Civil society has become a cornerstone concept both for those managing transitions to democracy and those studying them. The term's recent revival has been attributed to the political and social transformations of countries in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 80s. 1 Opposition intellectuals and activists in Eastern Europe argued that because totalitarian regimes operated by crushing independent organizations and controlling the economy, creating a vibrant civil society outside the influence of the state was the essential task for moving from communism to democracy and a free market economy (Fedorowicz 1990). Later, the discourse circulated to places such as China, where" many... reformers and dissidents of the 1980s... saw themselves... as building a civil society, a realm of social organization and activity not directly under state control"(Calhoun 1994: 195). Similarly, amid dictatorships in Latin Americaincluding Chile, the focus of this article—" the resurrection of civil society"(Oxhorn 1995: 15) appeared to open the possibility of freeing citizens from state dominance, and possibly overthrowing military rule.

The celebratory cast of civil society in these political contexts is paralleled in academic debates, where scholars have made the analytic concept into a normative ideal. Maxwell Ovvusu, an anthropologist who has consulted for a government-appointed committee working to create Ghana's new constitution (1997: 126), sees the" revival and proliferation of activist development oriented civic organizations and mutual-aid societies based on village, town, ethnic, family membership, and similar affiliations"(1995: 158) as integral to a" grassroots participatory democracy" that could become a model for other African countries. In the United States and western Europe, civil society has been heralded as a key component of democracy by scholars who for the most part have lamented its decline (see, for example, Putnam 2000, who uses the term" social capital").