ABSTRACT

This article points out the need to talk about the political society, or the politics and resistances, of subaltern groups in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Existing literature frames diversity marginalized struggles as civil society struggles or decries the weakness of donor-driven, disembedded civil societies, reproducing the understanding of political life in the region in terms of absences, voids and deficiencies. Challenging this subsumption or dismissal of subaltern struggles, I advance two arguments. First, I argue against broadening the civil society concept to include various subaltern struggles as this approach risks overwriting differences between those groups that mobilize as rights-bearing citizens and the ones that are not recognized or treated as civil society. Instead, I propose acknowledging the historically and spatially contingent character of civil society and the defining role of the state and other actors in shaping which struggles fall within or beyond institutional and discursive frameworks of legality and legitimacy. Second, I argue that Patra Chatterjee’s concept of ‘political society’ can serve better as a meta-vocabulary to account for a diversity of struggles shunted as backwards, premodern and uncivilized, and to refocus research from what is absent to what is present, towards understanding counter-hegemonic discourses and practices.

摘要

本文指出有必要谈谈东欧和欧亚大陆底层群体的政治社会，或者说政治和反抗。现有文献将多样性边缘化的斗争描绘为公民社会的斗争或谴责捐助者驱动的、脱嵌的公民社会的弱点，再现了对该地区政治生活的缺席、空白和缺陷的理解。为了挑战这种对底层斗争的包容或摒弃，我提出了两个论点。首先，我反对扩大公民社会的概念以涵盖各种底层斗争，因为这种方法可能会掩盖那些作为享有权利的公民而动员起来的群体与那些不被承认或不被视为公民社会的群体之间的差异。反而，我建议承认公民社会在历史和空间上的偶然性，以及国家和其他行为者在塑造哪些斗争属于合法性和合法性的制度和话语框架之内或之外的决定性作用。其次，我认为帕特拉·查特吉的“政治社会”概念可以更好地作为一种元词汇来解释各种被认为是落后的、前现代的和不文明的斗争，并将研究重点从不存在的东西转向存在的东西，走向存在的东西。了解反霸权言论和做法。