Abstract
“Latin America has become ground zero for citizen participation,” Gianpaolo Baiocchi observes in the first chapter of Beyond Civil Society. The product of an ambitious, transnational, and long-term collective research program, Beyond Civil Society brings together rich empirical studies motivated by a common theoretical interest in what the editors call the “Civil Society Agenda…the hegemonic though contested set of normative and prescriptive assumptions about citizen participation” that contend participation will promote and deepen democracy (p. 2). Given the mass proliferation of citizen engagement around the globe, critical scholars have questioned this assumption. Has participatory democracy been coopted by the state? Does contentious activism undermine institutionalized participation? And, how do we theorize participation as a form of social movement activism and civic engagement?
Beyond Civil Society tackles these important questions through an interpretive framework that make sense of the forms of participation that have emerged throughout Latin America in the twenty-first century. Refreshingly, instead of siloing seemingly divergent forms of participation and protest, the authors theorize broad and varied forms of contentious collective action and civic participation as part of a collective effort to decolonize civil society, participation, and association. This analytic effort begins at the outset, when the editors contrast their “Civil Society Agenda” with what they call, “Uncivic Activism,” or the forms of contention that disobey the accepted forms of civic participation. The subsequent chapters draw on rich historical and qualitative data collected across Latin America to unpack the actions and demands that are authorized or tolerated (lo permitido) and those that are unauthorized or intolerable (no lo permitido) within the “Civil Society Agenda.”
The book is divided into four parts. These collections of related essays begin by reflecting on the Civil Society Agenda in Brazil, and then move onto map national and regional social movement fields, examine the intersections and challenges of civic and uncivic politics, and finally consider the role of social movements in reformulating Latin American states. While these case studies are diverse, 7 of the 16 chapters focus on Brazil, reminding the reader of the centrality of the Brazilian experience in theorizing participatory politics. This is not a weakness of the text but an opportunity to consider the national and transnational dimensions of the cases examined: for example, the role of the Catholic Church and the International Monetary Fund in the construction of a “feminist people” in Argentina, as described by Graciela Di Marco (chapter 6), multinational corporations motivating transnational contentious action in Argentina and Uruguay, as described by Graciela Monteagudo (chapter 7), and the role of international mining corporations in Peru, as analyzed by Raphael Hoetmer (chapter 9).
While the interpretive framework of this text introduces a series of binaries to make sense of participation and activism (civic or uncivic, lo permitido or no lo permitido), the authors avoid the pitfall of simply and uncritically (re)classifying social action. Various chapters describe and theorize the ways that actors draw on both civic and uncivic forms of protest. For example, Jeffrey W. Rubin clearly shows how activists combine “civil” institutional participation in elections, commissions, and conferences with “uncivil” contentious action through protest, grassroots organizing, and civil disobedience. Drawing on his research on the Movement of Rural Women Workers in Brazil, Rubin argues that this constellation of practices constitutes “movement in democracy” that can promote progressive reform (chapter 11). Further theorizing this nexus of civic and uncivic action, Millie Thayer extends the concept of a “gray zone” to examine how market logics and commodifying discourses shape the relationship between two women’s organizations in northeast Brazil (chapter 8). Ultimately, Beyond Civil Society develops the foundations of a relational theory of participatory political action. While previous studies have focused primarily on the “space, place, or form in which citizen action unfolds,” the editors explicitly focus on the “political effect on activisms and its relationship to dominant discursive formations and constellations of power.”
I especially appreciated the book’s attention to the failures, unintended consequences, and ambivalences of participatory practices. In chapter 3, Andrea Cornwall analyzes the experience of a participatory health council in Brazil to understand what happens when democratic spaces “close down” and ultimately do little to change the status quo. Drawing on his research in Porto Alegre, Benjamin Junge shows how the ambivalences, contradictions, and refusals of community leaders engaged in participatory budgeting diverge from the construction of an “ideal participant” envisioned by the “Civil Society Agenda” (chapter 4). Multiple chapters also analyze how identity-based demands based on race, class, gender, and sexuality have ambiguous outcomes. For instance, Agustín Lao Montes maps the evolution of Afro-Latin American politics over time, arguing that neoliberal institutions favor individuals and groups (los negros escogidos) who align with the “Civil Society Agenda” (chapter 5). These and other chapters provide important models for future research on participation that moves beyond a success or failure narrative and takes seriously the complications and ambivalences embedded in the lived experiences of civic participation.
The book, in the end, is hopeful for the future. Reflecting on the combined decades of experience with participatory initiatives, the conclusion argues that the book is not only about the containment and cooptation of institution politics, but the overflow of activism and protest that remain unconstrained “by the Civil Society Agenda, by past forms of uncivic activism, by national borders, by categories of scholarship and scholarly analysis, or by the internal structures of social movements themselves” (p. 335).