Search

This paper attempts to problematize the discourse and politics of civil society, the former as produced by liberal democratic theory and mainstream democratization literature and the latter as carried out by various agencies of international democratic aid industry. The operation of a liberal discourse on democracy and the vanguard role it assigns to a particular model of civil society is construed here as an exercise in regulatory and disciplinary power implicated in governmentality in the Third World. Taking its cue from the Foucauldian genealogical approach questioning the conditions of possibility, modalities and constitution of the objects and domains of power (Foucault in 'Power' 2000; 118), this analysis is about how a certain regime of truth around the universal value of liberal democracy progressively re-constitutes the not-yet-so-civil subjects of the Third World through a multiplicity of mechanisms and shapes the contours of the political - without indelibly fixing them- in those transitional settings via novel forms of intervening into and managing the political energies and potentialities of those populationsBearing in mind the accompaniment of major mechanisms of power by ideological productions, I shall argue that the discursive production of the democratization paradigm in Western political theory entails the specific production of the Third World subjects through the practice of democratic aid interventions in the political processes of the Third World, thus constitutes an exercise in power. A regime of government is erected over the Third World, discursively and practically marking out uncivil societies in need of Western democratic aid; its control, surveillance, discipline and administration. Such an intervention in the government of the socio-political in the Third World is made possible by the production and circulation of a politics of truth, of an expert knowledge construing certain forms of knowledge as ontologically true, thereby setting the limits of what can be said, by whom, and with what legitimacy. Using the Western liberal model of civil society as the hegemonic benchmark against which to evaluate political change and development in the Third World, the democratization paradigm, in discourse and practice, governmentalizes 'civil society' for the ultimate purpose of shaping it to fit a preexisting model of democratic development; through the conditional funding of Southern non-governmental organizations by the democratic aid agencies. The instrument and effect of such intervention appears to be the normalization of liberal democratic ethics, the inculcation of universally appraised modes of political conduct, thereby constituting a momentary suture of the political, yet never complete. In the process, a whole set of local knowledges have been disqualified as inadequate, "located low down on the hierarchy", and subjugated, the insurrection of which requires "opposing the effects of centralizing powers linked to the institutions and functioning of an organized scientific discourse" (Foucault in 'Power and Knowledge'; 84). Nonetheless, the subjugating and constitutive functions of power-knowledge are inseparable from its contradictory effectivities in generating novel sites of counter-hegemonic resistance intent on resuscitating such subjugated knowledges. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]