Although it has gained wide currency in the analysis of African politics, civil society remains
a “mysterious” concept in need of proper grounding and understanding as an integral part of …

In 1995, I published an article entitled “Africa in the Age of Democratization: The Civic
Limitations of Civil Society” in the African Studies Review. The article was an attempt to …

Broadly defined, civil society is the “private sphere of material, cultural and political activities
resisting the incursions of the state”(Fatton 1992, 4-5). While such a broad definition is …

The essays in this important new collection explore the diverse, unexpected, and
controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics …

One of the most vociferous and voluminous debates in African politics over the past decade
has been over the concept of civil society. Both optimists and pessimists in this debate tend …

The wave of anti-statist, anti-authoritarian political developments across East-Central
Europe in the 1980s and in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s has been accompanied …

This article considers the usefulness of the concept of civil society—both as an analytical
construct and as a policy tool—in non–Western contexts, drawing on a selected review of …

Despite its ubiquity in popular and academic discourses, consensus about the
epistemological status of the idea of civil society remains elusive. In Africa, the literature is …

In this article, I explore a possible 'conversation'between a leading African political
sociologist, Peter P. Ekeh, in his theory of 'two publics', and the late French philosopher …

There is virtue in bringing out this clash of perspectives in a simple but sharp manner at the
outset At one end is the point of view of the managers of the independent state-the view from …