Understanding Civil Society in Pakistan: Imperatives and Constraints

Abstract

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc the conceptualization of civil society and, in particular, its diverse manifestations in ‘non-Western’ societies have obtained an added academic significance.¹ Assuredly, it has assumed the status of an all-encompassing, value-based paradigmatic and institutional framework symbolizing societal empowerment away from statist monopolism. In a powerful sense, it is a prioritization of the former through substantive and substitutive measures without reaching the extremes such as anarchism, total atomism or unrestrained privatization. The multiple enfranchisement of the society through multiple initiatives is aimed at reconstructing a syncretic discourse between the state and civil society by allocating the prerogative to the latter. The aggregate power of ‘saner’, non-coercive, tolerant and non-official institutions is seen as a reversal of the brutalization of state power which has been (and is) so pervasive in various regions. In a rather rudimentary fashion especially in not too infrequent moments of despair, one may simply suggest the total absence as well as impossibility of a civil society in countries like Pakistan, owing to a change-resistant statist unilateralism accompanied by religious totalitarianism.