CISTAS organiserer konferencen "Civilizing State and Society in the 21st Century"

2nd CISTAS Conference

Civilizing State and Society in the 21st Century:

Rethinking the Dynamics between State, Market and Civil Society

CISTAS (research-project funded by Carlsberg) invites students, teachers and researchers to participate in a second conference on the changing role of civil society. A key characteristic of the liberal democratic state is the assumption that state and society are separated into two different distinctive spheres. Since the 1980s we can observe that in public discourse 'society' has become bifurcated into two new distinct spheres: Market and civil society.

With the collapse of the communist regimes in USSR and Eastern Europe, it was generally assumed that liberal democracy as it had developed in many parts of the Western world would be the only legitimate and doable model of governance for the future.

Now that the dream of a statist route to emancipation was dead, "civil society" would fill the role as a civilizing element that could control states and markets, keep democracy vibrant and secure a vigorous development of society sensitive to existing patterns of domination and discrimination. Also in several Western states civil society came back on the agenda most notably in UK and US as an attempt to find a new institutional set-up which partly could integrate the increasing pluralistic societies and partly could give citizens more choice but at the same time maintain solidarity across society. At the same time it was an attempt to push for some democratization by suggesting devolvement of power to voluntary associations.

Today, however, we are situated in an entirely different political, economic, and ideological context and this has had severe implications for civil society. Does the current context require new theories of civil society? Can “civil society” still be understood as a decisive resource for civilizing processes with respect to political, economic and cultural developments? Or does “civil society” rather represent a conservative, impotent or even destructive factor in this regard? Do we need other concepts and perspectives? How and why has the relationship between state and civil society changed? How do we conceptualize and understand the dynamics between state, market and civil society and the production of the lines of demarcation between them? Thus civil society has become a contested concept and it seems to be accepted among scholars that civil society is a much more complex phenomena. Consequently, it is urgent to rethink civil society and this is the key purpose of this conference.

We have 35 seats and you need to register (see ‘registration’), and we follow the principle 'first come, first served'.

PROGRAM

DAY 1: Tuesday May 23rd

08.45-09.00: Coffee and registration

09.00-09.30: Welcome and introduction by Lars Bo Kaspersen (Copenhagen Business School): Civil Society in the 21st Century

Session I: Asymmetries and Dangers of Civil Society

Chair: Maj Lervad Grasten

09.30-10.15: Jean Cohen (Columbia University): Religion, Populism and Political Theology: Rethinking Civil Society and the State in the 21st Century

10.15-10.30: Coffee

10.30-11.15: Thomas Osborne (University of Bristol): Civil Society, Liberalism and Populism

11.15-12.00: Ilana F. Silber (Bar-Ilan University): A Gift of Civility?: Elite Philanthropy as Cultural Conundrum and Democratic Dilemma

12.00-13.00: Lunch break

Session II: Civil Society and Capitalism: New Forms of Socioeconomic Organization?

Chair: Liv Egholm Feldt

13.00-13.45: Veit Bader (University of Amsterdam): Associative Democracy: From ‘The Real Third Way’ back to Utopianism?

13.45-14.30: Frank Adloff (University of Hamburg): Capitalism and Civil Society Revisited or: Conceptionalizing a Civil Economy

14.30-14.45: Coffee

14.45-15.30: Joel Rogers (University of Wisconsin-Madison): Productive Democracy

15.30-16.10: Andreas Møller Mulvad (Copenhagen Business School): Civil Society beyond Liberalism: Rethinking Citizenship, Property, and Democracy with the ‘Barcelona School’ of Popular Republicanism

DAY 2: Wednesday May 24th

Session III: Possibilities and Limitations of Pluralism

Chair: Andreas Møller Mulvad

09.00-09.45: Andrew Arato (The New School): Civil Society and Federalism

09.45-10.30: Carlo Togato (National University of Colombia): The Cultural Pragmatics of Civic Engagement: How Societal Polarization and Division May Reorient Civil Society Theory

10.30-10.45: Coffee

Session IV: Civil Society and Governance: Instrumentalization or Democratization?

Chair: Mathias Hein Jessen

10.45-11.30: Bob Jessop (Lancaster University): Civil Society: Theory, Actuality, Policy Paradigm, and Mode of Governance

11.30-12.15: Marcel Maussen (University of Amsterdam): Democracy versus Professionalism? Institutional Innovation and Associative Democracy in University Governance

12.15-13.15: Lunch break

Session V: Reconfiguring Civil Society: New Forms of Action and Collective Imagination vis-à-vis Historical Experiences

Chair: Lars Bo Kaspersen

13.15-14.00: Nina Eliasoph (University of Southern California): Locating Civic Action in the Reconfigured Civic Field

14.00-14.45: Marc Stears (New Economics Foundation): Title TBA

14.45-15.00: Coffee

15.00-15.40: Anders Sevelsted (Copenhagen Business School): A Surprising Consensus: Revivalist Protestantism and the Social Democratic State on Eugenics and Civil Rights in the Case of Alcoholism 1904 – 1943

15.40-16.20: Christiane Mossin (University of Copenhagen): Collectivity Formation and Emancipation in Composite Times

16.20-16.30: Coffee

16.30-16.50: Final remarks by Liv Egholm Feldt