Berghahn Books Frontiers of Civil Society: Government and Hegemony in Serbia: 22 (Dislocations)

In Serbia, as elsewhere in postsocialist Europe, the rise of "civil society" was expected to support a smooth transformation to Western models of liberal democracy and capitalism. More than twenty years after the Yugoslav wars, these expectations appear largely unmet. Frontiers of Civil Society asks why, exploring the roles of multiple civil society forces in a set of government "reforms" of society and individuals in the early 2010s, and examining them in the broader context of social struggles over neoliberal restructuring and transnational integration. Review "Marek Mikus' book expands an important tradition of empirically-based critical research on one of the main ideational and institutional concepts of post-socialist transition: civil society." - Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe "All in all, Frontiers of Civil Society is an empirically rich book which provides a wealth of theoretical arguments that will be of interest to a wide range of disciplines and fields... Apart for the more obvious audiences of the book, all scholars interested in Europeanisation processes should read this book as it provides an important critical account of the reforms pursued by the European integration agenda, which to date has received scant scholarly attention." - Southeastern Europe "A significant contribution to a number of fields--postsocialist "transition" studies, the emerging forms of social organization in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, and debates about civil society. It is welcome on all those fronts, and contributes via a strong combination of very rich empirical work in Serbia and a commitment to theorizing the patterns, relations, and formations that the fieldwork reveals." - John Clarke, The Open University About the Author Marek Mikuš is Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale), and at the Department of Geography, Trinity College Dublin. He has previously been Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the Comenius University in Bratislava, and a Lecturer at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg.