Political Geography 67 (2018) 111–114

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Rethinking the spaces of civil society T

A B S T R A C T

Despite its popularity, civil society remains a troubling concept for many. It has been variously critiqued for masking the operation of power, for universalising a
situated normative order, and for homogenising the diversity of bodies, things and affects that comprise political and social lives. In this special issue we seek to probe
these debates through a specific engagement with the concept of ‘civility’. As populist and right-wing political movements gain in strength and prominence across the
globe, it seems a suitable moment to consider the role of civility in both political contestation and everyday lives, while reflecting on the implications for concepts in
political geography. In this introduction we outline these debates while introducing the specific contribution of each of the papers.

Discourses and practices of civil society endure. As a tool of gov- coffee house as a site where affairs may be discussed with civility (that
ernment, expression of collective rights, and a means of state-building, this is a transient site of consumption with a series of social barriers to
civil society is a flexible concept that has been a prominent part of entry based on class, race and gender is helpful for thinking through the
debates in the field of political geography for the past thirty years inevitable and enduring exclusions from civil society that are masked in
(Arnold, 2017; McIlwaine, 1998; Smith, 1989; Taylor, 2005). Over this some of its more universalist applications).
period the concept has travelled out of its origins in liberal political In these terms civil society stands as a means through which the
theory and into the toolkit of state elites keen to emphasise forms of public sphere may be populated without violence and ideas circulate in
democratic participation beyond formal citizenship practices (Keane, a framework distinct from the state. It is this separation between state
2013). Consequently, scholarship in political geography and elsewhere and society that is central to a second historical frame through which
has critiqued civil society as a term that has been used by elites to ideas of civil society are understood, though some of the political im-
project a virtuous gloss over the rollback of state welfare through the plications differ markedly. The source of the revival of much of work on
operation of neoliberal economic policies in both the global north and civil society comes from the fall of socialist and communist regimes in
south (Jeffrey, 2007; Mercer, 2003; Mohan, 2002). From the UK Gov- Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where
ernment's desire to foster a ‘Big Society’ through to the central role of civil society organisations have been viewed by many commentators as
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in international development catalysts to political change (see Pickles and Smith, 2005). The in-
initiatives, the cultivation of civil society seems to reflect a new mode of ference here is that – by their communist definition – previous regimes
governance and citizenship that emphasises individual obligations over could not exhibit a civil society (since this would require a realm of
the protection of rights (Alcock, 2010). public deliberation outside the one-party state) and consequently as
The historical antecedents for this privileging of civil society are not demands were made for greater democratic participation so this was
straightforward, and we should not simply link this to some form of aggregated into manifestations of associative life that challenged the
neoliberal devolution of social and political responsibility outwards authority of the state (Fagan, 2005; Marston & Staeheli, 1994). That
from state institutions. Instead we want to argue that there are a set of these transitions were (largely) peaceful added currency to the sense
nested historical frames that are sitting in tension with one another that this was a reflection of the transformative power of civil society to
when we think about the political practices of civil society. The first is enact a delicate dual manoeuvre of both challenging political authority
the evident link between the cultivation of civil society and the emer- and building cross-cutting social bonds. While the intricacies of these
gence of liberalism as a form of political theory and practice in Western transformations are masked in such interpretations, the key to our
Europe (for an overview see Cohen & Arato, 1994). The liberal demo- analysis is that this discourse of the end of the Cold War has been
cratic model is predicated on the existence of a realm of civic action central to later policy prescriptions.
that can hold state institutions to account. In doing so, this ties civil Considering these twin legacies of liberalism and transformation it
society to a historically and spatially embedded set of socio-political is no surprise that, in the years since, cultivating civil society has be-
developments that we could tentatively trace to the French and come a key policy response of international agencies seeking to enact
American revolutions in the late eighteenth century. But there are a liberal democratic transformation while also strengthening social co-
cluster of complex histories folded in to this shorthand: from the Eur- hesion. Consequently the third historical frame relates to the deploy-
opean Enlightenment's enshrining of individual potential to self-govern, ment of discourses of civil society in development and post-conflict
the concurrent migration of violence from the individual to the state, interventions since the early 1990s (McIlwaine, 1998). There has been
and the formation of a socio-economic realm of individuals with time to something seductive about civil society for policy makers: it has a sound
spare to engage in public affairs. It is these liberal roots that are en- normative basis (who would reasonably argue for uncivil society?), it
capsulated in the materialisation of civil society in the image of the projects responsibility for social outcomes onto individuals rather than

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Available online 24 October 2018
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 Political Geography 67 (2018) 111–114

states, it accords with a general philosophy of sub-contraction and de- between civil and political society. Chatterjee is, in many respects, ex-
centralisation and it provides the institutional space for international tending Ferguson's critique by highlighting the re-signification of the
NGOs (often gathered under a banner of civil society or networked into term ‘civil society’, away from an idealised realm of associative life and
civil society arenas) to be integrated into developmental responses. Of towards a more bourgeois set of institutions in close proximity to state
course, this is a continuation of the first two historical frameworks, power. But for Chatterjee this picture underplays the exclusion at work
where neoliberal policies have sought to create arenas of democratic in contemporary India, where individuals are only “tenuously, and even
performance located outside the state. The challenge here is not one of then ambiguously and contextually, rights-bearing citizens in the sense
illuminating the anti-state, pro-market nature of many of these inter- imagined by their constitution” (Chatterjee, 2004, p. 38). Rather than
ventions – this has been documented at length – but rather to point to extending the notion of civil society to include those excluded from full
the clear ambiguity that stems from the desire to simultaneously cul- citizenship rights Chatterjee uses the term ‘political society’ to draw
tivate liberal democratic traditions based on the monopoly of violence attention to the ways in which these individuals and groups are drawn
held within the state while encouraging the transformative potential of into political relations (and confrontations) with the state. Crucially for
associative life. the discussion here, Chatterjee does not advocate dispensing with the
There is an enduring critique that can be made of this schematic term civil society, it does – he asserts – represent an ideal that “con-
form of staged history. What has been presented across these three tinues to energise an interventionalist project” (p. 39). Instead he feels
frames is a Western European imagination of the development of po- it is unable to grasp the full range of legal and illegal actions undertaken
litical life, it is suggestive of a singular form of political participation by those in precarious material circumstances looking to lay claim to
and it assumes non-state action to be a virtuous sphere of deliberation. habitation and livelihoods. For Chatterjee, civil society refers to cul-
But in keeping this historical narrative under critical scrutiny we can turally equipped citizens, while it is in political society that the state
return to the second reason for studying civil society: it urges us to must renew its legitimacy and confront demands (p. 41).
reflect on some of central questions relating to the mechanisms through Following both Ferguson and Chatterjee, one of the central concerns
which ideas of citizenship and community are conveyed and circulate within a rubric of civil society is that it risks homogenising a variegated
within sites of intervention (understood broadly). This requires ex- social field, cloaking the operation of power in technical language of
amining civil society less in terms of the extent to which it meets some democratisation or state consolidation. But there are other theoretical
of the expectations that are set out for it, and more in terms of the routes to tracing these processes, ones that perhaps help focus on the
distance between these models of political life and the actual existing forms of agency and contestation individuals may exercise to unsettle
experience of those involved in political and social struggles. In this discourses of civil society. Extending Ferguson, we can disrupt the op-
approach, civil society can be used as a means of analysing the gap eration of an unvariegated discourse of civil society by exploring the
between perceived political life and actual existing practices of the examples of associative life or political practice that are either deemed
political. to be, or declare themselves as examples of, civil society. This is clearly
The most tangible starting point for thinking about civil society in less an exercise of institutional practice and more a case of linguistic
more conceptual terms is to critique the territorialisation and materi- identification, but it has material effects. This involves shifting the lens
ality of civil society. First territory: regardless of the desire to invest in of analysis from the ways that state power envisages civil society (as a
political practices that are distinct from the state, the focus on civil realm of autonomous institutions that fulfil a deliberative function
society has implicitly relied on state territorialisation as the central within society) to the ways in which individuals and groups utilise the
spatial expression of politics. There is a double-move at work here, conception of civil society to lay claim to resources, garner respect and
where the nation-state is both enshrined as the central territorialisation advance political objectives. For example, Jeffrey (2013) draws on the
of political life (after all, this is the political centre of calculation that conceptual vocabulary of Pierre Bourdieu (2011) to explore the ways in
civil society is holding to account) while erasing the role of transna- which individuals and institutions accrue social and cultural capital to
tional or more localised (urban) sources of authority in shaping political secure donor funding, retain political relevance and advance their
practice. In a sense it is a variant of John Agnew’s (1994) ‘territorial agendas. This work empasises the significance of agency, where the
trap’, though less an inadvertent reliance on state territoriality and actions of civil society cannot be assumed to stem from the structural
perhaps more a deployment of the state to mask other realms of coer- logics of the (neo)liberal state, but rather reflect the struggles of si-
cion. The state can be relied upon as an institution of ‘disinterested tuated actors working to accumulate influence and respect in a dynamic
domination’ (Abrams, 1988), while the exercise of power projection set of social and political fields. This is an arena of conflicting forces,
from beyond the borders of the state may be obscured. There is a well- where homogenising either intentions or outcomes risks hollowing out
established body of critical scholarship that develops this perspective, the nature of its politics.
perhaps most notably James Ferguson’s (1990) Anti-Politics Machine It is this sense of the structural dynamics of civil society, and in
which studied the “conceptual apparatus” of international interventions particular questions of agency and authority, that we seek to confront in
in Lesotho. In Ferguson's account, which is drawing on conceptualisa- this special issue. One of our primary objectives in bringing together
tions of discursive formation found in The Archaeology of Knowledge this group of papers was to orientate attention towards the forms of
(Foucault, 2013), the development project had constructed Lesotho as a socialisation that are imagined within accounts of civil society and,
particular type of ‘problem’ that required specific development inter- specifically, the question of what constitutes civility. While there has
vention, in doing so – and this is the important part – entrenching been considerable scholarly attention paid to the institutional and
bureaucratic state power through the operations of purportedly non- formal political elements of civil society, this question of how civility
state actors. Development was rendered as a technical problem, and as itself is conceived has not garnered similar scrutiny. At a time of re-
such closed down the possibility for political contestation or resistance. newed interest in the significance of inter-personal behaviour in the
This is a very well established in critique but it is freighted with im- conduct of political life (see Ott, 2017), it seems at apposite moment to
portant methodological considerations, investigating how ideas of ‘de- provide a corrective. This special issue seeks to advance understandings
velopment’ are generated in practice. of the conceptualisation and operation of civil society by focusing on
If the territorialisation of civil society points to a sense of its anti- what it means to be civil and, specifically, how civility is shaped spa-
political nature, this is extended in studies of its institutionalisation. tially. For example, adjudications of civility shape permissible conduct
The sense of the conceptual gap between the imagination of civil so- in public space, where difference is often coded as dangerous or illegal
ciety as an inclusive arena of deliberation and the ‘actual existing’ when deviating from dominant modes of civility. But while this taps
realities of governmental instruments or the reproduction of class ad- into established debates within urban political geography, we need to
vantage, as illuminated in Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) distinction combine such analysis with prevailing feminist critiques to examine

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how civility is understood in different terms as an embodied and si- forge new articulations of political subjectivity, often challenging social
tuated practice that exists beyond the strictures of public space. Very cleavages on which state formation has been based. “Civility in these
quickly such discussions demand an engagement with the ways in terms,” state Jeffrey et al. “is an embodied practice that is shaped by
which determining civility becomes a space-claiming practice, either a forces both distant and proximate.” One of the tangible outcomes of this
mechanism through which group membership is judged, or – at a dif- paper has been to challenge the coffee shop as either a site of indolence
ferent geographical scale – the ways in which interventions within so- or to see the activities of youth as a naïve acquiescence to hidden
vereign states are justified. Finally, and connected to this latter point, neoliberal agendas. Rather, the work illuminates a form of collaborative
civility is inevitably always plural, and hence in practice we see ten- agency that thrives in the enactment of intimacy, where such solidarity
sions and hierarchies emerge between different understandings and challenges elite political scripts of essential difference or social antag-
practices of civility. onism.
Consequently, examining civility requires an engagement with a set The virtues of civility are placed under further scrutiny in Jones and
of challenging spatial and conceptual problems, including analysing the Adou Djané’s exploration of the role of civil society in transitional
sites where such civility may be practiced (public/private space or the justice programmes in Côte D'Ivoire. Their work draws on qualitative
public sphere), the types of political collectivity that can stem from fieldwork with civil society actors who position themselves as ‘resisting’
practices of civility (democratic or agonistic politics) through to the the state-sanctioned transitional justice process following the
implications of trying to impose civility from the outside (the challenge 2010–2011 election violence and armed ousting of former President
of international development interventions or post-conflict reconstruc- Laurent Gbagbo. In doing so the authors highlight the ways in which
tion). Such analyses of civility advance a series of key debates in the civil society organisations can serve as a front for party political in-
field of political geography; for example the tension between individual terests and sanitise political movements that have been the focus of
and collective citizenship rights, between secular and religious inter- legal challenges. Here we see the potential ‘incivility’ of associative life,
pretations of morality, the imagined universalism of liberal forms of entrenching established landscapes of power, silencing alternative
government and the role of normativity in political geography. Our task voices and masking the operation of political agendas. For Jones and
is not another taxonomy of what counts as civil society, rather an ex- Adou Djané there is an intricate history and geography at work, as “[c]
amination of how civility is understood and practiced in specific geo- olonialism and the post-independence one-party state has ensured a
graphical circumstances. legacy of close alignment and indeed overlap between civil society and
Each paper in this special issue contributes to this debate, some political parties, meaning that associational space is frequently lever-
probing the conceptual basis of invocations of civility, others thinking aged for political goals, split between political factions, and divided in
through specific empirical settings where civility is a focal point for ways which change over time.” Beyond the situated nature of civil
political deliberation and action. The opening paper by Richard Boyd society action, this work poses a series of challenges for the practice and
seeks to focus attention on the content and form of civility, building on analysis of transitional justice, querying the ability of external actors –
his earlier work that has advanced this debate in urban geography themselves embedded in prior colonial practices – to act as independent
(Boyd, 2006). His paper in this issue addresses the mercurial and arbiters of crimes of the past.
transient nature of civility, a term that seemingly defies attempts to be The distinction between civility and incivility is a key theme in
‘fixed’ as a rigid set of rules. Boyd utilises the liberal theory of Adam Hammett and Jackson's study of the role civil society agencies in pro-
Smith (2010), arguing that civility should be thought of as a matter of cesses of democratisation in Uganda and Singapore. This focuses at-
‘style’ as opposed to the more rigid normative framework invocated tention on a key question uniting the papers in the special issue: how
through conceptions of ‘justice’. For Boyd, the distinctive characteristic meanings and adjudications of civility are used to “monitor, control and
of civil society is its informality, where human relationships are neither curtail the promotion and development of civil society in hybrid poli-
as close and intimate as those of the family, with their emphasis on tical systems.” The argument is made through an exploration of the
charity and magnanimity, nor as formal as those governed by the dis- discursive construction of civil society in both contexts, with a focus on
tant, abstract rules of citizenship and market economy. But, crucially, the role of legislation in shaping perceptions of legitimate associative
civility enters into both these more rigid arenas of inter-personal re- life. These regulatory practices, the authors argue, have the effect of
lationships: there is a minimalist sense in which familiar ties require draining civil society of its transformative potential as it performs a
being civil, while despite the transactional nature of market relation- delicate balancing act between “being civil-enough to avoid overly
ships, repetition and familiarity engender interpersonal warmth or ex- strenuous government intervention and being uncivil-enough to be able
change that are not focused solely on profit motives. Boyd explains “the to push for change, to act as a voice for marginalised groups and hold
relationships of civil society are of a particular kind—characterized by political leaders accountable.” This account reproduces an image of
informality, discretion, or situational discernment. They are defined by civil society reminiscent of Ferguson's: that of a depoliticising institu-
a certain manner of relating to other persons which is more demanding tional form that shapes human agency by establishing a clear set of
than the abstract rules of justice we owe to strangers, but less so than moral and political boundaries for the operation of associative life.
more stringent obligations to those who are morally close to us. Civility One area where civility performs a central, though often under-
exists midway within a spectrum whose antipodes are delineated by theorised, role is the performance of diplomacy. Through a study of EU
degrees of moral proximity between ourselves and others.” So, for diplomatic practices, Merje Kuus illuminates how diplomacy can chal-
Boyd, civil society is constituted by a qualitatively distinct mode of lenge the established boundaries between state, intergovernmental and
human relationship that partakes of the informal, necessarily tacit, di- non-governmental organisations operating in this transnational field. In
mensions of the virtue of civility. making these claims Kuus is challenging the ‘embedded statism’
This focus on the intangible and situated nature of civility is de- (Taylor, 1996) of much diplomatic scholarship, while thinking through
veloped empirically in the second paper of the issue, where Jeffrey et al. how civility works in such a rules-based and structured social arena.
examine the significance of coffee shops to the performance of youth One of the key findings of this work, and a thread that links a number of
citizenship in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and South Africa. While the papers in this collection, is the methodological implications of this
both locations have been the subject of numerous studies of civil so- argument. For Kuus, individuals matter and the production of trans-
ciety, following the approach of the issue as a whole, the paper seeks to national diplomatic fields is mediated through the biographies, char-
orientate attention to the significance of civility in the operation of isma and characteristics of individual diplomatic actors. This carries a
youth politics. In particular, and echoing Boyd's sentiments, the authors series of methodological consequences, not least that tracing such sites
trace the operation of a form of intimacy-geopolitics, where embodied of transnational civility requires patient academic labour and reflex-
practices of proximity, institutional belonging and quotidian routines ivity concerning individual positionality.

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This question of human agency and the centrality of the individual [Link]/10.1016/[Link].2018.10.004.
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Acknowledgements Alex Jeffrey∗

University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
This special issue emerges from the Dilemmas of Civil Society work-
shop, held at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge in March
Lynn Staeheli
2015, held as part of a European Research Council Advanced Grant
University of Arizona, United States
‘Youth Citizenship in Divided Societies: Between Cosmopolitanism,
Nation, and Civil Society’ (ERC295392). We are grateful to all the
contributors to the workshop and to the Editors of Political Geography David J. Marshall
for their supportive and patient handling of the special issue. Elon University, United States
E-mail addresses: asj38@[Link] (A. Jeffrey),
Appendix A. Supplementary data lstaeheli@[Link] (L. Staeheli),
dmarshall8@[Link] (D.J. Marshall)
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://

∗
Corresponding author.

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