Challenges to Civil Society: Popular Protest & Governance in ...

Chapter 2

Bringing the Civil in “Civil Society” Back

No society is a shining model of civility. Every civil society—past and present, modern and industrialized as well as impoverished and underdeveloped—has exhibited tendencies that explicitly challenge the idyllic concept of civil society as a haven of openness, nonviolence, solidarity, and justice (Boyd, 2004; Keane, 1996; Shils, 1992). For example, in his seminal work, Reflections on Violence, John Keane (1996) wrote that nothing calls attention more to the problem of incivility within contemporary society and the potential for disintegration into a totally uncivil society than the bloodletting and conflict—the wars, genocide, ethnic cleansing, firebombed cities, concentration camps, terrorism, and gang warfare—that have plagued the twentieth century (pp. 14–19). These issues have continued into the start of the new millennium. The threat, fear, and reality of violence specifically (and I add to this the breakdown in the rule of law and civil values generally) are usually acknowledged as extreme forms of incivility which always seem to lurk