This book is devoted to questions and research problems generated by the issue of civil society. It contains contributions from mostly young scientists, who develop various approaches to the position and functionality of civil society, examining different examples from both the past and the present, based on theoretical approaches to this concept. As a result, the volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, which allows the identification of various levels of the concept of the civil society, and insight into its multiformity, in terms of its reality, and its interpretation and depiction as a means of political and social self-determination.
The book provides fluid interpretation patterns, and avoids working with the term ‘civil society’ in any fixed, definitional mode. The editors’ and authors’ aim, as well as the main objective of the volume, is to refresh and stimulate the discussion and point out exemplary fields of research, which will bring interesting explanations and impulses to the formulation of innovative research questions regarding the concept of civil society. Finally, the book explains and underlines the pivotal role of the civil society in the upheavals of the 21st century, as well as provides an understanding of it as a fundamental structural element of the necessary renegotiation of the relations between the state and society.
