Muthiah Alagappa has assembled an impressive number of essays in this volume, which is the product of two workshops in Honolulu and Phnom Penh held in 2002. It offers contributions covering 12 countries by 14 contributors, organized by country.

Alagappa opens the volume with an extraordinarily lucid critical analysis of competing perspectives on the notion of civil society and their relevance to political change in contemporary East Asia. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the notion of “civil society” as the sine qua non of democracy has become the dominant trope in comparative political studies, first of Eastern Europe and then in the self-congratulatory rewriting of the history of democracy in the West, most notably in the United States. Many of these studies have been based on an insufficiently reflective acceptance of Alexis de Tocqueville's account of the role of voluntary, nonstate associations in creating democracy. By contrast, Alagappa proceeds from an appreciation of the insights offered by both the Tocquevillean and the “New Left” treatment inspired by Antonio Gramsci's work on hegemony and civil society, and the contributors to the volume consider seriously the possibility that Gramsci's insights on the mutual dependence of state and civil society might offer a more accurate account of the dynamics of the state–society relationship in East Asia. Alagappa defines civil society as “a realm in the interstices of the state, political society, the market, and society at large for organization by nonstate, nonmarket groups that take collective action in the pursuit of the public good; second, a distinct sphere for discourse and construction of normative ideals through interaction among nonstate groups … ; autonomous self-governance by nonstate actors in certain issue areas; and, fourth, an instrument for collective action to protect the autonomy of the nonstate public realm” (p. 32).

The findings in this volume cast a critical eye on the common presumption that the state and civil society are necessarily in opposition to one another and the notion that civil society is a category applicable only to the West. In both China and Japan, early in the twentieth century, not only were there labor unions and social movements (which are, inexplicably, excluded from the category of civil society organizations by many analysts) but also study groups, “new religions,” and their publications, providing for open public debate. Nevertheless, in late-industrializing Asian societies, which experienced state-led development, the boundaries between state and political society, and between civil society and the state, have been porous. Indeed, there has been a synergistic relationship between civil and political society in many Asian countries, offering evidence that a thriving civil society has, in fact, impeded democratization there. The evidence suggests that democratization may well require a strong state to impose limitations on the kind of violence that renders a civil society quite uncivil.

It is perhaps the South Korea case that offers the most straightforward analogue to the optimistic portrait of the role of civil society organizations as the midwife of democratization. Sunhyuk Kim's article on “South Korea: Confrontational Legacy and Democratic Contributions” also notes that South Korea's democratic transition, along with those of Taiwan and the Philippines (and some Eastern European and African cases), differed significantly from the cases in South Europe and Latin America that have so influenced the literature on democratic transitions. The former were not primarily the product of “conflicts, negotiations, and pacts among political elites” (p. 139), but rather the product of civil society groups that opposed the 1980s of Chun Doo Hwan. (p. 139).

Much of the strength of Korea's civil society derived from resistance to Japanese colonial rule. This point underscores the error of excluding liberationist groups as legitimate civil society groups in a colonial or semicolonial setting on the basis of their refusal to repudiate violence. Where the state is prepared to use violence to suppress all opposition, what chance does civil society have without groups prepared to fight for their rights (as in the American Revolution)? A definition of civil society that excludes, for example, those who made the democratizing revolution in South Africa would condemn the antiapartheid movement as uncivil, even though it cut across class divisions and ascriptive ties of ethnicity to bring a new democratic system to the land. Such a definition would affirm the injustice of an authoritarian regime rather than support the transition to democracy. It also underlines the significance of international context as a factor determining the growth or inhibition of civil society groups.

In Taiwan, too, we have an example of how an indigenous people's movement invigorated civil society and brought an end to authoritarian rule. Moreover, we see the effect not only of internal civil society organizations but also of the indirect experience of overseas Taiwanese recruiting on U.S. campuses and the lobbying of the U.S. Congress. Yun Fan's essay argues that civil society played a determinative role in the transition “by mobilizing political resistance, constructing counternarratives and ideologies, and marshaling international support for alternative elites” (p. 165). The essay highlights the role of unaligned women's organizations and overseas native Taiwanese, underscoring the limitations of a view of “civil society” as a category that can be isolated from transnational and international influences. These and other civil society groups propelled democratization through involvement in international and transnational organizations, and through efforts by overseas Taiwanese to lobby the U.S. Congress and the United Nations.

This role of international influences recurs throughout the volume. Civil rights groups opposed to British rule, which mushroomed in pre-Hindutva India, are rightly categorized as part of civil society. International nongovernmental organizations forged ties to local humanitarian groups that nurtured the former as they struggled against authoritarian rule; and alienated Malays in Britain became receptive to affirmations of their identity as Muslims emanating from Pakistan.

Where the need to reaffirm cultural identity leads individuals and groups to align themselves with ethnically or religiously exclusive programs, the implications for civil society are far from clear. On the one hand, liberationist groups in colonial Korea, Malaysia, pre-Hindutva India, and the Philippines engendered the emergence of civil society groups that four or five decades later played a major role in the democratization of their respective societies. Yet it is also clear that many such groups laid the groundwork for the deepening and institutionalization of ascriptive religious and ethnic ties that would subsequently threaten democratization. This certainly applies to Indonesia (per Edward Aspinall), India (as portrayed by Amitab Behar and Aseem Prakash), Malaysia (see the essay by Meredith L. Weiss), Sri Lanka (in Neil Davotta's contribution), and Pakistan (in the essay by Aqil Shah).

Pakistan, Malaysia, and India offer the most dramatic instances of a key finding of this volume: Civil society organizations can impede as much as encourage democratization. Certainly, fear of this outcome looms large in the eyes of the leadership of contemporary China, as they struggle against the alternative hegemonies counterpoised by religious and minority cultural groups (Mary E. Gallagher, “China,” pp. 438ff).

We can only scratch the surface of the impressive studies that form this volume in this review. One wishes for more focused treatments of the major themes, which is impossible to attain in a 500-page volume treating so many different societies. Civil Society and Political Change in Asia not only constitutes a major contribution to the study of civil society in East Asia but also helps to blaze the trail for contributions to be made in the future.