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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

Cover -- Title Page -- Foreword -- KINGDOM, STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN AFRICA -- POLITICAL COLLISIONS -- Groups advocating restoration -- Lobbying led to kingship -- Defensive advocacy following the coronation -- CONCEPTUAL COLLISIONS -- Is the BKG a government? -- Is the BKG a civil society organization? -- CONCLUSION -- ENDNOTES -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- REFERENCES -- Back Cover.

Civil society is one of several Western political and social concepts that have not traveled successfully to Africa. Revived in response to the search for democracy in Eastern Europe during the late Soviet era, Western donors promoted and funded new civil society organizations in sub-Saharan Africa, regarding them as an essential grounding for African democratization. Most of these new civil society organizations had little in common with African associational activity. Focusing on the characteristics and behavior of long-standing African organizations would appear a better starting point for developing a useful concept of an African civil society. One candidate worth serious investigation is the Buganda Kingdom Government. This organization violates most distinctions central to Western notions of civil society. Yet it continues to behave like a civil society organization. Its political and conceptual collisions offer guidance toward a useful notion of African civil society and understanding Ugandan politics.

"This book provides a careful and broad critique of the conventional wisdom in applying the concept of civil society to politics in sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly to democratisation. It examines the ideological roots of the conventional concept, the reasons for the failure of civil society actors, such as the churches, to play their expected roles, the exclusion of marginalised actors, the inability of civil society organisations to act independently of the state and the failure of civil society to contribute effectively to democratising the African state."--Jacket