ABSTRACT
Despite recurrent arguments that civil society is only at home on the northern shores of the Mediterranean, this chapter identifies, in a historical manner, how civil society has generated fruitful exchanges and common practices across the Mediterranean. In particular, it assesses how civil society evolved from an object of political theory in the 1980s, to a subject in its own merit in the 1990s. An active promoter of political change in certain contexts (e.g. the Barcelona Process), civil society and its formal, yet distant, cousins, the NGOs, faced institutionalization, ossification, or recuperation by various regimes in the 1990s and 2000s. The chapter assesses in detail some of the debates pertaining to civil society’s contribution to the Arab Uprisings of 2011 (‘Arab Spring’). Acclaimed originally as the triumph of bottom-up forms of participation, akin to some conceptions of civil society, the 2011 uprisings generated new debates about civil society including notions of citizenship, political representation and civility, which the chapter reviews.
