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This chapter charts the contours of the cultural environment inhabited by civil society organizations in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. While the majority of these organizations continued to produce positive or neutral messages about Islam, journalists were heavily influenced by the emotional appeals of a small group of anti-Muslim organizations—despite their meager social and financial resources. More than a decade after the September 11 attacks, anti-Muslim organizations enjoy considerable influence upon media, government, and public opinion. Meanwhile, the influence of mainstream Muslim organizations has substantially decreased. How did mainstream Muslim organizations lose so much of their influence within the American public sphere? How did anti-Muslim fringe organizations captivate the American media, government, and broader public?

This chapter asks whether the influence of anti-Muslim organizations within the media and policy process extends toward the broader public and everyday life. Though public opinion of Muslims became more favorable after the September 11 attacks, subsequent years witnessed a marked increase in anti-Muslim attitudes among the American public that mirrored the rise of anti-Muslim organizations within the public sphere. Data from popular social media sites suggest the surge in anti-Muslim civil society organizations was at least partly responsible for the transformation of the American public's understanding of Islam. Finally, the chapter details the growth of mosque controversies within the U.S. inspired by fringe activists—including the high-profile controversy about the construction of an Islamic center near the site of the September 11 attacks and the Qur'an burning controversy that followed.

This chapter begins with a brief history of the dozens of civil society organizations that worked to shape the representation of Muslims within the American public sphere before the September 11 attacks. These include a diverse array of African American and immigrant Muslim organizations, as well as Jewish, Christian, and nonreligious civil society organizations that became involved in public discussions about Islam during the Arab–Israeli War, the Iranian hostage crisis, and other high-profile events involving Muslims. This broad historical perspective highlights the emergence of mainstream civil society organizations that produced positive or neutral messages about Muslims in the decade before the September 11th attacks, alongside a small group of fringe organizations with predominantly anti-Muslim messages.

This chapter explains how anti-Muslim organizations leveraged their newfound standing within the public sphere to forge social networks with powerful civil society organizations and amass vast financial resources between 2004 and 2006. In so doing, anti-Muslim organizations crept from the fringe to the mainstream of the cultural environment as their once peripheral messages spread across more moderate organizations and inspired others to join the struggle to shape shared understandings about Islam. This transformation resulted from the routinization of their emotional energy into a field of terrorism experts, a sophisticated media strategy that resulted in several best-selling books and an influential documentary film, and partnerships with groups that splintered from the mainstream during earlier periods.

This chapter summarizes the evolutionary theory of how civil society organizations shape the evolution of cultural environments in the wake of major crises such as the September 11 attacks. It discusses the international implications of the rise of anti-Muslim messages within the American public sphere. It argues that the evolution of shared understandings of Islam in the American public sphere cannot be explained via cultural, structural, or social-psychological factors alone. Rather than independent causal factors competing for influence, culture, structure, and social psychology are best described as interdependent forces that combine to produce a new status quo as societies transition out of crises. The interpenetration of culture, structure, and social psychology creates a particularly powerful form of cultural change because it is largely invisible.

This chapter analyzes the third axis, which describes the challenges to the exclusionary state coming from civil society mobilization. The growing involvement of civil society organizations in authoritative decision‐making is a phenomenon that takes place both within and across countries. The borders of the national state are frequently pierced and mobilization occurs increasingly at the transnational level. Forms of participated governance can be found at all governmental levels as well as across levels. Public interests are promoted by transnational social movements and advocacy coalitions.

The general aim of this book is to shed light on how countries deal with legacies of repression during a transition from authoritarian or totalitarian rule to democratic rule. Two broad kinds of transition are covered: those that occur as a result of the collapse of the old regimes or regime forces, as in Portugal, Argentina, Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and Germany after reunification, where collapse was followed by absorption into another state; and those that are negotiated between an incoming democratic elite and an old regime, as in Spain, the southern cone of Latin America, Central America and South Africa. Because of this range of transitional situations, it is possible to see how varying degrees of political, social and institutional constraints affect the solutions adopted or limit opportunities to deal with the past, and to permit a comparative analysis of the variety of policies adopted, establishing links between one and the other. The book concentrates on the presence (or absence) of three kinds of official or government-sponsored efforts to come to terms with the past: truth commissions, trials and amnesties, and purges; to a lesser extent, it also looks at policies of compensation, restitution or reparation. At the same time, it focuses on unofficial and private initiatives emerging from within society to deal with the past – usually promoted by human rights organizations (HROs), churches, political parties and other civil society organizations; in doing this, the book examines a ‘politics of memory’ whereby societies rework the past in a wider cultural arena, both during the transitions and after official transitional policies have been implemented and even forgotten. The different sections of the Introduction are: Truth and Justice in Periods of Political Change: An Overview; What Can be Done about an Authoritarian Past? Limits and Possibilities of Transition Types and Other Variables; Beyond the Transitional Period: Authoritarian and Long-Term Historical Legacies; Truth, Justice and Democracy; and Memory Making and Democratization.

This chapter explains why the impassioned warnings of anti-Muslim fringe organizations overshadowed the dispassionate condemnations of terrorism produced by mainstream organizations with superior financial and social resources after the September 11 attacks. Moreover, it explains how the rise of anti-Muslim fringe organizations within the mass media provoked angry responses from mainstream organizations that only called further attention to these once-obscure actors within the American public sphere. Finally, the chapter explains how consternation about whether and how to respond to the continued rise of the fringe created tension and splintering within the mainstream, and thus further opportunity for fringe organizations to advance their peripheral cultural messages within the media.

Chapter 4 provides a detailed analytical map of the contemporary U.S. space of opinion and the cultural beltway of elite institutional spaces which surrounds it. Drawing on large samples of opinion texts from The New York Times, USA Today, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Face the Nation, Crossfire, and Hannity & Colmes, it examines variations in autonomy between different kinds of speakers, texts and opinion formats. It finds deepening internal distinctions within an overall expansion and opening of the opinion space in the last 20 years. One part of the opinion space remains anchored in the traditions of journalistic autonomy and independent opinion most closely identified with the elite professional newspaper columnist, while another part – the political talk show – has moved closer to the political field. In every format, new voices from outside the journalism including academics, lawyers, novelists, and think tank intellectuals have also become more prominent.

The involvement of civil society organizations with the HIV response, is arguably the largest ever seen in both breadth and depth. Never before have civil society organizations (CSOs) done so much to contribute to the fight against a global health crisis, or been so included in the decisions making process by policy-makers. The direct involvement of CSOs in the treatment and care of people living with HIV is partially related to the nature of the pandemic. Less tied to bureaucracy than the more institutionalized actors in domestic healthcare systems and intergovernmental organizations, CSOs operate more nimbly and are often better able to respond quickly to needs created by HIV. This can be true in the case of local CSOs, which are more attuned to the community, or international CSOs, which are able to transfer and employ global expertise and monetary resources better than many domestic health systems can do unaided.

This chapter emphasises that civil society organisations afforded ‘possibilities of concerted action and social self-organisation’, and that, as such, they might be indicative of the active commitment of particular groups of Scots to particular visions of empire. It aims to provide an account of the ways in which, through the medium of civil society organisations, Scots' experience of empire was transmitted to people in Scotland, and how such representations of empire in turn affected conceptions of Scottish identity. It identifies civil society organisations in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Scotland which had an explicit engagement with empire or imperialism. It focuses on the activity of civil society organisations in Edinburgh and concentrates on other forms of civil society engagement with empire which fall into two broad categories: philanthropic activities motivated by religious and moral concerns; and secular organisations which were either inspired by enthusiasm for imperialism or manifested an interest in it.

This chapter examines the second round of state–mosque relations that produced institutionalized Islam Councils. Interior ministries provided the first impetus to organize Islam as a “national” religion, and the government-led consultations established a variety of national councils between 1992 and 2006, from the Conseil français du culte musulman, to the Comisíon Islámica de España, to the Exécutif des musulmans de Belgique, to the Deutsche Islam Konferenz, to the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board in Britain, to the Consulta per l'Islam italiano. These national processes are not identical: many place more weight on the role of Embassy Islam and foreign government representatives (e.g., Belgium, Germany, France, Spain), while others rely more heavily on handpicked local civil society organizations (e.g., Italy, United Kingdom).

While Egyptian judges and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) had interacted on several occasions in the past, the events of 2005 occasioned new manifestations and forms of support between them. Judges and NGOs supported one another in attempting to ensure the transparency of the ballot. Judges fought for the right of NGOs to enter polling stations while civil society organizations maintained their total support for judges, siding with them repeatedly through press releases, public statements, and conferences. Beyond such reciprocal support, NGOs and judges both supervised and observed the referendum and elections, and both reported the abuses and fraud that marred the elections. Their recommendations centered on the same issues, and they went beyond requests for changes to electoral procedures to demands for reforms in the legal and political environment itself.

This chapter discusses how China's experts began to explore ways to implement economic reforms, within a modern legal system. At the same time, they were trying to ensure that social organizations continued to benefit the public. This attempt to find a balance between two important elements of society was not unique to China. Many socialist and formerly socialist countries have engaged in this internal debate. The leaders in China also found it important to reconcile public benefit entities, such as social organizations and the state-run social service providers, within the new social and economic party-state, which recognized private entities with both commercial and noncommercial purposes beginning in 1977–1978. The decisions about the proper way to regulate on civil society organizations (CSOs) during this period occurred amidst debates over devolved versus delegated public service responsibilities. The chapter looks at how these debates played out during the critical first fifteen years of reform and opening up, focusing initially on social organizations and foundations.

The involvement of civil society organizations and community-based organizations in the global response to the HIV epidemic is unparalleled in public health history. The successful impact of such mobilization is nowhere more evident than in South Africa, where these organizations have had tremendous success in shaping the response to HIV in one of the world's highest burdened countries. Using the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the AIDS Budget Unit (ABU) at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA) as case studies, this chapter briefly looks at the government's relationship with civil society organizations, the cooperation amongst these organizations and how these various parties interact to directly influence policies and combat the effects of HIV on the country.

Civil society plays a central role in democratic regimes. Repressive governments may try to suppress or limit civil society, but so may relatively democratic societies. Historically, this suppression has taken two principal forms: limits on individuals’ rights to assemble or associate and limits on organizations’ or associations’ rights. We provide a simple framework for thinking about the right to associate and the rights of associations, illustrated with examples from US history. We then turn to our principal historical example, tracing the history of limitations on association and civil-society organizations in Prussia from the late eighteenth century until World War I. Prussian governments restricted the right to associate, but they also denied to most civil-society organizations corporative legal rights such as the ability to contract in their own right. We argue that the latter rights are crucial to effective civil-society organizations, and trace the process by which Prussia liberalized its treatment of such groups. We show that similar limitations operated in France in the nineteenth century, even though France after the Revolution had a very different constitutional order. Restrictions on association can be found in quite diverse political environments, even those based self-consciously on the idea of liberty.

This chapter focuses on volunteer activity in post-1990 Turkey as a particular response to the threat posed by the weakening of the welfare state and the neoliberal restructuring of society. It discusses how the “middle class” and its civil society organizations (CSOs) started to align themselves with the state to assume the duty of “sharing the state's burden.” One of the most important and powerful CSOs, The Educational Volunteers Foundation of Turkey (TEGV), took on a prominent role in the provision of educational facilities to “disadvantaged” segments of society. Field research into its activities reveals how the most individualizing technologies of the self may be used by CSOs to promote loyalty to Republican modernism and neoliberal market values.

This chapter analyzes the “new” set of regulations, beginning with the 1998 regulations on social organizations and the noncommercial institutions (min ban fei qiye danwei), and then moving to the 2004 foundation regulations. One of the critical questions is the extent to which the 1989 events in Tian'anmen Square hardened the attitude of the government against social organizations. Another significant event that caused many officials in the security apparatus to harden their attitude toward civil society was the surrounding of Zhongnanhai (where the high party officials live and work) by Falun Gong practitioners in 1999. This was, however, generally a period of “reform and opening up” for mainstream civil society itself, as open discussion with foreigners about the design of the regulatory framework for civil society organizations (CSOs) in China was encouraged. The chapter also considers the laws adopted during this era of legal change—the Public Welfare Donations Law and the Trust Law, which governs charitable trusts.