examines the philosophical foundations of conventional wisdom and observes that it often fails to take into account the dark side of some civil society groups, from the mafia to Al Qaeda. While acknowledging the potential contribution of civil society to the development process, the paper also cautions again the rush to circumvent the state, which sometimes sustains community-based initiatives in poor countries. It suggests the possibility of the production of negative social capital by non-state actors.
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