Globality, Democracy and Civil Society

✍ Scribed by Terrell Carver (editor), Jens Bartelson (editor)

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 218
• Series: Democratization and Autocratization Studies
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Globality, Democracy and Civil Society explores the relationship between the concepts of democracy and civil society through a comparison of their meaning and function in different historical and cultural contexts.

This volume presents detailed contextual studies in Europe, North America, Japan, Russia and Turkey. The contributors explore different ways of understanding and developing democratic practices and institutions. Rather than projecting the conditions of modern representative, state-centric democracy onto the global realm, they propose ways of rethinking these very conditions in terms of human diversity and difference. This is done by exploring conceptions of democracy that reconcile cultural plurality with democratic practices, and by using a number of examples and perspectives framed by a global context, rather than by geographical divides between East and West. The contributors are not trying to define the concept of civil society, but rather demonstrating the different ways it is deployed in political practice and disseminated through on-going processes of globalisation.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students of global democracy and governance, cosmopolitan democracy, the future of civil society in a globalising world, comparative politics and political thought.

✦ Table of Contents

Book Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I Engaging the issues in theory
1 Civil society and class: Centrality and occlusion in discourse and practice
2 The East/West perspective and civil society: Making visible similarities and differences
3 A historical reappraisal of civil society discourse in postwar Japan
4 The ‘Postwar Enlightenment’ project: Masao Maruyama and liberal civil society
5 ‘Mass society’ and ‘civil society’ in postwar Japan
6 Challenging democratic governance: The impact of globalisation on the territorial and temporal sovereignty of the state and the capacities of civil society
7 Civil society, democratic values and human rights
8 Democracy in the twenty-first century: Global questions
Part II Engaging the issues in practice
9 Democracy, civil society and women’s public personae: Turkish women and Muslim headscarves
10 Civil society between Europe and Asia: Postcommunist Russian democracy
11 Civil society in Japan: Peace movements and the post- war Japanese Constitution
12 Space and the politics of civil society: Citizens at play
Index