Abstract
As citizens outside government ignite conflicts within and between bodies politic or work to end them, the politics through which they act and the civil societies in which they act become critical arenas for changing conflictual relationships. Enlarging our conceptual framework and the array of resources for preventing and ending violence and building peace depends on broadening our present focus on political institutions to add a fresh look at citizens as political actors.
Keywords
Civil Society Political Actor Political Process Fault Line Democratic Government
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Endnotes
- 1.Part of the text of this section, “Civil Society: A Context of Peacemaking and Peace-Building,” originated as a letter dated January 4, 1996, from David Mathews and Harold H. Saunders to David Hamburg and Cyrus Vance, co-chairs of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. The idea of two interrelated strategies—the five-stage process of sustained dialogue and a civil-society strategy—had been developed in Randa M. Slim and Harold H. Saunders, “Managing Conflict in Divided Societies: Lessons from Tajikistan,” Negotiation Journal (Vol. 12, No. 1, January 1996), pp. 31–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 3.This picture of U.S. citizens’ feelings was reported in The Harwood Group, Citizens and Politics: A View from Main Street America (Dayton, QH: Kettering Foundation, 1991), a study conducted for the Kettering Foundation. Its findings are also described and elaborated inGoogle Scholar
- David Mathews, Politics for People (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), Chapter 1.Google Scholar
- 5.See Robert D. Putnam, with Robert Leonardi and Rafaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
- 8.See Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1980);Google Scholar
- David Mathews, The Promise of Democracy (Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation, 1988); and Mathews, Politics for People, pp. 52–64.Google Scholar
- 11.Mathews, Politics for People, pp. 100–101. He cites Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), pp. 118 and 133. The quotes from John Adams are hers.Google Scholar
- 13.Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, edited by J.P. Mayer, translated by George Lawrence (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), p. 513.Google Scholar
- 14.This attention to the small group as the principal unit of social organization is documented in my unpublished doctoral dissertation: Harold H. Saunders, “The Group Concept in American Sociology and Political Science, 1883–1929” (Ph. D. diss., Yale University, 1956). The impact of urbanization and industrialization on the individual as seen through the eyes of American authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is captured in an unpublished essay byGoogle Scholar
- Harold H. Saunders, “In His Image” (B.A. Thesis, Princeton University, 1952).Google Scholar
- 15.Mathews, Politics for People, p. 167–168. He cites Daniel J. Elazar and John Kincaid, “Covenant and Polity,” New Conversations (Vol. 4, 1979), pp. 4–8.Google Scholar
- 16.See Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 ed.).Google Scholar
- 17.Mathews, Politics for People, pp. 151–152. He cites Stanley J. Hallet, “Communities Can Plan Future on Their Own Terms,” Regeneration (Vol. 6, January–February 1990), p. 8.Google Scholar
- 19.Mary Parker Follett, The New State: Group Organization: The Solution of Popular Government (originally 1920; Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1965, reprint), cited in Mathews, Politics for People, p. 143.Google Scholar
Copyright information
© Harold H. Saunders 1999