A concept that is everything and nothing: Why not to study (post-)Yugoslav anti-war and pacifist contention from a civil society perspective

Abstract

This paper draws upon a variety of empirical sources to start critically examining the concept of civil society in the context of both (post-)Yugoslav anti-war and pacifist contention and the civic engagement stemming from it in the nationally fragmented post-Yugoslav space. I argue that civil society can no longer be meaningfully used for understanding the complex geometry of social, political and personal interactions, cooperation's and resistances within the regional civic spheres characterized by appreciable power asymmetries. Its definitional volatility and logical incoherence allow civil society to incorporate ideologically and historically extremely divergent phenomena. Due to its conceptual elasticity, civil society is a cognitively easily available device and a depoliticised theoretical paradigm convenient for masking power networks frequently conditioned by foreign political agendas. This paper points to possible alternative perspectives that might prove more productive for analyzing (post-)Yugoslav bottom-up civic engagement.