Rethinking Civil Society in Transition

Front matter

PROTEST AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Ester Sigillo

Protest and Social Movements

Table of Contents

List of abbeviations List ofillustrations Acknowledgments Preface

1 Unpacking the notion of civil society

2 Studying civil society in transition through a (strategic) relational approach

Preface

When I arrived for the first time in Tunisia in September 2015, I quickly realized that civil society was a hot topic in this tiny country undergoing a profound political transformation that started at the end of 2010. On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor, set himself on fire in front of the governorate building in Sidi Bouzid, a rural town two hundred miles south of Tunis. This desperate act became the catalyst for demonstrations and riots that spread throughout the country based on pre-existing social and political grievances against the authoritarian regime of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali. The wave of protests triggered a revolutionary movement, better known at the international level as the Jasmine Revolution, which led President Ben Ali to step down on January 14, 2011, after 23 years in power.

After the fall of Ben Ali’s regime, thousands of associations blossomed in a public space that had been co-opted under authoritarian rule for decades. As a result, the idea of a renewed civil society burst onto a rapidly changing socio-political scene. Associations became pivotal actors engaging in virtually every topic that emerged in the post-revolutionary debate in the country, including human rights, gender equality, democracy and citizenship, social development and solidarity, humanitarian action, environment and sustainable development, transparency, the fight against corruption, and good governance. Against this backdrop of vibrant associational life, it became clear that Tunisia could prove a vital laboratory to explore and test the notion of civil society in a post-authoritarian setting.

After a few short weeks in Tunis, I realized that the two months I had planned for my field research would be insufficient to understand the complex dynamics of a Tunisian civil society undergoing such a significant transition. The post-authoritarian landscape is an inherently changeable space, as newly emerged actors and associations are testing boundaries and experimenting with strategies, and outcomes are uncertain. Indeed, under such conditions, civil society actors are neither fully institutionalized nor genuinely independent. For this reason, they bank on many actors who have acquired relevance in post-revolutionary Tunisia as ‘civil society supporters.’ Notably, actors such as state’s local authorities and international donors handling relations, when interviewed about their activities, depict newly emerged associations like new chicks hatched in the nest, which must somehow learn to fly and move boldly out into the world of ‘civil society’ with all its promise and peril. This is the post-revolutionary environment in Tunisia that I witnessed as I began the research that resulted in the book you are now reading.

This book is the result of ethnographical research designed to uncover the impact of civil society promotion in Tunisia, understood as the diffusion of an idea of ‘civil society’ packaged by various actors in asymmetrical power relations with local associations. Civil society promotion is not only the concern of external actors. It can also occur within countries, among a wide range of public and private actors, and spread all kinds of practices, institutions, and ideas—from specific instruments, standards, and norms—to broad policy models, ideational frameworks, and organizational structures.

Moreover, actors can diffuse norms directly or indirectly by creating incentives and constraints. The most relevant actors in post-authoritarian Tunisia have been Western and non-Western foreign donors, a Tunisian state in transformation, and the Islamist party Ennahda, which emerged as the first mass party in Tunisia’s first post-transition elections, held in October 2011. Thus, since 2011, Tunisian associations have been embedded in a space of multiple, complex interactions. With less rigid structures and hierarchies than other local organizations, such as trade unions and political parties, which arguably form part of the extended notion of civil society, these associations have been confronted with multiple adaptive pressures in the new dynamic environment, from expectations regarding professional best practice to the mandates of funding agencies.

Against this background, the goal of this book is twofold: first, to contribute to the debate on the impact of civil society promotion in specific local contexts; second, to rethink the notion of civil society itse/fafter the Tunisian Revolution. Post-authoritarian settings are changeable spaces characterized by the reconfiguration of power relations involving claims for inclusion on the part of previously repressed socio-political groups. As one such setting, post-2011 Tunisia has been a highly contentious environment. Moreover, the Tunisian case underscores the competitiveness of post-revolutionary settings, where old and new actors struggle to find and consolidate a place within it according to their specific social, economic, and political ideas. In this scenario, some actors try to assert their hegemony over the civil society sphere: international donors wish to diffuse their idea of civil society to local associations; the state struggles to abandon specific control mechanisms inherited from the old regime; the Islamist political party Ennahda puts much emphasis on newly emerged religious associations.

Contrary to most of the academic works on civil society in the Arab world, where the role of hegemonic actors is treated separately or through the binary logic of ‘dominant vs. dominated,’ this study questions the interpretation

PREFACE 17 of power in concrete terms as something to be ‘seized’ or ‘held.’ Instead, it adopts a relational approach, studying civic activism by observing how the various actors interact with one another. This requires rethinking civil society from a dynamic perspective. Moreover, a relational approach allows us to bring the agency of social actors back into the frame, something that the civil society promotion and democratization literature often fail to do. Furthermore, it allows us to put forward hypotheses about the strategic dilemmas faced by associations and their members embedded in a political game. Put differently, analyzing the relational dynamics of associations allows us to disentangle the reasons motivating different socio-political groups to engage with a public sphere newly liberalized after decades of authoritarian crystallization, with all the promise and peril such a space entails.

Finally, a relational approach to studying civil society actors allows us to sidestep the top-down interpretation of relations between associations and hegemonic actors (international donors, the state, and political parties), showcasing the cross-cutting and multiple linkages associations share. These connections are not univocal, as top-down approaches assume, given that activists have agency in their interactions with hegemonic actors and can exploit opportunities in the political landscape to connect with other agents in multiple ways as they pursue their goals and objectives.

This book focuses on associations mobilizing for social solidarity and development, the most vibrant and visible sector of civic activism in Tunisia after the fall of the authoritarian regime. The 2011 uprisings were primarily driven by socioeconomic grievances against the old regime’s clientelist networks. It is, therefore, no coincidence that most associations that emerged after the revolution focused on addressing the deep socioeconomic divides of the country through the novel, grassroots proposals generated in an explicitly participatory and decentralized way. ‘Developmental issues’ were defined quite broadly within the newly expanding sphere of civil society, incorporating not just socioeconomic concerns but also educational and cultural ones. Thus, mobilization for development was closely linked to broad-based citizen participation and constituted a significant driver of the reconfiguration of power relations and the reallocation of symbolic and material resources in a changing political landscape.

Findings trace two main phenomena that in the literature are usually considered mutually exclusive: a standardized process of professionalization and the politicization of local associations. In this book, these processes are regarded as two sides of the same coin, whereby associational members professionalize as a strategy to achieve the political goals of newly emerging localized networks. Notably, the book highlights how associations have served as a launching pad for different groups aspiring to participate in the post-authoritarian political reconfiguration: urban, secular elites, young experts of internationalized NGOs, and the Islamist network partially disenfranchised by the Ennahda party. Overall, these networks will likely shape Tunisian politics for decades to come.

Civil society is one ofthe most enduring and confusing concepts in social sciences, and for that reason, it is an excellent candidate for analytic explorations.

This book scrutinizes the roles assigned to the Tunisian associations by those actors promoting civil society after the collapse of Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime in 2011 and local associations’ internalization of these roles. The first part of this introductory chapter casts light on the normative evolution of the notion of civil society across time and space. Since the early 1990s, the role of civil society in circumstances of political change has been a vibrant topic of debate. Indeed, after the fall of the Soviet Union, ‘civil society promotion’ became the principal objective of international programs supporting democratization in Eastern Europe.

After the Arab Uprisings in 2010-201, which saw one authoritarian regime after the other toppled across the region, questions about the causes and consequences of civil society in transitional settings have acquired a new salience. Especially in the Arab world, the role of Muslim civil societies in fostering the democratization process has focused on the minds of scholars (Bozzo and Luizard 2011; Esposito, Sonn, and Voll 2015; Grinin, Korotayev, and Tausch 2018). Others have instead focused on the role of international donors in supporting civil society during the transition, often portraying the impact of such actors on their beneficiaries in a less than flattering light (Durac and Cavatorta 2009; Cavatorta and Durac 2010; Teti 2012, 2015; Teti et al. 2020). These important studies have a substantialist perspective of ‘civil society, defining it in binary terms as either present or absent, as either dynamic or quiescent.

By applying a relational approach to the study of newly emerged associations in a post-authoritarian setting, the present book eschews this substantialist interpretation of civil society. Concretely, it shows that civil society is not a given, an object with defined properties and boundaries, but rather a complex system of relations that changes over time. Post-revolutionary

Sigillo, E., Rethinking Civil Society in Transition: International Donors, Associations and Politics in Tunisia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 DOI: 10.5117/9789463727976_INTRO

Tunisia is an excellent place to bring such mutability to light. Thanks to the post-revolutionary liberalization, thousands of associations have flourished under the impulse of ‘civil society promotion. Thus, since 2011, ‘civil society’ in Tunisia has emerged as essentially uncharted territory waiting to be ‘occupied’ by new ideas contributed by many actors.

Against this background, the second part of this introductory chapter is devoted to introducing the book’s argument, based on the interpretation of newly emerged associations as pivotal players participating in the reconfiguration of power relations in post-authoritarian Tunisia. The third part focuses on the methods used to develop this argument. The research is based on a cross-case analysis that draws on a grounded theory approach. After collecting rich data through immersive fieldwork, I was able to compare different types of local associations (Islamic and secular associations mobilizing for development and social solidarity) in diverse localities in Tunisia (Grand Tunis, Sfax, Siliana, and Medenine) from alternative perspectives (socioeconomic, cultural, and political).

Despite this evident heterogeneity, I observed a puzzling tendency toward standardization in the practices of local associations. This puzzle motivated the decision to carry out the analysis on two levels. Meso-level analysis explores associations’ institutional relations with the various actors in the post-authoritarian landscape. Research at the micro-level explores the evolution of associations over time and in their localized networks. This two-level analysis allows me to cast light on the changing shape of civil society and the power dynamics that embed the actors within it against a backdrop of profound political change.

In the very last section of this introductive chapter, I outline the book’s overall structure.

1 Unpacking the notion of civil society

It is hardly new to point to the ambiguity in the notion of ‘civil society’ This ambiguity arises because the term is inherently relational; ‘civil society’ has always been (and continues to be) defined as some opposite. Indeed, over time, its meaning has inverted. Initially referring to the politically organized segment of the social order (i.e., the state), today, civil society has come to mean the opposite—that part of the society that organizes outside the state and, indeed, in opposition to it. According to the general understanding of the concept, which has its roots in modern liberal history, the institutions, associations, and networks of European and North American civil society operate in a pluralistic, continuously contested public space, a zone between the public and private realms. Indeed, civil society is generally understood as comprising voluntary associations that operate in the area between those ofthe individual and the state but outside the family or tribal linkages.

Distinct from the coercive and bureaucratic functions of the state and the profit-seeking private sectors, civil society represents a third autonomous sector of modern society. It seems to contain the moral residue of a primordial, premodern civic realm, for many of its organizations and activities enhance ethical responsibilities, communalism, charity, and so-called traditional values. Yet civil society is conceived as a modern, bourgeois, post-enlightenment phenomenon, characteristic of liberal policies and economies centered on the individual and not the ascribed primordial community (Carapico 1998: 2).

This dominant interpretation of civil society emerged in the Western world through the Enlightenment philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Up until then, the concept was regarded as coterminous with the state. However, between 1750 and 1850, ideas about civil society took a new and fundamental turn in response to a perceived crisis of the ruling social order, motivated by the rise of the market economy and the increased differentiation of interests it provoked (Edwards 2009: 6). In An Essay on The History of Civil Society, initially published in 1767, Adam Ferguson (1980) posited that civil society is intricately intertwined with the institutions of the modern commercial economy. Indeed, it represents a by-product of the modern division of labor and worries that the modern division of labor will produce a loss of public spirit. Through the division of labor, society becomes a complex machine where everyone has an increasingly specialized role. Given this, individuals become detached from the communal spirit, and public-spiritedness is replaced with self-serving goals (Ketola 2013: 11). Personal advancement becomes a priority, superseding the concern for others and the public spirit. Therefore, “the separation of professions, while seeming to promise improvement of skills...serves, in some measure, to break the bonds of society” (Oz-Salzberger 1995: 12). As these links are broken, and collective interests wither away, public life is corrupted, paving the way for political despotism. It is looked at this way, a dense web of social interactions can protect modern societies from the adverse consequences of modern capitalist development.

Mainstream variants of the idea of civil society are generally articulated around the view of associational life in the early-nineteenth century. In his Democracy in America (1981), Tocqueville argued that high levels of associationism provide citizens with the means to resist the state’s power.

Given this, Tocqueville advanced the notion of a separation of state and civil society, first sketched by Hegel (1952). Tocqueville wrote in the period following the French Revolution when the Jacobin myth that the intermediate bodies of society (i.e., the aristocracy, which had limited the king’s abuses of power) needed to be smashed for democracy to succeed provoked fear of tyranny. He was, therefore, preoccupied with the potential tyranny of the majority (or the organized minority) and the contradictions between the principles of freedom and equality. Indeed, suppose the progress of civilization expands the degree of autonomy of civil society vis-a-vis the state. In that case, equality pushes for the reinforcement of a tutelary state capable of imposing itself on civil society. Thus, by civil society, Tocqueville meant all those autonomous associations acting as a rampart against despotism. In other words, he emphasized the capacity of civil society to check the excesses of state power and, in so doing, act as a counterweight.

In this sense, civil society can be considered a critical ingredient of democracy. Moreover, this Tocquevillian conception of civil society came to the fore in democratization processes and accorded policymaking relevance through the democracy promotion strategies that Western countries and international organizations pursue. This conception of civil society is also reflected in neoliberal approaches that treat civil society as a hedge against the authoritarian state. In foregrounding the Tocquevillian understanding of civil society, international efforts to encourage democratization in developing countries tend to home in on a particular subset of civil society actors—namely, groups advocating human rights, women’s emancipation, civil rights, and the environment or else trade unions and umbrella organizations of the business community. Indeed, since the 19905, it is precisely these groups that have benefited from international support. Notwithstanding the importance of the issues that the groups so targeted promote, they have often overshadowed urgent social and economic questions. More broadly, it is crucial to keep in mind that international support for a given society in transition to democracy is far from neutral, as it is aimed primarily at diffusing the logic of neoliberalism.

After Tocqueville, Marx, and Gramsci advanced critical conceptualization of civil society in contrast to the normative interpretations that had prevailed among the early Enlightenment thinkers. Marx (1859) famously developed his criticism of political economy through a critique of Hegelian philosophy. In particular, he found no correspondence in the real world to the notions of civil society and the state described by Hegel. Marx, instead, saw civil society as rooted in the reality of social relations. He elaborated his work against a backdrop of a struggle between two social classes, the bourgeoisie

(which Marx defined as the owners of the means of production) and the progressively developing working class. According to Marx, civil society was a bourgeois society detached from traditional collective forms. In this view, civil society is the space of individuals’ material conditions where capitalist production is organized. According to Marx, only capitalist society gives rise to civil society as a social space that has progressively detached itself from family ties and the formal domain of the bureaucratic state in favor of capitalist relations of production. Marx essentially posed an economic conception of bourgeois civil society, yet he ultimately emancipated civil society from the state by overturning the Hegelian arrangement. In Marx’s view, the state was no longer the basis for civil society; on the contrary, civil society was now the ground of the bourgeois state. From this perspective, the state is just the guarantor of (bourgeois) social relations. All told, Marx grants importance to the idea of civil society yet simultaneously identifies it entirely within the economic sphere (which determines the structure of social classes). Indeed, in Marxist movements and theory, the term ‘civil society’ is often used as a synonym for ‘economic sphere, the economic base of capitalist society.

In his Prison Notebooks (penned between 1929 and 1935), Gramsci (2011 [1975]) challenged this conception, renewing the idea of civil society as an autonomous domain. As a leading light in the Italian Communist Party in the interwar period, Gramsci developed his ideas against the backdrop of economic and social strife following the First World War and the political struggle against the cultural hegemony of the church and the rising fascist movement. Gramsci realized that class struggle needed an ideological dimension if the hegemony of the leading forces was to be overcome. For him, civil society was the arena in which the crucial struggle for cultural hegemony played out. Gramsci’s foregrounding of civil society as the nexus of hegemonic struggle would prove very influential throughout the twentieth century and not only among Marxists. In the Gramscian view, civil society is neither reducible to economic society nor is it merely a place where the ruling class exercises domination. It is, in fact, an arena of contestation and conflict. From this perspective, civil society is a political sphere, a space in which the ideologies that cement society are contested and constituted. According to Gramsci, there is no inherent relationship between the strength of civil society and the health of democracy. Civil society is thus neither a domain of freedom nor a source of democracy but a sphere of hegemony. As mentioned by Yousfi, “it represents the totality of social institutions wherein cultural and political hegemony is achieved, and for this reason, must become an area of militant activity” (Yousfi 2017).

Indeed, according to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, civil society is the primary space in which the ruling class seeks to maintain its domination over society through the production of cultural hegemony (Gramsci 2011 [1975]). By controlling the production of ideas within civil society, the ruling elite, with the support of the bourgeoisie, can manufacture consent for the prevailing political and social order. Thus, while civil society can serve as a space for social activities outside the state, it could just as easily serve as a space to reinforce the hegemony and power of an authoritarian state. In constructing his theory, Gramsci identified an intricate web of relations between civil society and the state. For him, civil society exists in an ‘organic’ relationship with the state: the interplay between civil and political society forms the tentacles of power in society.

Civil society and democracy

The fall of the Soviet Union and the tremendous changes that followed gave rise to a new field of literature dealing with the role of civil society in transition (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Schmitter 1993; Lewis 1992; Diamond 1994, 1999; Linz and Stepan 1996; Pridham, 1995; 2001; Arato 2000; Gill 2000). Since then, the liberal-democratic model—which emphasizes the separation of an autonomous civil society from the state and the links between civil society and democratization—has dominated the subject’s political, policy, and academic discourses (Ketola 2013).

Many scholars since Tocqueville have paid particular attention to the distinct contribution of associations and associational life to the dynamism of civil society (Maloney and Rossteutscher 2007). Indeed, the global rise of voluntary associations during the 1990s fueled vast literature on the contribution of civil society to political development. Most democratization studies are based on the theoretical assumption that civil society activism is conducive to democratization and consolidation. According to the dominant normative understanding of the concept, “without a well-developed civil society, it is difficult, if not impossible, to have an atmosphere supportive of democracy” (Entelis 1996: 45).

The historical experience of the so-called ‘Third Wave of democratization’ proved the assumption correct. The cases of Eastern Europe and Latin America are very rarely analyzed without mentioning the importance of civil society in negotiating the transition and consolidating democracy. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union, part of the literature was already focused on agency-based explanations of civic and political engagement. Organizational theories, for example, foregrounded the role of social networks in engaging citizens, especially mass political parties and unions, churches, voluntary associations, and even the press (Verba, Nie, and Kim 1987). Moreover, as mentioned by Norris, pluralist theories attribute an equally important role to intermediary groups that compete to provide checks and balances in a democratic system and articulate public demands by providing channels of political participation linking citizens to the state (Norris 2002). In his pioneering work on polyarchy, Robert A. Dahl also mentioned trade unions, businesses and professional associations, welfare and charity associations, and educational and cultural clubs (Dahl 1971).

Since the early 1990s, however, we have witnessed a renewed academic interest in the role of civil society organizations in democracies. Putnam greatly stimulated this interest and colleagues’ seminal volume, Making Democracy Work (1994). According to their social capital theory, all kinds of voluntary organizations in which face-to-face meetings are the norm contribute to a rich and dense civic network, strengthening community bonds and social trust (Putnam et al. 1994). While some organizations may be explicitly political, “others are recreational clubs, ethnic or religious groups, neighborhood organizations, work-related associations such as professional, business, cooperative, union groups” (Norris 2002: 27). In any case, all may contribute to fostering the political process. The core argument is that “the denser the linkages promoted by these organizations, the more bridging social trust will be generated that facilitates cooperative actions in matters of common concern, acting as a public good that affects even those who do not participate directly in the networks’ (Norris 2002: 27).

However, the assumption that a simple expansion in the number of civil society organizations will, by itself, engender democratic political change has been progressively challenged. Indeed, according to some studies, associations can also stimulate insular views, and not all scholars find that social capital produced through associations is necessarily a universally valuable resource (Berman 1997; Edwards and Foley 1997; Fiorina 1999; Foley and Edwards 1996; Jamal 2007; Kamarava and Mora 1998; Levi 1996; Maloney et al. 2000; Orr 1999; Portes 1998; Robteutscher 2002). For instance, Kamarava and Mora underline that voluntary associations are not automatically vehicles of democracy. Instead, to become agents of democratization, they must operate democratically and complement their respective agendas with demands for democracy. Moreover, they must either be sufficiently powerful or work with other organizations to promote change.

Berman adds another cautionary note, pointing out that a robust civil society might even weaken a democratic regime under certain circumstances. Using the example of interwar Germany, where voluntary organizations flourished, she argues that civil society can fragment as much as unite a society, accentuating and deepening existing cleavages if pre-existing political institutions are weak (Berman 1997: 565). Also, drawing on the case ofthe Weimar Republic, Robteutscher has observed that skills acquired in voluntary associations can also be used for undemocratic ends. Emphasizing “the other side of social capital” in Palestine, which acts as a barrier to democratization there, Jamal (2007) argues that there is no reason to believe that an inevitable connection exists between civic activism and democracy.

In sum, there are many views regarding the relationship between civil society and democratization, and the dominant view—which assumes a positive correlation between the two—is increasingly being challenged (Durac and Cavatorta 2015).

An outside-in perspective on civil society promotion

From the 1990s, democracy promotion emerged as a principal objective of international donors (Robinson 1996; Pridham 1991; Carothers 1999; Burnell 2000; Ottoway and Carothers 2000; Liverani 2008). In the Arab world, policymakers saw promoting civil society as the best means to democratize authoritarian regimes, following the success of civil society in Eastern Europe and Latin America in achieving similar ends (Cavatorta and Durac 2011). The underlying assumption was that strengthening perceived liberals within civil society would lead to democratic change.

Democracy assistance, loosely defined as “aid designed to foster opening in anon-democratic country or to further a democratic transition in a country that has experienced a democratic opening” (Carothers 1999: 6), covers a wide variety of aid packages targeting different elements of the political system. Civil society support has been considered an instrument to foster democratization from below. Notably, donors such as the European Union (EU) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have increasingly framed their civil society promotion as part of the broader objective of promoting democracy (Liverani 2008). For this reason, once a quintessential internal phenomenon, civil society acquired an international dimension through ‘civil society promotion’ (Whitehead 2004). However, external actors’ promotion of local civil society presents a challenge, if not a paradox. While the ostensible aim is to promote the autonomy of civil society actors and associations, international donors often promote norms tied to external conceptions that may contradict local circumstances.

Several scholars doubt how well the Western concept of civil society translates into non-Western societies. For example, Van Rooy (1998) points to the historical circumstances that gave the idea. According to this argument, civil society was born out of the historical specificities of eighteenthcentury Europe and cannot be easily transferred. Similarly, Olivier Roy has highlighted the danger of importing values and institutions from a Western model that is likely less universal (and less democratic) than is often claimed (Roy 2002). In such cases, the concept must be adjusted to reflect local traditions. This may include widening the idea of civil society to include certain involuntary relations that play a vital cohering role in some countries. Indeed, some authors have noted that the Middle Eastern boasts a long tradition of associational life, albeit in forms that do not necessarily fit neatly into Western categories (Challand 2009; Norton 1995; Pace 2009).

In other words, civil society as it has evolved in the West differs from the associational life observed in the Arab Mediterranean region. For this reason, Arab writers have questioned the appropriateness of imposing Western frameworks for thinking about civil society on Muslim societies, arguing that the former exclude or discount the religious, tribal, and other communal groupings that form the bedrock of associational life in many non-Western countries (Al-Sayyd 1995; Howell and Pearce 2001). Arab sociologists, in turn, have explored the rich tapestry of Arab Muslim organizations based on voluntary participation, many of which are inspired by religious beliefs (Gahlioun 2000; Norton 1995). Indeed, civil society activism in the Arab Mediterranean region cannot be understood if the contribution of Islamism is excluded (Browers 2006; Cavatorta 2005). However, as Challand (2009) notes, Western donors have looked askance at Islamic religious fraternities that appear not to fit the liberal template of Western civil society promotion. However, labeling Islamism as inherently illiberal does not give justice to the variety of movements that operate within the sphere of civil society and does not reflect the diverse approaches to civil society that Arab political thought presents (Cavatorta and Durac 2010; Ottoway and Carothers 2000).

Interestingly, civil society promotion has almost exclusively been the theoretical prerogative of International Relations Theory (IR). The leading schools of thought within IR formulate hypotheses about the reasons and intentions behind the interaction between international donors and recipient NGOs and the expected outcomes from this support for civil society (Challand 2009). These top-down theories on civil society promotion foreground the role of states’ strategic interests in promoting certain norms and values beyond their borders (Peceny 1999; Schweller 2000; Youngs 2004). From this point of view, democracy promotion can be interpreted as a form of soft power (Nye 2004). Especially after the September 118 terror attacks, international donors such as the United States have increased their share of financial support to civil society, bypassing governments. The same happened after the Arab Uprisings, where civil society actors moved to center stage as agents of stabilization in international programs of democracy promotion (Chiriatti and Sigilld 2019).