Structural Impediments of the Civil Society Project in Iran: National and Global Dimensions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The origins of the “civil society” concept can be traced to the nineteenth century European political thought. But in the last two decades the concept has been revived in an eclectic and non-critical fashion by Western governments and affiliated donor agencies with vested neo-colonial and economic interests in Eastern Europe, former Soviet republics, and developing countries. This article argues that as an alternative to radical ideologies and revolutionary processes of social change, the civil society concept has been transformed into a neutral and allegedly non-ideological pragmatic “project” for establishing democracy and promoting market-based economies in developing nations. The article entails two components. First, it traces historical origins of the civil society concept from Locke, Hegel and Marx to Gramsci and Habermas, as well as resurrection of the concept by western governments, particularly in the United States and Britain. Second, it examines the feasibility of establishing civil society in developing countries by using the Islamic Republic of Iran as a case study, particularly since the victory of Mohammad Khatami and pro-reform factions in the 1997 presidential elections. Using Antonio Gramsci’s interpretation of civil society and providing a conceptual model, the article concludes that the civil society project in Iran and other developing countries is a recipe for failure due to both internal and external structural impediments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".