In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Civil society in Anglophone Cameroon Introduction This volume on the role of civil society in Africa, particularly in Anglophone Cameroon, is very topical since ‘civil society’ has become a popular concept in academic and policy-making circles on the African continent in the past two decades. The recent emergence in Africa of this concept, with its historical roots in Enlightenment Europe, has actually given rise to fierce debates among Africanists about its usefulness as an analytical construct and policy tool in a non-Western context (cf. Allen 1997; Lewis 2002). In the first section of this introductory chapter I argue that a concept that is borrowed from Western discourse needs to be contextualised in a comparative manner to adequately capture and explain the African reality. I therefore attempt to shed more light on the nature of civil society in Africa by focusing on one of the neglected, or even totally rejected, aspects of civil society, namely its relationship with ethno-regionalism and the politics of belonging (Orvis 2001; Osaghae 2005; Nyamnjoh 2005). I stress that ethno-regional associations and movements are an integral part of civil society in Africa, being of even greater significance to the ordinary people than conventional civil-society organisations. In the second section, I attempt to show how the politics of belonging has pervaded most civil-society organisations that were created or revived during the current neoliberal economic and political reforms. The final section offers a concise description of the various essays included in this volume. 2 CHAPTER 1 Towards an African version of civil society Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a global ubiquity of the concept of civil society among researchers and activists, and a widespread assumption among policy-makers in different parts of the world about its global relevance in strengthening development and democracy. Clearly much of the current interest in civil society is closely linked to the global dominance of neoliberalism with its goodgovernance agenda that has stressed the need for less, but also for better, government in African states (Konings 2004c; Carmody 2007). The Bretton Woods institutions , foreign donors and their academic pathfinders seem to have reinvented the notion of civil society to serve their neoliberal doctrine, seeing it as the missing link between citizens and the state and the prime mover in desired neoliberal economic and political reforms (World Bank 2000; Harbeson et al. 1994). Donor support for the empowerment of (assumed) weak civic organisations in Africa has been a central point of this neoliberal agenda. The neoliberal perspective, which proclaimed the dawn of a new democratic era, has been increasingly contested as being ideologically laden and too optimistic because it does not appear to reflect actual socio-political and economic processes in Africa. After an initially hopeful beginning, numerous failures of liberal democracy across the continent could be observed, as well as the survival of most of the African neopatrimonial and authoritarian regimes. It has also been pointed out that the neoliberal assumption of a close link between civil society and neoliberal economic and political reforms tended to obfuscate the complexity, scope and functions of civil society. After all, civil society existed before neoliberal reforms and will continue to exist after them (Kasfir 1998; Osaghae 2005). Paradoxically, there was also growing evidence that the prescribed strengthening of civil society could constitute an important means not only to realising neoliberal reforms but also to challenging and resisting neoliberal orthodoxies (Abrahamson 2000; Konings 2004c). Strikingly, optimists and pessimists alike have based their argumentation on Western notions of civil society and have thus been inclined to define (often implicitly) civil society in terms that were too narrow in the African context and to demand too much of it (Hutchful 1996; Orvis 2001). Indeed how to define civil society and delineate its boundaries has been a persistent problem in African Studies (cf. Harbeson et al. 1994; Hann & Dunn 1996; Kasfir 1998; Comaroff & Comaroff 1999; Lewis 2002; Osaghae 2005). Most Africanists use the ‘associational life’ version of civil society, referring to those organisations , both formal and informal, that cohabit the public realm with the state and mediate relations between the individual (or household) and the state. In practice however, they do not usually include all such organisations in their definitions. By giving the concept of civil society a relatively narrow and normative meaning (Kasfir 1998), they restrict the core of civil society to a relatively limited set of organisations [18.218.127.141] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 20:03...

Share