Cistas Participate in the 41st Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association.

41st Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association. Chicago, IL November 17-20, 2016

Beyond Social Science History: Knowledge in an Interdisciplinary World

Cistas participate with the panel on

"Civil society on the edge - past, present and future avenues of civil society".

 Civil society is currently envisaged a significant role in safeguarding democratization, coherence and welfare provision. From both political and research perspectives civil society is perceived as an untapped and valuable resource, which with some strategical adjustments can provide a revitalization of the welfare states and even create social cohesion on a national and maybe even on a global scale. This calls for more research on the past, present and future of civil society´s role from an interdisciplinary and comparative scale. This panel revisits the concept of civil society as it has developed over time in different historical contexts. The various papers examine different aspects of civil society – theoretically as well as empirically –bringing together different disciplines such as political theory, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and history. The interdisciplinarity and the different analytical approaches which follow from the interdisciplinary point of departure uncover a number of interesting dimensions of civil society that are rarely discussed in the civil society literature. The papers share some common features. First, the state is the necessary basis for a vibrant civil society, and civil society organisations are potential intermediates between the state and its population. Second, civil society is neither ontologically good nor bad. Third, the centrality of organisations, institutions and values (e.g. voluntarism and philanthropy) in civil society must be understood in their concrete context to establish their relevance.