The heyday of civil society activism in Latin America and the scholarly output that accompanied it was a product of more optimistic times. For Latin Americans as much as for Latinamericanists the focus on and enthusiasm for civil society was born of the new opportunities for democratic engagement occasioned by the end of a period of dictatorship and terror. Fresh perspectives on politics were called for, ones that challenged earlier revolutionary and liberal paradigms, and brought democratic theory, institutions, principles and politics into sharper focus as sites of struggle and transformation.
In this context, civil society organisations (CSOs) were seen as the dynamic force in social reform, and as the way to transform politics altogether. Civil society and citizenship entered the Left's lexicon – at once part of a new political imaginary and field of action. And yet, three decades on, as the chapters in this collection show, some of that enthusiasm has been tempered. This is not because of any decline in social movement activism in Latin America. It continues to play its part in the region's political landscape, as shown by ongoing mobilisations by indigenous anti-extractivist protests, women against gender-based violence, Afro-Latino and LGBT movements, mass demonstrations against austerity, and much else besides. If the scholarship on social movements has a more sober ring today, it is perhaps because it focuses more on disappointed hopes than on the gains that were made.
Beyond Civil Society offers a reassessment of ‘the civil society turn’ in Latin America through an examination of 15 case studies. Not surprisingly, Brazil predominates (seven chapters), given its significance as a principal site of civil society mobilisation and participatory democracy during the ‘golden years’ of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT). The book is the result of a long collaboration across a network of social movement scholars, some of whom – like co-editor Sonia Alvarez and contributor Arturo Escobar – were founders of the research group that led to the publication of the 1992 landmark text The Making of Social Movements in Latin America (Westview Press).
In general, little agreement exists on the meaning of civil society in Latin America and it remains as contested as is the activism that is associated with it. As Leonardo Avritzer points out in a critical review of the uses made of the concept, civil society was often adapted to suit the arguments made by scholars without due regard for empirical evidence, more tailored as it was to the concerns (and hopes) of the Left. With its popularisation, civil society came to be used co-terminously with social movements, NGOs and CSOs, with the focus on the disadvantaged and those whom authors saw as destined to bring transformative change. This differentiated Latin American usages from Liberal political theory, where civil society connotes a broader entity including middle and upper classes, business, trade unions, religious organisations and so on. In all iterations, however, civil society's defining ideal characteristic is its independence from political authority, critical in serving as a counterweight to state power.
It is this theme of civil society autonomy and its opposite, state co-optation, colonisation, predation – that runs through the collection. A concern of many of the authors is to understand the tensions between the opportunities presented by – and the limits of – ‘The Civil Society Agenda’. This refers to the civil-society ‘strengthening’ initiatives that became part of international development policy from the 1990s, and that were annexed to good governance and democracy promotion. Millie Thayer details how, as funds were directed to this end first by donors then by governments, social movements lost their autonomy and oppositional character and became reliant on donor funds or state support. The book's case study format retells this familiar story documenting the disappointing trajectories of social movements and CSOs in a number of rich and detailed accounts. Not that the authors give up entirely on the ‘civil society agenda’, but something vital and generative, they argue, was lost in this process of co-optation.
Brazil's once-lauded participatory governance model is a paradigmatic case. Participation, once (rightly) embraced as a key principle of democratic engagement and more disingenuously as capable of ‘destabilising the bourgeois political system’, can morph into a form of top-down governance. Contributors acknowledge the potentially positive dynamic of participation but also show the limits of actually existing participation. In Brazil, with a progressive party in power from the early 1980s, civil society and citizenship represented a way to rethink the relationship between new social actors and the state. But in time the familiar problems of the lack of grass roots representativity, independence and influence appeared. This evolution is well documented in Gianpaolo Baocchi's account of how citizen participation became central to government functioning in Brazil.
Such cases, however, are not so much an argument against participation and civil society activism, as one for showing how important it is to get the right mechanisms in place to ensure its effectiveness. Too much party or state involvement, or even too little as when governments fail to respond to popular demands are both problems. There are certainly costs in engaging with states, but there are also risks of retreating entirely from engaging with them. Herein lies the dilemma so often faced by social movements as much as by those who write about them. As a way out of the standard binary, Alvarez develops a heuristic typology to differentiate between regimes, or forms of governmentality associated with participation, some of which allow of more positive outcomes than others.
If the authors have not given up on civil society – and indeed several berate the facile dismissal of civic participation as neoliberal collusion – where does Beyond Civil Society leave us? Escobar notes the changes that civil society has undergone in recent years and the challenges this presents for social theory. Social movements, he says, became ‘more complex … less bounded, less neatly oppositional, … more resistant to theory’ (p. ix). Perhaps – but was it not ever thus? The consensus among the authors seems to favour a pragmatic approach, seeing some purchase in ‘decolonising the Civil Society Agenda’ so that its more disabling elements can be ‘identified and acted upon’ (p. xii). Some hail uncivic activism as a motor for change to overcome the complacency and constraints of lo permitido, the ‘invited’ participation that was promoted in the 1990s. There is an acknowledgement that the debate over the civil society agenda is messy, with competing versions of what is possible.
This book then is of its time, a moment to revisit and rethink the significance of transformative politics in the changed circumstances of the Latin American region.
The authors give us much to chew over, to agree and disagree with. But at the heart of this book lies the unsolved problem of how best to achieve a transformative politics and social justice. In the end this goes beyond the realm of popular social activism to also involve improving the institutions of liberal democracy, making them more transparent and political parties more responsive. As this book shows, despite the Latin American Left's uneasy and ambiguous relationship with Liberal democracy, social movements invariably have to deal with it if they are to realise their demands. That being so, the nature of states and representative institutions remain critical strategic issues.
