Elisabeth Lilja

A New Ecology of Civil Society II

This special section is the continuation of the theme ‘A new ecology of civil society’ that was taken up in Volume 11, Issue 2 (June 2015) of Journal of Civil Society. The articles in these special sections present some of the results from research projects within the Civil Society Programme launched in 2010 by the Swedish Research Council, a government agency that provides funding for basic research in all disciplinary domains. All results from the Programme are presented on a common website. These articles examine the new ecology of civil society and the ongoing transformation of the theoretical foundation of civil society. This questioning of the basic concept of civil society takes place in the context of processes of globalization, individualization and the development of new information technology. The transformation of civil society raises questions about the fundamental conditions of civil society as such, its roles and functions, as well as its new arenas and forms. The new ecology of civil society sets the stage for examination of two key fields of inquiry: On one hand, civil society as a discursive field and processes on new arenas for the public and, on the other hand, civil society as a problem of social organization in a globalized network society. The articles published in the first special section of the Journal of Civil Society (Lagerkvist, 2015; Mulinari, 2015; Räthzel, Uzzell, Lundström, & Leandro, 2015) portray a much more complex picture of civil society as social organization and question the Western European and American conception of civil society as formal organizations with clearcut boundaries dividing different societal spheres. The ‘classical’ Northern concept of civil society was also questioned from a ‘Southern’ perspective. The research findings published in this second special section of the Journal of Civil Society are clearly moving towards a reconsideration of the concept of civil society as a process rather than as a structure. The new ecology of civil society thus requires that the analysis of civil society’s formal organizations also focuses on civil society’s practices, as a way of ‘doing’ of civil societies and how this doing is performed in different temporalities on different arenas for interaction as public staging. A long durée approach can improve our understanding of the long-term changes of civil society and help to identify Journal of Civil Society, 2015 Vol. 11, No. 4, 402–407, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17448689.2015.1112510