Since the emergence of the dissident "parallel polis" in Eastern Europe, civil society has become a "new superpower," influencing democratic transformations, human rights, and international co-operation; co-designing economic trends, security and defense; reshaping the information society; and generating new ideas on the environment, health...

Introduction Lars Trägårdh and Nina Witoszek Chapter 1. The Dawn of Monitory Democracy John Keane Chapter 2. Civil Society in the Age of Crisis John Clark Chapter 3. Digital Deprivation: New Media, Civil Society and Sustainability Paddy Coulter and Cathy Baldwin Chapter 4. “Monitory” versus “Managed” Democracy: Does Civil Society Matter in Contemporary Russia? Kathryn Stoner-Weiss Chapter 5. Monitory Democracy and Ecological Civilization in the People’s Republic of China James Miller Chapter 6. Tenuous Spaces: Civil Society in Burma/Myanmar David Steinberg Chapter 7. Kenya’s Green Belt Movement: Contributions, Conflict, Contradictions, and Complications in a Prominent ENGO Bron Taylor Chapter 8. A New Direction in Transnational Civil Society: The Politics of Muslim NGO Coalitions Zeynep Atalay Chapter 9. Anti-Totalitarian Feminism? Civic Resistance in Iran Nina Witoszek and Haideh Daragahi Chapter 10. Associative Democracy in the Swedish Welfare State Lars Trägårdh Chapter 11. State Capture of Civil Society: Effects of Patronage in the Norwegian Aid Industry Asle Toje Chapter 12. Civil Society as a Driver of Governance Innovation: A Montesquieu Perspective Atle Midttun Chapter 13. Afterword: An Ounce of Action is Worth a Ton of Theory Bill McKibben prefaced by Nina Witoszek and Lars Trägårdh Bibliography Index  

“This is an ambitious effort to capture and contextualize highly diverse broad-ranging trends of contemporary and emerging civil society worldwide and to open a debate on how to theorize these trends. It provides a set of conceptual and theoretical inroads as well as a variety of empirical cases on state–civil society relations and is a welcomed contribution to the field of civil society studies and democratization studies.”  ·  Jens Stilhoff Sörensen, Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Stockholm “[A]collection of original and sophisticated chapters. The combination of theoretical and empirical chapters – addressing and debating political activism (understood here through the concept of ‘civil society’) and the state and nature of contemporary democracy in various different contexts – is convincing and makes the collection an attractive and valuable contribution to our understanding of contemporary political dynamics.”  ·  Sabine Selchow, London School of Economics