Introduction: Civicness in conflict

ABSTRACT

This article is the introduction to a special issue on ‘Civicness in Conflict’. Civicness is defined in three ways: (i) as a logic of public authority, that speaks to ideas of rights-based, inclusive rather than exclusive political orders; (ii) as a form of behaviour, acting ‘as if’ such a logic existed; and (iii) as a political position, articulated against uncivic politics, in particular the combination of endemic corruption, ethnic or religious sectarianism and economic and social injustice. The introduction traces some conceptual, historical and vernacular entry points, before summarizing empirical research that points to the prevalence of civicness in all three senses in contemporary conflicts. It emerges even without free and secure spaces, and it often represents a strategy of survival. We also suggest that whether or not civicness is merely a way of surviving in conflict contexts or whether it represents an opening for challenging the dominant war logics depends to a degree on the character of international involvement.

KEYWORDS:

• Civic
• civicness
• conflict
• war
• peace
• public authority

Introduction

The predicament of contemporary conflict appears, in many places, ever more intractable. Transactional politics, often framed in ethnic or sectarian narratives, produce conflicts that become entrenched as persistent social conditions. An analysis of conflict developed by the Conflict Research Programme (CRP)¹ is based on what it defined as logics of public authority. ‘Public authority’ refers to any type of authority that commands voluntary compliance; it could be a state, an international agency, a municipality, a chiefdom, or a religious authority. Across the conflict zones that the programme researched, the dominant logics identified were the political marketplace, a kind of systemic corruption, and exclusivist identity politics, ethnic nationalism, sectarianism or religious fundamentalism. But in all cases, we also observed manifestations of what could be described as ‘civicness’, something that differs from and may contradict the dominant logics.

Focusing on the civic represents the flipside of Alex de Waal’s call, first articulated in relation to the Horn of Africa, that we investigate, in the sense envisaged by Raymond Geuss, the ‘real politics’ of conflict (de Waal, 2015; Geuss, 2008). Acknowledging the patterns, drivers, and dynamics of conflict that he identified, we explore the real politics of how these are challenged, coped with, resisted, and occasionally overcome. Civicness might be found, for example, in the individual action of a schoolteacher resisting pressure to apply sectarian revisionism to the curriculum; in the case of a municipality governing itself, enacting authority according to inclusive, non-violent norms; or in the anti-corruption and anti-sectarian slogans of a protest. Some element of civicness is both necessary for social and individual survival in zones of conflict and, at the same time, might open up the possibility for a different ‘social imaginary’, in Charles Taylor’s terms, to prevail (Taylor, 2002).

The concept of civicness has been developed through an inductive and reflexive methodology as a way of describing and understanding a phenomenon that CRP empirical research has uncovered and noted in all of CRP’s sites. Our research found that the term ‘civil society’ was not adequate to capture this phenomenon, even though both the terms ‘civicness’ and ‘civil society’ have intertwining roots and histories. Civil society, in its contemporary meaning, tends to refer to NGOs or to grassroots community groups, which may well behave in civic ways, but can easily be co-opted by exclusivist identity politics or, in cases where they are dependent on external funding, become subordinate to the broader political economic dynamics of the political marketplace. In our conceptual discussions, the programme experimented with and explored various alternative terms, for example ‘public mutuality’, before settling on the term civicness. Further field research was undertaken in order to test the utility of the concept and draw out the implications both for our understanding of contemporary conflict and for policy-making.

This special issue is an outcome of this research (although this introduction also draws more widely on CRP findings not included in the special issue). This article aims to introduce the concept of civicness and draw attention to the empirical manifestations observed in CRP field sites. In the first part, we begin to sketch out an account of civicness in conflict by mobilizing a range of resources in contemporary and historical political thought that engage the notion of the ‘civic’. These ideas have sometimes come about in relatively settled political conditions, but have also often emerged from more challenging political circumstances. Importantly, ideas of the civic have often not been dependent on the existence of a stable state in the modern democratic sense, and are thus helpful to interrogate contexts where the absence of such a state is all too real.

This is followed by a brief overview of empirical manifestations of civicness drawn from CRP research. Such manifestations are diverse, but it is helpful to think about three broad entry points, different facets of which are rehearsed in both the overview and the articles that make up this special issue. First, within certain institutions or political spaces, public authority can be exercised according to civic logics, often imperfectly and transiently, but nevertheless offering a concrete model of alternative orders. Second is the sphere of individual behaviour. In fragmented conflict settings, the possibility of civicness is often upheld in small and particular ways, by people acting as if civic models of citizenship and public authority existed. Third, an idea of the civic may become the mobilizing register for political protests, social movements, or other collective political responses to the dominant actors and logics driving conflict. Indeed, attacks on civic protests, as in Syria, have often marked the start of contemporary conflicts, while elsewhere, such as in Iraq or Sudan, they can capture the demands for change in ways that offer the possibility of transforming entrenched conflict dynamics.

Finally, we provide a summary of the special issue before drawing some conclusions.

Conceptual, Historical and Vernacular Starting Points

The epithet ‘civic’ is and has been widely used in social and political theory but it is usually the noun to which it is appended that is problematized and investigated, perhaps because in many of the contexts in which it is used. The possibility of ‘civicness’ itself is less controversial, and therefore less clearly defined. Used as a noun, the concept can be interpreted as encompassing movement, what Sassen describes in terms of the ‘work of making’ or ‘becoming’ (Sassen, 2008). If we look at the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of ‘civic’ and its related compounds (such as ‘civic-minded’), what is at stake is clear: it pertains to the status of citizen, to a community of citizens, and to a public-spirited concern for the welfare of that community (OED, 2022). For instance, one meaning: ‘Of, belonging to, or relating to a citizen or citizens; of or relating to citizenship or to the rights, duties, etc., of the citizen; befitting a citizen’. Another: ‘Of, belonging to, or relating to a city, town, borough, or other community of citizens; esp. of or relating to the administration and affairs of such a community; municipal’. It locates origins of the term in the Latin civicus, from civis ‘citizen’ and in the French civique, in use from the sixteenth century but especially during the French Revolution (OED, 2022). Thus civicness is related to a collection of similar terms pertaining to the city, citizenship, administration, law, action and duty.

In the sites where the CRP undertook research (DRC, Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan, and Syria), language akin to civicness is used by those engaged themselves in instances of civicness. In the Yugoslav wars, the term ‘civic’ was used to describe those who refused ethnic or religious political labels. In South Sudan’s education system, some use the term ‘Ubuntu caring’ to refer to African traditions of humanity involving interconnectedness and interdependence of the self with others (Duany et al., 2021, p. 7, 20; Waghid et al., 2018). Protestors refer to madaniyya (Ali, 2019) throughout the Middle East, while in DRC civic activists use the term citoyenneté (Vlassenroot et al., 2022).

So how do we interpret the widespread use of the term in conflict settings? One way to help us investigate the meaning of civicness is through an exploration of the rich history of the family of terms to which the term ‘civicness’ belongs as well as the use of the term ‘civic’ and the relevance of the nouns to which it is appended. In what follows, we interrogate these notions, in order to amplify our understanding of civicness as a logic of public authority, a form of behaviour and a political position.

The Evolution of Civic Forms of Public Authority

Cities incubated ideas of the civic. Historically, they hosted emergent political communities based on notions of law and citizenship. Whether in the context of Greek city states, medieval European cities, the cities of classical Islam, or the Italian city states, these new forms of public authority were characterized by formal rights and obligations, the establishment of urban law, combined with notions of membership and loyalty, in contrast to the personal and religious ties that defined the subjects of empire, religious authorities or monarchies and princely fiefdoms. Sassen describes such forms of urban polity as ‘communitarian, secular and constitutional’ (Sassen, 2008).

Within the Islamic tradition, classical thinkers were developing political theories along parallel lines, also influenced by the philosophers of antiquity. Thinkers like al-Farabi (Baghdad, tenth century) and Ibn Khaldun (Tunis, fourteenth century) engaged with Ancient Greek thought, notably Aristotle’s, and drew on ideas of the polis in developing their own approaches to the city as site for human flourishing, considering its moral character and civic potential, and invoking concepts such as (in Ibn Khaldun’s case) the solidaristic bond of Asabiyyah. (Ezzat, 2022; Germann, 2021)

During the seventeenth century, practices of civic engagement became associated with the emergent construct of the early modern state, not least in England. There is a broad literature (Giddens, 1985; Mann, 2012; Weber, 2001) about the determinants of this process – the role of puritanism, the rise of commerce and gentry, the redefinition of custom. Sassen refers to tipping points where particular types of what she calls ‘organizing logics’ switch from one type of political authority to another (Sassen, 2008). The seventeenth century was such a tipping point. The civic logic was originally associated with city states, but in the modern period, it switched to the construction of national states.

These earlier notions of civicness were exclusive. Civicness involved a set of civil and political rights that only pertained to membership of the political community; thus, citizenship represented a privileged status. The growth of capitalism and urbanity extended notions of civicness both in the Middle East and Europe linked to the rise of middle classes, education and culture. Legal frameworks for civicness were generally confined to privileged groups of people, whether this was in contrast to slaves (Athens and the United States), serfs (eastern Europe), ‘backward’ or ‘indigenous’ peoples (Native Americans, Berbers, etc), or the divisions between citizen and subject in post-colonial Africa described by Mamdani. All those states that characterized themselves as civic were also empires. Rights and obligations were reserved for Europeans in the colonies and everyone else was subject to complex forms of subjecthood (Mamdani, 2018). This exclusivist notion of civicness continues to be used in religious or ethnically based states; for example, certain civic privileges are primarily reserved for Jewish citizens in Israel.

Ideas of civic duty could also be absolutist, associated with military service and taxation. During the French revolution, people were expected to sign certificates of ‘civisme’ to prove their loyalty (Rothschild, 2021, p. 124). Something similar can be observed in citizenship duties that were demanded in the former Communist countries or in post-colonial states such as the DRC, or even contemporary China: those who wish to stand for election in Hong Kong must swear an oath of patriotism that includes loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.

Sassen argues that we are currently at another tipping point, where forms of citizenship are becoming more complex and are at times losing their primary anchorage in the exclusive state. With the decline of ‘old’ wars, citizenship is less associated with the citizen soldier, referring rather to a bundle of entitlements (as well as obligations such as political participation or taxpaying) that can only exist in the context of an institutional framework, often a state. Sassen points to the prevalence of dual citizenship especially among the new global classes (something that was abjured when citizenship was linked to allegiance), the rise of new forms of multiple citizenship such as EU citizenship, as well as the perceived requirement to address problems of statelessness or undocumented migrants (Sassen, 2008). The entire globe is now divided into ‘administered space’ (Scott, 2009, p. 324) that bundle of rights and obligations needs to be provided by some public authority or other, at least in principle. This principle is also expressed in international human rights law. What it means is that civic duty is no longer necessarily associated with identitarian allegiance or with preferential status but rather a commitment to the existence of rights in themselves, to the notion of a logic of civicness, or to the active membership of a political entity organized according to a logic of civicness.

Civicness as Behaviour: Acting ‘as if’ in Contemporary Conflict

In situations of conflict, what it means to be a citizen is inherently unstable. Implicit, settled assumptions become unsettled, explicitly political, and often dangerous. Intractable contemporary conflicts reflect, by definition, situations where any pre-existing social contract that might have existed between state and citizen is either non-existent or profoundly ruptured.

Alan Fowler shares many of the above starting points for thinking about the civic in time (Fowler, 2010, p. 152). Though he argues that: ‘Civic agency connects political theory with purposeful sociopolitical action’, he (plausibly) limits the exercise of such agency to ‘persons who enjoy a minimal condition of meaningful citizenship’ (Fowler, 2010, p. 151). For Fowler:

Environments with a minimum respect for the right of all to have their say and be socially engaged are a precondition for civic agency. Where this precondition is not fulfilled, notions of a public realm and civic agency remain a theoretical potential but cannot operate in a practical sense. (Fowler, 2010, p. 151)

But that does not mean that the idea of citizenship, or the bundle of values, expectations and aspirations, vanishes, in conflict contexts which demonstrably fail to meet Fowler’s criteria. Nor does the possibility of their enactment. Emergent forms of civic agency along the lines Fowler envisages are both present and noteworthy in conflict situations, though the chronic incompleteness of citizenship in such circumstances highlights and radicalizes the ‘work of making’ that Sassen associates with the condition of (always to some extent incomplete) citizenship (Sassen, 2008). The questions of whether citizenship exists in a conceptually robust sense in conflict contexts, of what its scope might be (local, national, transnational) are less relevant than understanding how, why, and with what consequences certain people act as though it existed. Moreover, what is often missed in the literature is the thickening of international law, as it pertains to human rights, the spread of global norms associated with enhanced communication that can be observed in conflict settings even if there exist overwhelming obstacles to their implementation at local levels.

In their ‘work of making’ political subjectivities, agencies and citizenships, people living amidst conflict enact and perform their reactions against, and resistance to, practices that they feel are wrong, unjust or corrupt. These visceral negative articulations of, say, injustice, can, as Amartya Sen’s work has demonstrated, provide a solid basis for fostering political action without the need for agreed upon ideal types of perfect justice (Sen, 2009). Indeed, measuring against ideals may be actively unhelpful.

Nevertheless, contemporary conflict is hardly a vacuum of ideals. People often carry surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) resilient positive ideas of what citizenship ought to look like, of what rights ought to look like, of how others should be treated. These latent social imaginaries may never have been realized prior to the conflict in question, but they can still be powerful, and provide a context for everyday survival and peaceful coexistence ‘as if’ a more civic order pertained. Appiah, taking his cue from the philosopher Hans Vaihinger, notes the power of acting ‘as if’, according to ‘useful fictions’ (Appiah, 2017, p. xvi), echoing the way dissidents in Eastern Europe in the 1980s refused the lies that characterized their regimes (Kusý, 1985). After all, conflict entrepreneurs are engaged in the, itself imaginative, project of rendering such a thing ‘unimaginable’. Indeed, the most successful amongst them are cynical masters (gendered noun intended) of the imaginary, of the ‘as if’, reminding us of Geuss’ point that all forms of politics (including the ostensibly reactionary or the status quo) require an imaginative underpinning (Geuss, 2010, pp. x–xi). Moreover, as Vlassenroot et al. point out in their article in this special issue, these imaginings can be ambivalent where, for example, sectarian entrepreneurs, armed groups perhaps, also imagine themselves as guardians of order while civilians may also be caught up in the complicity of the dominant logics. (Vlassenroot et al., 2022)

Being a conflict-affected citizen, not necessarily ‘of the world’, but all-too-inescapably ‘in the world’, imbues ideas and practices of citizenship in conflict with rich, specific meanings and possibilities (and also limitations, paradoxes, and tragedies). Such emergent performances of citizenship sometimes lack a direct institutional counterpart (most obviously a state governed according to a robust social contract), against which rights or entitlements might be asserted or claimed, so the potential political order that might be ‘in the making’ can often be obscure or unclear, even to those engaged in them. In any case, as Lund usefully underlines, even the state itself is ‘always in the making’, and ‘[t]reating “the state” as a finished product gets in the way of understanding it' (Lund, 2016, p. 1200).

Whatever their circumstances, for those enacting citizenship, the ‘work of making’, which any commitment to civicness entails, is necessarily concrete. Corruption and injustice come to life not in the abstract, but in the visceral confrontation with, and often subjection to, their practical, seditious everyday power. Yet civicness also requires the ‘work of imagining’, the element of ‘as if’ mentioned above. The work of imagining should be understood as distinct from, and less demanding than, the idea of utopia. Rather than the perfect city on the hill, it is, along the lines of Sen’s approach evoked above, the register of the better, the less unjust, the less violent, the tolerable. When the everyday reality is replete with intolerable violence, the better is an extraordinary enough act of political creation.

Civicness as a Political Position: Civic Virtue and Civic Patriotism

The content of civicness in contemporary conflicts tend to be counterposed against the dominant logics of the political marketplace and exclusivist identity politics. The word ‘civic’, especially in conflict zones tends to be understood in terms of the public interest as opposed to private or sectarian interest. These concerns echo similar preoccupations in the conceptual evolution of the term. Civic virtue, as developed in antiquity and taken forward during the period of the Italian city states, was counterposed to Fortuna, which referred to the risks and dangers faced by communities (Pocock, 2016). Later interpretations of Fortuna linked the concept to corruption, not merely to material corruption, but corruption of power expressed in despotism – something very relevant to the current conflicts where a reaction against corruption is often a framing with the potential to gain traction against instrumentalizing or exclusivist logics of public authority.

Frank Lovett notes that:

We may understand the term ‘corruption’ simply to mean the advancement of personal or sectional interest at the expense of the public good, and ‘civic virtue’ as its opposite – that is, a willingness to do one’s part in supporting the public good. (Lovett, 2018, p. n.p.)

What this might entail is highly contested, but this willingness speaks usefully to attempts to mitigate the experience of contemporary conflict, especially when seen in the light of the practices of civic activism, and the notions of citizenship that are enacted in conflict-affected settings.

Viroli argues that civic virtue does not ‘bloom on the branch of cultural or ethnic or religious homogeneity’ (Viroli, 2002, p. 90). The term ‘civic humanism’ associated with the fifteenth century Florentine philosopher Leonardo Bruni, marked the break with notions of power defined in religious terms and the development of the idea of a broadly based civic constitution contrasted with both tyranny and barbarism. Civic humanism derived from conversations with antiquity concerning the idea that the highest form of human association was political. According to James Hankins:

Civic humanists elaborated a republican political ideology that made the state, not religious authority, the font of value. […] In general, they valued participation in politics, the active life, and public service in this life, as against a medieval outlook that supposedly subordinated the temporary to the eternal and politics to the salvation of souls. (Hankins, 2014, p. 99)

Like civic humanism, the term civic patriotism directly contrasts with the forms of exclusivist identity politics that characterize contemporary conflict, in which such homogeneity is invariably invoked in one form or another. ethnic or religious identity, even though the political authority may claim such an identity. Crucially, such a commitment need not attach to a nation, or a particular ethnicity, but rather to a particular instance of the public realm that is brought about through the performance of citizenship. The idea of civic patriotism necessarily invokes a bounded commitment, but the dynamic of the formation of patriotism can be one of greater inclusion. Honohan notes Taylor’s claim that the original meaning of patriotism lay in the contrast between (in Honohan’s words) ‘loyalty to the communal over private interests, rather than in its current sense of loyalty to one’s own country as against others’ (Honohan, 2002, p. 140). Of course, for most of the genealogy of the idea of patriotism, the referent was not a state, but rather a smaller entity, usually centred on a city – a focus that Bell and de-Shalit also take as starting point in developing their notion of ‘civicism’ (D. A. Bell & de Shalit, 2021; D. A. Bell & de-Shalit, 2014).

Civic patriotism is often a reaction to attempts to define the state in terms of ethnic nationalism, or extremist religion, with the aim of producing internal enemies that can be sidelined or eliminated. But it can also characterize a collective commitment to a particular city or municipality being run according to the public good, the dominant association between patriotism and the state being a modern artefact. In the conflict in Syria, civic patriotism captures the revindications and commitments of the non-sectarian opposition at a national level, as well as the preservation of a non-sectarian mode of governance in particular municipalities, in a way that terms such as ‘cosmopolitanism’ or ‘liberalism’ do not (for all the cosmopolitans and liberals that form, along with many others, these groupings).

The current war in Ukraine offers further illustration of this argument. A political idea of Ukraine was forged in the Maidan protests, an idea that included Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Poles, Crimean Tartars and others committed to an inclusive idea of the state. Indeed the protests included explicitly anti sectarian slogans. By contrast, Putin is promoting an ethnic Russian idea of the state. The difference between territory controlled by Russia and territory controlled by Ukraine is not the ethnicity of the inhabitants but the way society is organized, as an emerging rights-based democracy or ruled by an autocratic exclusivist regime.

Other terms, such as democracy or justice, might sit well alongside civicness. But a civic patriotic commitment speaks to a particular context in which such things might be invoked and fought for. Describing the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, in terms reminiscent of the spirit of the initial demonstrations in Syria, Viroli writes:

We do not need more citizens attending national festivals with great fervour; nor do we need more citizens willing to offer their lives to protect their country’s religious or ethnic or cultural unity. We need, instead, more citizens willing and capable of mobilising when one or more citizens are victims of injustice or discrimination, when unfair laws are passed or constitutional principles are violated. (Viroli, 1995, p. 185)

Civicness in Practice

Civicness is everywhere in conflict zones: in informal networks of reciprocity, in courageous acts of unselfishness, and in everyday practices – ‘events that are apparently ordinary but, given the conflict-affected context, are extraordinary’. (Mac Ginty, 2014, p. 552). Chiming with Mac Ginty’s soberly unheroic approach to everyday peace, we note that for many in conflict, being civic can often be something people are pushed towards as the best means of survival. In all our research sites, we observe different ways in which civicness is manifested in practice.

Civicness as Institutional Design

First, there are public authorities, or parts thereof, that operate more-or-less according to a civic logic. The institutional design of contemporary states is more-or-less based on a civic template, with elections, legislatures, justice systems, or ministries responsible for public services. The classic state-building agenda, often imposed by external donors, usually aims to reproduce this template. But in conflict zones, this design is subverted and disassembled by the dominant logics of the political marketplace or exclusivist identity politics. Elections become violent contests for sectarian representation, judges are biased and corrupt, public service ministries are looted by entrepreneurs of the political marketplace. Yet the very existence of such institutions not only provides the basis for an alternative imaginary but can sometimes be availed of in different ways.

In conflict, it is usually possible to find specific areas where citizens have come together to prevent violence, provide services, and cross sectarian boundaries. Kheder Khaddour describes two areas in Syria that remained peaceful. One, Dumair in the Qalamoun region, is a town where army housing is based – in a suburb – yet local people favoured the opposition. Throughout the war, efforts were made to avoid tensions between the two parts of town. ‘Yet local communities maintained basic economic links and a shared interest in isolating Dumair from the quickly escalating war, and prominent locals and army officers from the two areas coordinated to ensure the city remained peaceful' (Khaddour, 2017, p. 8). A similar case is the city of Hama where some of the biggest demonstrations took place in 2011. However the city remained under regime control and has hosted very large numbers of IDPs. A key role in maintaining peace and keeping armed groups out of the town was played by large mercantile families. ‘One of these families’, writes Khaddour:

whose history stretches back generations, currently includes seven brothers, most of whom are businessmen and factory owners, while one is a Sunni sheikh. The family has well-established ties with local regime figures through its businesses, and the family also has maintained ties with opposition activist networks through the sheikh and works actively with charities to support internally displaced people since the beginning of the uprising. (Khaddour, 2017, p. 9)

Summarizing findings from Wayame in Ambon, Indonesia and Dadin Kowa in Jos, Nigeria, Jana Krause describes how a logic of civicness (though she does not use the term) came to characterize public authority in those places:

Community leaders and residents countered polarization and developed inclusive cross-cleavage identities; established internal social control, persuading residents to support prevention efforts and formulating rules and procedures for conflict management; and engaged external armed groups for negotiations and the gathering and dissemination of information. In so doing, they established social orders different from violence-prone neighbourhoods that came under the influence and control of armed groups. (Krause, 2018, p. 7)

This illustrates the link between the deliberate effort to create and support ‘cross-cleavage identities’ and the sustenance of an 'island of civility', in Kaldor’s terms, which she links to such efforts to refuse the 'politics of particularism’ and polarization (Kaldor, 2012, p. 117). In the same way, Bojicic shows how civic leaders in Novi Pazar, a Muslim town in Serbia, managed to keep out of the wars that were engulfing Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo despite the economic pressures and the burdens of displaced people (Bojicic-Dzelilovic, 2020).

Studies by CRP’s South Sudanese researchers demonstrate that education, in itself, provides a degree of civic space.

Since December 2013, educational institutions have provided spaces of protection, struggle, and change. This has included opportunities to come together and provide safety across ethnic lines. Some political and military leaders have enrolled in educational institutions, including the University of Juba, showing that they still seek the authority of education as a supplement to coercive military power. (Duany et al., 2021, p. 6)

Of course, education is hugely damaged by wars – teachers are killed and disappear, buildings are used for military barracks and other war related purposes, children dare not travel to school. Education is also instrumentalized by exclusivist leaders. During the time when South Sudan was part of Sudan, Islamic values were imposed on schools and universities, for example. But this instrumentalization is always ‘complicated by the inherent social value of learning and the aspirations and capacities associated with it’. (Ibreck et al., 2021, p. 7) Despite all the problems during the South Sudan civil war and despite the fact that only 59% of schools remained open, literacy continued to increase, especially for girls. According to one teacher:

These students of mine have contributed much [to reducing tensions in the PoC [Protection of Civilians site]]. Like now the leader of the gang who was disturbing the community in POC has reported in Senior 2 and [he is] now mobilising his group, whom some have actually joined. (Ibreck et al., 2021, p. 17)

Civicness as a Form of Behaviour

Across the contexts CRP has worked in, it is possible to observe civic individual behaviour. Mac Skelton has described how, in Iraq, doctors and nurses challenge sectarian impositions and, in particular, how cancer patients from different back grounds cross sectarian lines and establish informal networks in order to access cancer treatment (Skelton, 2019, 2020). Aida Al-Kaisy, in research she led for the CRP, identified examples, albeit isolated ones, of journalists making hugely courageous efforts, in the face of huge obstacles, to tell the truth and expose wrongdoing (Al-Kaisy, 2018, 2019; Al-Kaisy & Lawler, 2022). Her examples include efforts to expose corruption; vital information sharing by local media that connect local leaders to their citizens; and feminist reporting that helps to amplify the agency of women. Although these are largely examples of individual actors transcending their structural constraints, they undoubtedly also signify the opening up of public, civic spaces, the ‘pockets of civicness’, from which other political possibilities may grow. In sustaining these, she also highlights the importance of transnational networks of support, training and funding, for instance in enabling the Iraq-based elements of the Panama Papers investigation.

In her work on legal activism in South Sudan’s ‘injustice system’, Rachel Ibreck provides fascinating examples of how ‘[c]ommitted judges, chiefs, lawyers and citizens try to reckon with everyday injustices even during a civil war’ (Ibreck, 2019, p. 3). Ibreck’s case studies are vivid illustrations of the importance of, in Judith Shklar’s terms, ‘giving injustice its due’ as a starting point for political action (Shklar, 1990, pp. 15–50). That is, while just political arrangements remain elusive in South Sudan, people recognize, articulate and work to mitigate concrete injustices.

Ibreck highlights the creativity and improvisation that offers ‘evidence that transformative agency with the potential to incrementally alter power structures can emerge even in war-torn places, where the “mesh of violence” invariably constrains moral choices’ (Ibreck, 2019, p. 4). The examples documented in her work are nuanced and ambivalent. Amidst a hostile environment a truly ‘civic’ outcome is rare. But nevertheless, she surfaces something precious and important. The legal activists she engages with ‘consistently emphasised the high value they placed on their citizenship and espoused a commitment “to the public good”’ (Ibreck, 2019, p. 181). She illustrates how activists draw creatively both on transnational ideas of rights or law and more particularly customary or local laws or authorities. She finds that legal activism in South Sudan ‘demands particular diligence, creativity and bravery in this harsh environment and, despite considerable efforts, successes appear to be limited, transitory or negligible’ (Ibreck, 2019, p. 153).

Among the cases she draws on are examples of landgrabbing in Hai Game, a strategically located, multi-ethnic sector of Juba, where citizen activists, with pro bono legal assistance and united behind a local chief, manage to defeat a major landgrab by the wildlife police in the courts, only to have to renew their activism in the face of a second wave of landgrabbing in the allocation of plots. While contestation over the land rights continues, Ibreck notes the civic achievements of the people of Hai Game, working across communities, drawing on legal help, a supportive chief and relatively functional parts of the justice system in their continuous fending off of landgrabs (Ibreck, 2019, pp. 120–132).

Civicness as Activism

Finally, a combination of civic virtue and civic patriotism seems often to characterize the political platforms of activists in war zones. The rise of civic activism appears to have followed the 1989 revolutions, drawing on models of non-violent protest that can be traced back to Gandhi.

Recent protest movements in Iraq, Sudan, and Lebanon represent illuminating examples of civicness as a political position. In all three cases, the protests began in response to dramatically deteriorating economic circumstances (high unemployment, intermittent or non-existent public services and, in the Lebanese case a raft of new taxes). In all three cases, the demonstrations have succeeded in removing leaders, but in all of them, future political arrangements are unclear and public pressure is continuing.

There are considerable similarities in all three cases. They are post-conflict (though not necessarily post-violence) rather than pre-conflict. While pre-conflict protests were largely pro-democracy actions in opposition to authoritarianism, these protests could be said to be directed against the social system that characterizes contemporary conflict zones, notably the dominant logics of the identity politics and the political marketplace, or to put it more colloquially against sectarianism or Islamism and systemic corruption. The term madaniyya, which could roughly be translated as civicness, is claimed by the protesters in all three countries. According to Zahra Ali, the term:

is not only an expression of a ‘post-Islamist’ political moment but it is structured by the traumatic experience of sectarian violence. For Iraqi youth, the demands for social justice and economic redistribution cannot be separated from the claim for sectarian equality and religious freedom: both demands are experienced as matters of life and death. (Ali, 2019)

The slogan ‘Bis mil-din baguna al-haramiya’ means ‘in the name of religion we were robbed by looters’. (Ali, 2019)

An important feature of all three protest movements has been the prominent role of women. All three countries have discriminatory laws against women, which is intrinsically associated with both sectarianism and Islamism. In Sudan, a large majority of protestors are women. In both Sudan and Lebanon, women have played a key role in ensuring non-violence. In both countries, they have formed women frontlines to separate police and protestors. In Lebanon, on the first night of the protests, a video of a scuffle between protestors and the bodyguard of a cabinet minister went viral; the guard brandished a gun and a leading woman protester kicked him in the groin. As one protestor put it: ‘We have been on the front lines, we have been empowering each other and we have kept the peace’ (Hall, 2019). In Iraq, it has been more difficult to maintain the peace in the face of vicious behaviour by Iraqi security forces and the Popular Mobilization Forces (established to combat ISIS). As of January 2020, some 511 protestors have been killed and 20,000 injured (Alkhudary, 2020). Saba al-Mahdawi, who was kidnapped and killed early on in the protests has become an icon of the Iraqi protests (Magid, 2019).

Women have contributed to the spirit of the protests through symbolic dress and actions. Murals depict the role of women. As one woman put it:

On 1 October when I went [to the protests], I was wearing heels. They were shooting and I was running, it was hard to run, but I wore it as a type of protest. I took a photo of my heels and wrote that Iraqi women’s heels are straighter than our government. (Magid, 2019)

Summary of the Special Issue

The examples described above, drawn from CRP research, are supplemented by the articles in this special issue. The special issue starts with two articles that deepen its theoretical exploration of civicness. Heba Raouf Ezzat draws on her first-hand account of the iconic 2011 Tahrir Square protests in Cairo as an entry point to consider the histories, contexts, and manifestations of civicness within Islamic thought, practice and experience. Arguing that dynamics of civicness within those protests prevented a far more violent scenario, she productively juxtaposes the spontaneous civicness of the popular committees that sprung up with ongoing entanglements between civic traditions and practices within Islamic thought, the city, and ideas of the public sphere. She notes that practices of grassroots civic activism associated with the committees sometimes survived their dissolution, within and alongside broader notions of conviviality in Cairo (Ezzat, 2022).

Henry Radice explores the intersection between civicness and humanitarianism. Ostensibly, the two sit uncomfortably with each other. The civic suggests a commitment both political and particular, while the humanitarian is generally understood as apolitical and universal. In practice, though, he argues that much of the work of civic activists is humanitarian in content, both because it addresses the survival and basic dignity of people living in conflict, and because it often reveals the deficits in political agency that engender this precarity, deliberately engineered by conflict entrepreneurs as a denial of humanity. He argues that a humanitarian action oriented towards the civic is more likely to succeed in its purported aims, while avoiding the depoliticizing tendencies of humanitarian governance (Radice, 2022).

Two essays deal with the coming together of civic action and institutional design. Koen Vlassenroot, Aymar Nyenyezi, Emery Mushagalusa Mudinga and Godefroid Muzalia draw on ethnographic fieldwork to challenge conventional narratives about the 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). They draw on the Congolese vernacular of citoyenneté, historicizing it and demonstrating how a Mobutu-era discourse associated with nation-building has come to be resignified to substantiate contemporary expressions of citizenship and resistance that run counter to the electoral political (mal)practices of the powerful. They argue that despite the fraudulent outcome that frames most discussions of the elections as a democratic event, the electoral process represented a widening of democratic space in which a broader range of political subjectivities could be, and were, expressed (Vlassenroot et al., 2022).

Marika Theros and Rim Turkmani explain how the Civil Society Support Room (CSSR) at the UN-led political talks for Syria can be seen as a case study in engendering civicness. They show how, in contrast to the main talks, the CSSR enabled connection and dialogue across conflict lines, suggesting a different kind of politics ‘predicated on dialogue and shared values’. While its direct impact on the political talks was limited, it has had a more of an impact on the ground, for instance in terms of facilitating humanitarian access and ceasefires. But it also stands, through its transformative impact on those involved, as a functioning model for how a broader range of Syrian actors than those represented at the political talks might, over time, reframe toxic and entrenched conflict narratives and suggest the contours of a new social contract for Syria (Theros & Turkmani, 2022).

The next essay is about civicness as behaviour. Rachel Ibreck and Angelina Seeka vividly bring to life the enactment of citizenship and political agency by South Sudanese refugees in Cairo, through what they term their ‘vernacular solidarity practices’. In the face of a dehumanizing regime of humanitarian governance, an unforgiving security state and a highly gendered continuum of violence, Ibreck and Seeka show how refugees elaborate practices of association, collective deliberation, and mutual aid. They track the emergence of ‘resilient modes of local governance, and struggles for rights, that promote survival with dignity but do not promise fundamental change’ amidst a particularly hostile environment. Although the benefits of these are intermittent at best for refugees, they argue that these initiatives amount to more than the sum of their parts and can plausibly be described as civicness (Ibreck & Seeka, 2022).

The final essay and commentary are about activism. Nisar Majid draws on concepts of transborder citizenship and social remittances to bring to life the political subjectivities of two activists he presents through capsule life histories. He explores the implications of mobility in the Somali context and across its diaspora. His two protagonists engage in a variety of forms of civic activism, acting across different types of social, cultural and political divides. The setbacks they face are numerous, yet the picture that emerges is one in which they consistently enact and perform an idea of citizenship and civic commitment in both space(s) and time, and the notion of social remittances helps explain how their individual action may have implications for the transmission and amplification of civic values across the contexts in which they operate (Majid, 2022).

And in a shorter commentary, Murat Belge provides a subjective account of the establishment of the Helsinki Citizens Assembly in Turkey, how it was inspired by the 1989 revolutions, and how they found themselves involved in a new form of civic activism aimed at solving problems of violence or ethnic conflict from below. He talks about how members of the HCA of Turkey participated in discussions with activists about wars in the Balkans and the Caucasus and the activities they undertook to reduce the polarization between Turkish and Kurdish people within Turkey – actions that resulted in a peace process up until the recent reversal under Erdogan. He explains how this new form of activism was contrasted with the more established human rights NGOs like Helsinki Watch or Amnesty, which were about drawing Governments’ attention to injustices rather than participating in and developing their own solutions (Belge, 2022).

Conclusion

In this introduction, we have described civicness as a logic of public authority that speaks to ideas of rights-based, inclusive rather than exclusive political orders; as a form of behaviour, acting ‘as if’ such a logic existed; and as a political position, articulated against uncivic politics, in particular the combination of endemic corruption, ethnic or religious sectarianism, and economic and social injustice. In our empirical research, we find that civicness in these three senses is ubiquitous. It naturally emerges even where there are no free and secure spaces, and it often represents a strategy of survival.

So the question arises as to whether civicness is merely a method of coping with the dominant logics of the political marketplace and exclusivist identity politics. Indeed, is civicness tolerated only to the extent that it makes possible the reproduction of the dominant logics by managing their worst consequences? Or does the prevalence of civicness provide a potential opening for shifting the dominant logics and propelling a trajectory of change?

Part of the answer may have to do with the international context. Contemporary conflicts are globalized conflicts. The political marketplace depends on global flows of finance, including development assistance, the revenues from natural resources, as well as contracts for the purchase of weapons. Exclusivist identity politics are usually integrated into transnational identity and/or geo-political networks that provide ideological and material support. What seems to emerge from our case studies is that civicness can be alternatively nurtured, suppressed, or marginalized through the encounter with the international depending on the type of encounter.

Several examples of where international engagement has opened up space for civicness can be identified in our case studies. The UN establishment of the Civil Society Support Room helped to strengthen civicness on the ground in Syria. In the DRC, the international monitoring of elections may have offered some security to citizens deciding to vote independently even if, in the end, the international monitors went along with the decision of the electoral commission to choose a candidate who was neither the choice of the elected President nor the person who appears to have won the elections. In Iraq, transnational networks of support were vital in enabling the investigative journalism that fed into the Iraq-linked parts of the Panama Papers. In terms of activism, it was civic experiences abroad that helped to create what Majid calls ‘social remittances’, while in Belge’s commentary on his experience of activism in Turkey, being part of a civic transnational network was extremely important.

This suggests that international actors aiming to reduce violence and to help the victims of violence need to behave in civic ways to be effective. External interventions need to be assessed in terms of their contribution to a shift of logic. Is the intervention helping to sustain the dominant logics driving conflict, as is the case for example with most peace agreements (C. Bell & Pospisil, 2017)? Or are they opening up space for civicness in a way that weakens the dominant logics?

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all those who participated in this strand of research during the lifetime of the Conflict Research Programme (CRP), in particular presenters and participants at several CRP workshops, and those who contributed papers, drafts, research and ideas to this special issue project. We are also very grateful to the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor for enabling the special issue and for their suggestions and patience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by the Conflict Research Programme, led by the London School of Economics and Political Science, and funded by UK aid from the UK government through the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office [Grant Number GB-1-204428]. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official policies (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office).

Notes

1 The Conflict Research Programme, based at the London School of Economics, was a four year Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)-funded research programme that ended in March 2021. It focussed on five research sites: DRC, Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan, and Syria.