Roman Stoics - Sociology of Peace Processes - Lecture Notes, Study notes of Sociology

Download Roman Stoics - Sociology of Peace Processes - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! Sociology of peace processes Lecture 6 summary: Civil society and peace processes I want to do three things today: 1 I will define what I mean by civil society 2 show how it impacts on peace processes, good and bad 3 and illustrate the arguments with some examples. Civil society is a very ancient term, going back to the Roman Stoics, Machiavelli, and Adam Ferguson in Scotland, and this brings us only to the eighteenth century. And there are several meanings to the term. There are three meanings to the term in currency today, one of which is emphasised strongly in the good governance literature. These three meanings are: civil society as voluntary association; civil society as the public sphere; civil society as the good society. The equation of civil society with voluntary association is an idea that resonates with a lot of contemporary sociology. It is implicated in Anthony Giddens’s notion of the ‘third way’, Robert Putnam’s discussion of social capital and in sociology’s anxieties about what is called a ‘mass society’. The argument goes back to Adam Ferguson in eighteenth-century Scotland, and his book entitled An Essay on the History of Civil Society, published in 1767. Modern societies need an array of institutions, organisations and voluntary bodies in which people can participate – trade unions, churches, charities, scouting organisations, parent-teacher associations, NGOs, women’s groups, football and sporting groups and so on and so on. Various benefits derive from such participation. These benefits affect the quality of the relationships people have, their level of identification with each other, and strengthen what Ferguson called so long ago people’s ‘social bond’. On the whole the attention within this meaning of the term is on what sociologists might call our sociability: on our patterns of relationships, feelings of belonging and senses of community and the like. Another meaning of the term civil society extends this argument in the direction of politics. The theory of deliberative democracy places emphasis on the public sphere as a way of under girding and supporting democracy – public debate (that is public deliberation) in a variety of publics encourages feelings of shared interests, encourages a willingness to compromise and work together. In this view, civil society is an arena for political deliberation in public; and the extent to which this space exists in the public sphere determines the health of the democracy. Civil society is under threat wherever the state centralizes power, reduces the effectiveness of public forums, or eliminates the opportunity for free deliberation. This argument too draws on a vibrant sociological tradition. Habermas, for example, wrote about the importance of the perfect uncorrupted language game, in which conversationalists in public dialogue until they reach a compromise, suggesting that the best ideas win out the public argument not they who shout loudest. Dialogue politics, conducted in the public sphere, offers a route to reach normative consensus within society and peaceful and stable politics. Civil society for docsity.com Habermas is thus the route into solving the crisis of legitimacy that modern states suffer, for it offers the opportunity for what he calls emancipatory discourse, the dialogue of compromise and mutual interest. Both sorts of arguments equate civil society with the good society. This is the third meaning attributed to the term: it means the ‘good’, the morally valuable and best way of organising human affairs. I need say little more on this except that notions of what is good are relative. In all of these representations, civil society is seen as mediating between two powerful forces that people need to be protected from – a controlling and centralising state, and the free reign of people’s selfish interests and individualism: civil society is, if you like, a way of mediating between the state and the free market, between the trammelling of political liberties by a central state and the trammelling of our sociability by the selfishness promoted by the free market. This means that civil society is an idea that is against free market capitalism as much as it’s against authoritarian and dictatorial rule. These things are not incompatible – Giddens’ notion of the third way is an attempt to find a route between state socialism, free market capitalism and the liberal welfare state, in order to socially regulate the market without centralising political control. These two scripts to the idea of civil society, mean that proponents often focus on one rather than the other. It is for this reason that the good governance literature, for example, focuses on the political dimensions of civil society, the way is protects and supports democracy, rather than its role as a defence against the free reign of an untrammelled market. Civil society is influential in peace processes, which has to do with the skills, resources and motivations found in civil society compared to the grassroots. If I could summarise the role of civil society in peace processes, it’s worth considering civil society as occupying four spaces within a peace process. Intellectual spaces in which alternative ideas are envisaged and peace is envisioned; as institutional spaces in which these alternatives are enacted and practiced by an array of voluntary and intermediary associations; as sociological spaces in which cultural, social and material resources are devoted by the institutions in civil society to enact these alternatives; and as political spaces in which these organisations and associations engage with the political process in assisting the negotiation of peace settlements. In South Africa and Northerrn Ireland civil society filled the gap left from the political vacuum arising from their unfair and unjust systems. In Northern Ireland, following the introduction of direct rule in 1972, the democratic accountability of the state was severely diminished as officials in the Northern Ireland Office replaced locally accountable representatives. Politically emasculated politicians filled this void able only to exercise veto power – the power to say no to British led policy initiatives without carrying responsibility locally for the policy deficit this caused. In Northern Ireland, some of these groups are neighbourhood based, addressing locality-wide communal issues that affect their area, others deal with specific constituencies or issues, such as women’s groups, victims of crime and reconciliation and peace issues. Former military activists and ex- prisoners groups, vie with church people, the victims of crime, women’s groups, trade docsity.com