“Beyond NGOs: Civil and Uncivil Society in the 21st Century"

February 26-27 2009
at Goodenough College, London WC1

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

The Centre for Civil Society and the CINEFOGO Network of Excellence invites participants for this forthcoming international conference, which investigates the role of organizations and movements that fall outside conventional civil society analysis and aims to develop new perspectives on issues of transnationality, migration and citizenship in and beyond Europe.

The conference covers three broad themes. The first theme will explore the role of civil society organizations beyond the NGO sector. These include churches, mosques, religious movements, migrant networks, criminal groups and gangs. This research theme will raise issues around the diversity of social and political society both in European and in developing country contexts.

The second broad theme will explore the engagement of governments with social organizations outside the formal NGO sector. A key focus will be on changing European government policies towards the funding and management of civil, social and religious groups. Included in this strand would be the growing interest in working with faith-based organisations, diasporas, transnational advocacy networks as well as the work and international connections of Christian and Islamic organisations.

The third broad theme will examine civil society theory in the light of recent challenges, which have seen notions of civil society as European or Western impositions, and criticised their deployment within European and World Bank policies. Questions of what is civil and uncivil, or what is political society versus civil society open up new social science perspectives on the value of civil society as an analytical device and possible different understandings and applications of it.

The conference will feature a number of lively panel sessions exploring these broad themes, with papers concerning such diverse topics as Diasporas and Development in the Caribbean, State-Society Relationship in China, struggles in the global Indymedia network, amongst others.

Confirmed keynote speakers include Professor Jenny Pearce, Department of Peace Studies, Bradford University and Professor Meyda Yegenoglu, Middle East Technical University, Ankara. They will reflect critically on concepts such as populism and extremism in Europe; globalisation, civil society in North and South and democratic culture; and religion, secularism and democracy.

The conference will begin at 9.30am on Thursday 26th February and will end on the Friday afternoon.

No conference fees will be charged but participants will be expected to arrange their own travel and accommodation and to cover the costs of this themselves. Participants affiliated to a CINEFOGO institution should be able to reclaim these costs from their institution.

If you would like to attend this conference please complete the attached form and return it to ccs@lse.ac.uk as soon as possible. The final deadline to apply for a place has now been extended to 18th February if places are still available, but please book early to avoid disappointment.

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