scholarly journals Between “CV builder” and “Genuine” activist: The many faces of youth civic engagement in Serbia

Sociologija ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-276
Author(s):  
Jelisaveta Petrovic ◽  
Dragan Stanojevic
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Qualitative Methodology ◽  
Youth Engagement ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Youth Civic Engagement ◽  
Social Good ◽  
Civil Society Organisations

The aim of this paper is to explore the characteristics and relative importance of civic engagement for young members of civil society organisations in Serbia. This article is exploratory in character and is based on qualitative methodology. Youth engagement is observed through the theoretical lens of the life course approach. The questions addressed by the paper are as follows: How do young people perceive their civic engagement? What motivates their participation? How does this engagement relate to other aspects of their life course? The method used here is narrative analysis of 20 semi-structured interviews conducted with young volunteers and members of civil society organisations in Serbia selected through theoretical sampling. The key finding is that there is a range of motivations and accompanying strategies - from the purely idealistic to the highly instrumental. The majority of our respondents displayed a mixed type of motivation, successfully combining activities aimed at protecting the ?social good? with those that contribute to the achievement of personal goals. Motivation, however, tends to vary between the different types of organisations, professional and grassroots. Engagement in professional organisations is more frequently instrumental and, in contrast, grassroots organisations typically attract ?genuine?, value-driven activists.

scholarly journals “That’s How Revolutions Happen”: Psychopolitical Resistance in Youth’s Online Civic Engagement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Wilf ◽  
Laura Wray-Lake
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Movement Analysis ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Youth Civic Engagement ◽  
Generation Immigrant ◽  
Inductive Constant ◽  
Building Community ◽  
Constant Comparative Analysis

Aims: This paper aims to describe forms of online youth civic engagement that center the experiences of youth with historically marginalized identities and documents ways that youth are civically engaged. Demographics: Twenty U.S.-based, digitally active youth ages 16-21 years old were interviewed. Seven participants (35%) identified as female, nine (45%) as male, and four (20%) as gender nonbinary. Twelve (60%) identified as a first or second generation immigrant. Settings: Youth were recruited through youth-led movement accounts on Twitter and contacted via Direct Messaging. Methodology: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with youth between March and September 2020, a period spanning the outbreak of COVID-19 and rise in participation in the Black Lives Matter movement. Analysis: Inductive Constant Comparative Analysis was used to document forms of youth civic engagement on social media and understand how youth ascribed meaning to their civic engagement. Findings: Framed by literature on critical consciousness and psychopolitical resistance to oppression, findings highlight three forms of online youth civic engagement: Restorying, Building Community, and Taking Collective Action. Implications: These findings indicate that, for youth with identities that have historically been marginalized, social media is an important context to be civically engaged in ways that resist oppression and injustice.

scholarly journals The role of Civil Society Organisations in post-conflict development of northern Uganda

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-148
Author(s):  
Denis Musinguzi
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Qualitative Methodology ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Community Needs ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Dialectical Relationship ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Violent Conflicts

This article examines the role of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in post-conflict reconstruction and development of northern Uganda. The analysis is informed by the increased spate of violent conflicts in Africa since the end of the Cold War; the destruction caused by violent conflicts; and the significant role played by CSOs in post-conflict reconstruction and development. The northern part of Uganda witnessed the most protracted and devastating Lord‘s Resistance Army (LRA) conflict in the country‘s post-independence history, which forms the central focus of the study. To generate a deeper analysis of the role of CSOs, this article delves into the historical evolution of civil society from the classical thought of ancient Greece to the modern and contemporary perspectives of civil society. The analysis of the role of CSOs in post-conflict reconstruction and development is framed in the war-topeace transition; and recognises the dialectical relationship between peace and development. The article examines the community‘s perceptions on the role of CSOs and its responsiveness to community needs. It concludes with a reflection on simmering issues, which if not properly addressed, could destroy the positive inroads and peace dividends being realised in northern Uganda. A constructivist and qualitative methodology guided the study, which sought to interpret reality from the context of the espondents.

Youth Civic Engagement: Do Youth Councils Reduce or Reinforce Social Inequality?

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astraea Augsberger ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Collins ◽  
Whitney Gecker ◽  
Meaghan Dougher
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Community Engagement ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Municipal Government ◽  
Youth Engagement ◽  
Youth Civic Engagement ◽  
Ongoing Training ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Youth Council

Youth engagement in municipal government has the potential to benefit both youth and the community. Yet, some forms of youth civic engagement may be related to social class and race resulting in benefits to select youth and communities, thus perpetuating a longer term trajectory of privilege or marginalization. Informed by theories of social capital and civic engagement, the present study examined how youth councils may reduce or reinforce social inequality among young people at the city level. Data collection included interviews with youth council members, interviews with adult allies, observations of youth council meetings, and a review of council documents. Thematic analysis identified four overarching themes related to social inequality: member representation, social networks, community engagement, and youth engagement in governmental decision making. Although the council was committed to diversity and authentic youth engagement, findings identified areas in need of further attention. One important area is recruiting diverse youth, including those who attend non-traditional school settings. Another key area is providing youth with ongoing training and support focused on effective strategies for community engagement. Finally, more emphasis should be placed on engaging socially disadvantaged youth in municipal government and assisting them in enhancing their social networks.

scholarly journals “That’s How Revolutions Happen”: Psychopolitical Resistance in Youth’s Online Civic Engagement

2021 ◽  
pp. 074355842110621
Author(s):  
Sara Wilf ◽  
Laura Wray-Lake
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Youth Civic Engagement ◽  
Generation Immigrant ◽  
Inductive Constant ◽  
Building Community ◽  
Constant Comparative Analysis

This paper describes forms of online youth civic engagement that center the experiences of youth with historically marginalized identities and documents ways that youth are civically engaged. Twenty U.S.-based, digitally active youth ages 16 to 21 years old were interviewed. Seven participants (35%) identified as female, nine (45%) as male, and four (20%) as gender nonbinary. Twelve (60%) identified as a first or second generation immigrant. Youth were recruited through youth-led movement accounts on Twitter and contacted via Direct Messaging. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with youth between March and September 2020, a period spanning the outbreak of COVID-19 and rise in participation in the Black Lives Matter movement. Inductive Constant Comparative Analysis was used to document forms of youth civic engagement on social media and understand how youth ascribed meaning to their civic engagement. Framed by literature on critical consciousness and psychopolitical resistance to oppression, findings highlight three forms of online youth civic engagement: Restorying, Building Community, and Taking Collective Action. These findings indicate that, for youth with identities that have historically been marginalized, social media is an important context to be civically engaged in ways that resist oppression and injustice.

scholarly journals QATARI FEMALE MANAGERS IN A WORLD OF PATRIARCHY

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 215-225
Author(s):  
Noora Ahmed Lari
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
The State ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Family Policies ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
Governmental Institutions ◽  
Evaluation And Monitoring ◽  
The Impact

Purpose: The State of Qatar has widely sought to include women in public life and has implemented several policies in order to improve gender equality in the workforce and fair distribution of development benefits. This study establishes how far the State of Qatar has achieved the equality of women in the workplace, since the initiation of new reform policies and agendas of modernisation in 1995. Qatari women in leadership positions still face major challenges in relation to cultural limitations and organisational constraints; these areas need to be further developed to improve the degree of gender equality and close the wide gap between the two genders in terms of economic rights and equal opportunities in the labour force. Methodology: This paper uses semi-structured interviews which were conducted with twenty-five women aged all of whom held senior management positions in a range of civil society and public sector organisations in Qatar at the time of the interview. The twenty-five participants who participated in the study ranged in age from 34 to 61 years. Main Findings: The findings suggest that Qatari women are helped by two forces: the support they are getting from the ruling family and the impact of reforms and social change in surrounding regions. Indeed, the slow pace of social reform is one of the common complaints of progressives. Implications/Applications: Therefore, focused, procedural steps should be taken to enforce adherence to frameworks by governmental institutions and to amend existing legislation to tackle the challenges faced by women. These steps include implementing some social policy recommendations in terms of establishing and funding women’s civil society organisations, integrating an evaluation and monitoring system in governmental organisations, promoting work/family policies, and initiating a feminisation policy in government organisations.

scholarly journals The Relationship between Foreign Aid and Democratization in Myanmar in respect to Civil Society

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Aye Mon Paing
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Democratic Reform ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
Military Regimes ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Impact

<p>Since 2010, Myanmar has been making a transition to a democratic country after 40 years under successive military regimes. The semi-civilian government led by President U TheinSein has been in charge of Myanmar since the democratic reform is carried out. After Myanmar's new government has carried out its democratic reform for 2 years, international assistance has come in Myanmar to assist Myanmar's democratization in 2012 unlike before 2010. Western donors who were not active in providing aid in Myanmar became enthusiastic to help Myanmar's democratization in various ways. Civil society in Myanmar is still small and informally organized to participate as a strong actor in Myanmar's democratization. Democratic aid to nurture civil society in Myanmar, which has been repressed for long time, became an important aid to strengthen democracy in Myanmar.  This thesis will analyse the relation between democratic aid through civil society and democratization in Myanmar. It is based on recently completed in-country research involving document analysis and semi-structured interviews. The paper investigates what is the impact of democratic aid through civil society on Myanmar's democratization process.  The findings of this thesis indicate that democratic aid was not delivered in Myanmar under the successive military regimes to impose democratization. Democratic aid has started to be delivered again after the Myanmar government started its process of democratization mostly due to domestic factors, such as people's dissatisfaction with the military governments. When western donors started supporting the democratization process in Myanmar, they provided democratic assistance to sustain local civil society organisations in Myanmar in order to act as a check and balance to the Myanmar government and to make it more accountable to the citizens. Democratic assistance towards civil society has been promoting the role of civil society organisations in politics, creating a platform for communication between the government and local civil society organisations to increase the all-inclusiveness in Myanmar's democratization process. With the democratic assistance from western donors, local civil society organisations became more developed and started working as one of the check and balance actors in Myanmar's politics. Thus, democratic assistance to civil society has increased the sustainability of local civil society organisations in Myanmar to participate in the democratization process. However, democratic assistance to civil society has only started recently, in 2012, and there are challenges in providing assistance to civil society to promote democratization. If those challenges can be avoided in delivering aid to civil society, the assistance towards civil society can have a better impact on democratization in Myanmar.</p>

scholarly journals Research Design for an Integrated Artificial Intelligence Ethical Framework

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Афина Караджоянни
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Research Design ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Ethical Framework ◽  
Social Good ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
Ai Ethics ◽  
The Individual

Artificial Intelligence (AI) regulatory and other governance mechanisms have only started to emerge and consolidate. Therefore, AI regulation, legislation, frameworks, and guidelines are presently fragmented, isolated, or co-exist in an opaque space between national governments, international bodies, corporations, practitioners, think-tanks, and civil society organisations. This article proposes a research design set up to address this problem by directly collaborating with targeted actors to identify principles for AI that are trustworthy, accountable, safe, fair, non-discriminatory, and which puts human rights and the social good at the centre of its approach. It proposes 21 interlinked substudies, focusing on the ethical judgements, empirical statements, and practical guidelines, which manufacture ethicopolitical visions and AI policies across four domains: seven tech corporations, seven governments, seven civil society actors, together with the analysis of online public debates. The proposed research design uses multiple research techniques: extensive mapping and studies of AI ethics policy documents and 120 interviews of key individuals, as well as assorted analyses of public feedback discussion loops on AI, employing digital methods on online communities specialising in AI debates. It considers novel conceptual interactions communicated across the globe, expands the regulatory, ethics, and technological foresight, both at the individual level (autonomy, identity, dignity, privacy, and data protection) and the societal level (fairness/equality, responsibility, accountability and transparency, surveillance/datafication, democracy and trust, collective humanity and the common good). By producing an innovative, intercontinental, multidisciplinary research design for an Ethical AI Standard, this article offers a concrete plan to search for the Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence: Its Ethics.

scholarly journals The V in VGI: Citizens or Civic Data Sources

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suthee Sangiambut ◽  
Renee Sieber
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Civic Participation ◽  
Data Use ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
Structured Interviews

Volunteered geographic information (VGI), delivered via mobile and web apps, offers new potentials for civic engagement. If framed in the context of open, transparent and accountable governance then presumably VGI should advance dialogue and consultation between citizen and government. If governments perceive citizens as consumers of services then arguably such democratic intent elide when municipalities use VGI. Our empirical research shows how assumptions embedded in VGI drive the interaction between citizens and government. We created a typology that operationalises VGI as a potential act of citizenship and an instance of consumption. We then selected civic apps from Canadian cities that appeared to invoke these VGI types. We conducted interviews with developers of the apps; they were from government, private sector, and civil society. Results from qualitative semi-structured interviews indicate a blurring of consumer and citizen-centric orientations among respondents, which depended on motivations for data use, engagement and communication objectives, and sector of the respondent. Citizen engagement, an analogue for citizenship, was interpreted multiple ways. Overall, we found that government and developers may increase choice by creating consumer-friendly apps but this does not ensure VGI offers an act of civic participation. The burden is placed on the contributor to make it so. Apps and VGI could potentially further a data-driven and neoliberal government. Planners should be mindful of the dominance of a consumer-centric view even as they assume VGI invariably improves democratic participation.

scholarly journals The concept and determinants of civic engagement

Human Affairs ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paschalis A. Arvanitidis
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Interpersonal Trust ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Sociodemographic Factors ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Youth Civic Engagement ◽  
Multidimensional Concept

AbstractCivic engagement plays a prominent role in sustaining a strong civil society and a vibrant democracy. However, it is a complex multidimensional concept, taking multiple forms and encompassing a variety of behaviours and actions related to both political and social aspects. Drawing on the relevant literature the paper attempts to clarify and pinpoint the notion, specifying its dimensions and mapping out its determinants. Then, focusing on university students, it moves to examine youth civic engagement in Greece, examining the extent of their civic participation and its determinants. After controlling for sociodemographic factors it finds that interpersonal trust, religiosity and political ideology affect students’ likelihood to be civically engaged.

scholarly journals The Relationship between Foreign Aid and Democratization in Myanmar in respect to Civil Society

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Aye Mon Paing
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Democratic Reform ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
Military Regimes ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Impact

<p>Since 2010, Myanmar has been making a transition to a democratic country after 40 years under successive military regimes. The semi-civilian government led by President U TheinSein has been in charge of Myanmar since the democratic reform is carried out. After Myanmar's new government has carried out its democratic reform for 2 years, international assistance has come in Myanmar to assist Myanmar's democratization in 2012 unlike before 2010. Western donors who were not active in providing aid in Myanmar became enthusiastic to help Myanmar's democratization in various ways. Civil society in Myanmar is still small and informally organized to participate as a strong actor in Myanmar's democratization. Democratic aid to nurture civil society in Myanmar, which has been repressed for long time, became an important aid to strengthen democracy in Myanmar.  This thesis will analyse the relation between democratic aid through civil society and democratization in Myanmar. It is based on recently completed in-country research involving document analysis and semi-structured interviews. The paper investigates what is the impact of democratic aid through civil society on Myanmar's democratization process.  The findings of this thesis indicate that democratic aid was not delivered in Myanmar under the successive military regimes to impose democratization. Democratic aid has started to be delivered again after the Myanmar government started its process of democratization mostly due to domestic factors, such as people's dissatisfaction with the military governments. When western donors started supporting the democratization process in Myanmar, they provided democratic assistance to sustain local civil society organisations in Myanmar in order to act as a check and balance to the Myanmar government and to make it more accountable to the citizens. Democratic assistance towards civil society has been promoting the role of civil society organisations in politics, creating a platform for communication between the government and local civil society organisations to increase the all-inclusiveness in Myanmar's democratization process. With the democratic assistance from western donors, local civil society organisations became more developed and started working as one of the check and balance actors in Myanmar's politics. Thus, democratic assistance to civil society has increased the sustainability of local civil society organisations in Myanmar to participate in the democratization process. However, democratic assistance to civil society has only started recently, in 2012, and there are challenges in providing assistance to civil society to promote democratization. If those challenges can be avoided in delivering aid to civil society, the assistance towards civil society can have a better impact on democratization in Myanmar.</p>

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