(Page 2 of 25) - Decentralization, Civil Society and Ethnonationalism: Arabs in Israel authored by Haklai, Oded.

The phenomenon of ethnically based civil society has increased in political salience

in recent years. Communal groups have been inclined to challenge the state through an
array of Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs), trying to penetrate it and influence its
policies in a direction that will yield increased access to opportunities for the communities
they claim to represent. As channeling collective claims through organized voluntary
associations is increasingly gaining legitimacy, more communal groups in multiethnic
societies are likely to follow the political path of civil society for asserting their demands.

The study of ethnically based associations has remained relatively peripheral in the

literature on civil society. For many, the concept ethnically-based civil society seems almost
like an oxymoron. The term civil society itself, although very fuzzy, as noted by several
scholars (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999, 5; Kingston 2001, 56), hints at more encompassing
citizenry collectivities. New civil society movements are conventionally perceived as
building inclusive linkages within society, framing their demands around universal rights,
dealing with issues such as the environment, women’s rights or human rights (for example,
Kingston 2001; Melucci1985; Touraine 1985; Wignaraja 1993). These issues are generally
understood to cut through communal boundaries. Ethnically based civil society
associations, conversely, frame their demands around particularistic communal identities.
Ethnic schisms are often seen as hindering the development of effective civil society
(Haynes 1997, 16-18; Migdal 2001a, 116). And yet, many communal groups, such as the
Arab citizens of Israel, the Scotts in Britain, the First Nations in Canada, and the Flemings
and Walloons in Belgium have been increasingly able to build powerful, ethnically based
linkages that contest the norms embedded within the state and existing institutional
arrangements.

In the ethnic politics literature, civil society has also been neglected. Until the late

1980s, most students of ethnic politics, critics of the modernization paradigm that viewed
ethnicity as temporary, attempted to account for ethnic strife using explanatory variables
that lay in the social and economic arenas, such as elite manipulation and economic
disparities between communities and regions (Brass 1991; Gurr 1993, 1994; Peled 1989).
By and large, these theories tended to treat ethnic mobilization as an all-encompassing
category. They did not differentiate between a variety of political activities ethnic groups
might pursue, such as parliamentary activity, violent contestation or the formation of civil
society associations. And yet, diverse forms of ethnic mobilization do not have uniform
consequences, nor do they necessarily share causal mechanisms. The tendency to lump all
types of ethnic mobilization under one category, therefore, had obscured the particularities
of ethnically based civil society.

Furthermore, the tendency of this “traditional” ethnic politics literature was to

draw a clear distinction between the state and the communal groups living under its
jurisdiction. Often, the state was not referred to at all. In other cases, the state was seen as
separate and independent of society or as an instrument that can be manipulated in the
hands of elites (Alford and Friedman 1985, 275; Brass, 1991; Gurr 1970, 3-4). Groups were
“seen as acting on the state only from the outside” (Alford and Friedman, 276). From the
late 1980s, inspired by the broader shift in political science of “Bringing the State Back
In”, students of ethnic politics also began to incorporate the state as a significant