Framing Civility in the Middle East: Alternative perspectives on the state and civil society

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 32, Issue 5, 2011, Pages 827-843

  Volpi, Frédéric ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARAB WORLD; CIVIL SOCIETY; ETHNOPOLITICS; ISLAMISM; LIBERALISM; POLITICAL CHANGE; POLITICAL PARTICIPATION; STATE-LOCAL RELATIONS;

MIDDLE EAST;

EID: 79960900269     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: 13602241     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2011.578954     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. For a synthetic perspective on these debates, see F Volpi, Political Islam Observed: Disciplinary Perspectives, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
2. See, for example, B Barber, Jihad vs McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World, New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.
3. See, from a developmental perspective, JS Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. For a sophisticated reconsideration of these issues in the post-Cold War and post-9/11 contexts.
4. see RW Hefner (ed), Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
5. On this generic aspect of the postcolonial predicament, see A Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001.
6. Barber, Jihad vs McWorld.
7. Compare, from a political perspective, MP Posusney, 'Enduring authoritarianism: Middle East lessons for comparative theory', Comparative Politics, 36(2), 2004, pp 127-138.
8. with K Collins, 'The political role of clans in Central Asia', Comparative Politics, 35(2), 2003, pp 171-190.
9. See, from a democracy promotion perspective, T Carothers & M Ottaway (eds), Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005.
10. N Elias, The Civilizing Process, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
11. In this respect a parallel can be drawn with the construction of the contemporary notion of Islamism. See S Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, London: Zed Books, 2003.
12. See the contribution by Armando Salvatore in this work.
13. Elias, The Civilizing Process.
14. The notion of a state-induced form of société policée was well developed subsequently by Foucault via his notion of bio-politics. M Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed P Rabinow, New York: New Press, 1997.
15. and Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, London: Palgrave, 2008.
16. Generally civility articulates a context-dependent orientation towards understanding and a respect for difference. See M Kingwell, A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue and the Politics of Pluralism, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.
17. They provided the context for the rise of the civil society of the European enlightenment as described, for example, by Jürgen Habermas.
18. From a cultural perspective, see P Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans R Nice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
19. J Keane, Global Civil Society?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p 199.
20. In relation to Middle Eastern polities, see S Ismail, Political Life in Cairo's New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
21. W Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
22. R Boyd, 'The value of civility?', Urban Studies, 43(5-6), 2006, pp 863-878.
23. This field of study is generally illustrative of a trend in which considerations about what is desirable for a good polity shape the debate about the means considered reasonable for civic interactions.
24. For an alternative take on civility as toleration of differences, see A Ayhan, 'Framing faith-based radicalism in the context of civil society: beyond an ontological approach', in C Timmerman, D Hutsebaut, S Mels, W Nonneman & W Van Herck (eds), Faith-based Radicalism: Christianity, Islam and Judaism between Constructive Activism and Destructive Fanaticism, Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007.
25. C Taylor, 'Modes of civil society', Public Culture, 3(1), 1991, pp 95-118.
26. J Dunn, 'The contemporary political significance of John Locke's conception of civil society', in S Kaviraj & S Khilnani (eds), Civil Society: History and Possibilities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp 39-57.
27. For some critical considerations, see the contributors to B Edwards, MW Foley & M Diani (eds), Beyond Tocqueville: Civil Society and the Social Capital Debate in Comparative Perspective, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001.
28. P Kopecký & C Mudde, 'Rethinking civil society', Democratization, 10(3), 2003, pp 10-11.
29. See also the contributors to Kopecky & Mudde (eds), Uncivil Society? Contentious Politics in Post-Communist Europe, London: Routledge, 2003.
30. For an historical sketch of the debates on civil versus uncivil society, see R Boyd, Uncivil Society: The Perils of Pluralism and the Making of Modern Liberalism, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
31. For a neo-Tocquevillian interpretation, see R Putnam, 'Bowling alone: America's declining social capital', Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 1995, pp 64-78.
32. See, for example, C Benard, Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies, Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2004.
33. and JB Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, New York: Basic Books, 2004.
34. M Walzer, 'The civil society argument', in G Shafir (ed), The Citizenship Debates: A Reader, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, p 292.
35. See, for example, J Cohen & A Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
36. E Shils, 'Civility and civil society', in EC Banfield (ed), Civility and Citizenship in Liberal Democratic Societies, New York: Paragon House, 1992, p 1.
37. A Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society, New York: Free Press, 1992, p 165.
38. LW Pye, 'Civility, social capital, and civil society: three powerful concepts for explaining Asia', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXIX(4), 1999, p 764.
39. For an analysis of such an 'orientalist' bias, see BS Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism, London: Routledge, 1994.
40. See Carothers & Ottaway, Uncharted Journey.
41. Regime change or regime reform, as was recently witnessed in Tunisia and Egypt (at the time of writing), should not be mistaken for a complete transformation of state-society relations, not least because most of the agents that were part of the earlier structures of governance, at all but the most senior level, remain crucial to the survival of the new state.
42. For a corrective, see the contributors to A Salvatore & DF Eickelman (eds), Public Islam and the Common Good, Leiden: Brill, 2004.
43. See also M Browers, Political Ideology in the Arab World: Accommodation and Transformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
44. B Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
45. and Barber, 'The discourse of civility', in SL Elkin & KE Soltan (eds), Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1999, pp 39-48.
46. B Barber, 'Jihad vs McWorld', Atlantic Magazine, March 1992.
47. Dunn, 'The contemporary political significance of John Locke's conception of civil society'.
48. See, for example, B Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, London: Palgrave, 2000.
49. and W Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
50. At the international level, see A Linklater, 'Norbert Elias, the "civilizing process" and the sociology of international relations', International Politics, 41(1), 2004, pp 3-35.
51. C Calhoun, 'The virtue of civility', Philosophy & Public Affairs, 29(3), 2000, p 271.
52. C Calhoun, 'The virtue of civility', Philosophy & Public Affairs, 29(3), 2000, p 262.
53. C Calhoun, 'The virtue of civility', Philosophy & Public Affairs, 29(3), 2000, p 264.
54. Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, p 300.
55. S Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
56. Brown. Regulating Aversion.
57. J Spinner, The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Liberal State, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p 94.
58. Calhoun, 'The virtue of civility', p 271.
59. L Wedeen, Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
60. and S Slyomovics, The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
61. RW Hefner, Democratic Civility: The History and Cross-Cultural Possibility of a Modern Political Ideal, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998, p 20.
62. Calhoun, 'The virtue of civility', p 264.
63. J Rawls, Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p 217.
64. J Rawls, The Law of Peoples, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
65. In international relations theory similar problems are encountered by Linklater when he argues that 'the discourse approach is not limited to relations between committed liberals but can be applied globally to all human collectivities'. A Linklater, 'Dialogic politics and the civilising process', Review of International Studies, 31(1), 2005, p 152.
66. Calhoun, 'The virtue of civility', p 272.
67. Ismail, Political Life in Cairo's New Quarters.
68. AB Seligman, 'Ritual and sincerity: certitude and the other', Philosophy and Social Criticism, 36(1), 2010, pp 9-39.
69. Calhoun, 'The virtue of civility', p 271.
70. Rorty addresses this point frontally in his 'religion as conversation-stopper', in R Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, London: Penguin, 2000.
71. L Whitehead, Democratization: Theory and Experience, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p 82.
72. N Kasfir, 'The conventional notion of civil society: a critique', in Kasfir (ed), Civil Society and Democracy in Africa: Critical Perspectives, London: Frank Cass, 1998, pp 1-20.
73. and M Browers, Democracy and Civil Society in Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006.
74. See, for example, M Ottaway & T Carothers (eds), Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000. The ambiguous attitudes of Western governments towards the social influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during and after the process of regime change in 2011 are indicative of this frame of mind.
75. See, for example, M Ottaway & A Hamzawy, Getting to Pluralism: Political Actors in the Arab World, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009.
76. On this issue, see S Ismail, Political Life in Cairo's New Quarters; and her contribution in this work.
77. By 'bricolage' I am loosely referring to the process described by Lé vi Strauss, particularly in relation to myths. C Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans J Weightman & D Weightman, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966.
78. An alternative and more recent account of similar processes in terms of 'metis' is well presented in JC Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.