MACMILLAN NGOs, Civil Society and Structural Changes

This book suggests that our notions of civil society have undergone radical changes―including structural changes in the nature of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Such massive structural changes greatly problematize the older liberal view of a simple split between state and civil society actors which nonetheless remains dominant in much of social and political sciences. The author argues that the naturalist and behaviorist approaches to civil society occlude the fact that citizens increasingly live within a particular and highly contestable way of imagining and constructing civil society. The book shows that changes in how civil society is conceptualized and organized around new practices, might mark radically new conceptions of the state that are ideologically neo-liberal and subtle in the ways they disempower ordinary citizens.  Review “They may be ridiculed by neo-liberals as ineffective and threatened by authoritarian governments who want to work through them, but this book rightly celebrates NGOs as the symbolic expression of Civil Society”. (Iver B. Neumann, co-author (with Ole Jacob Sending) of Governing the Global Polity (University of Michigan, 2010)) From the Back Cover This book suggests that our notions of civil society have undergone radical changes―including structural changes in the nature of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Such massive structural changes greatly problematize the older liberal view of a simple split between state and civil society actors which nonetheless remains dominant in much of social and political sciences. The author argues that the naturalist and behaviorist approaches to civil society occlude the fact that citizens increasingly live within a particular and highly contestable way of imagining and constructing civil society. The book shows that changes in how civil society is conceptualized and organized around new practices, might mark radically new conceptions of the state that are ideologically neo-liberal and subtle in the ways they disempower ordinary citizens.  Acar Kutay Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Istanbul Kent University, Istanbul, Turkey. About the Author Acar Kutay Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Istanbul Kent University, Istanbul, Turkey.