Civil Society Revisited: Africa in the New Millennium

Abstract

In 1995, I published an article entitled “Africa in the Age of Democratization: The Civic Limitations of Civil Society” in the African Studies Review. The article was an attempt to make sense of the fragile relationship of state and civil society in the alleged period of the continent's “second independence.” I must confess, however, that after writing “Africa in the Age of Democratization,” I remember telling a colleague that this would be my last venture into the subject. I argued that the debate on state and civil society had reached a point of utter saturation and sterility and that no further intellectual advance was possible in the foreseeable future.