We need to talk about political society: subaltern resistances beyond civil society in Eastern Europe and Eurasia

ABSTRACT

This article points out the need to talk about the political society, or the politics and resistances, of subaltern groups in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Existing literature frames diversity marginalized struggles as civil society struggles or decries the weakness of donor-driven, disembedded civil societies, reproducing the understanding of political life in the region in terms of absences, voids and deficiencies. Challenging this subsumption or dismissal of subaltern struggles, I advance two arguments. First, I argue against broadening the civil society concept to include various subaltern struggles as this approach risks overwriting differences between those groups that mobilize as rights-bearing citizens and the ones that are not recognized or treated as civil society. Instead, I propose acknowledging the historically and spatially contingent character of civil society and the defining role of the state and other actors in shaping which struggles fall within or beyond institutional and discursive frameworks of legality and legitimacy. Second, I argue that Patra Chatterjee’s concept of ‘political society’ can serve better as a meta-vocabulary to account for a diversity of struggles shunted as backwards, premodern and uncivilized, and to refocus research from what is absent to what is present, towards understanding counter-hegemonic discourses and practices.

KEYWORDS:

• civil society
• political society
• decolonial theory
• subaltern
• resistance
• street vendors
• Eastern Europe and Eurasia
• Tbilisi

Introduction

We need to talk about political society. That is to say, in times when political engagement, associational life and resistance are equated to or subsumed under the concept of ‘civil society’, we need to talk about the politics of those groups who are not acknowledged, treated as or sometimes themselves do not strive to be part of civil society. This is not to downplay the longstanding labour of critical scholars in elaborating concepts to study the politics of subaltern groups, the diversity of invisibilized struggles (Holston 2009; Scott 1989) and everyday practices of space production (de Certeau 1984). The challenge lies, rather, in the prevailing tendency to subsume the diversity of critical concepts under the all-encompassing concept of civil society. This process of subsumption manifests itself in calls to incorporate invisible struggles, informality, infrapolitics and everyday resistances under the endlessly stretched concept of civil society (Jacobsson and Korolczuk 2020). In light of the extensive work on civil society, both as a materialization of hegemony and as a potential ground for counter-hegemonic struggles (Gramsci, Hoare, and Nowell-Smith 2008; Katz 2006), it comes as no surprise that not only liberal but also often leftist, post-development, post-colonial and decolonial thinkers fall back on the civil society concept (Kothari et al. 2019). Civil society has become the key, hegemonic shorthand denoting all that is political, all kinds of politicized social life beyond states and markets. In this article, I explore the limits of civil society and demonstrate the need for further conceptual labour to understand the politics of subaltern groups in one of the regions condemned for the weakness of civil society – namely, in post-socialist Eastern Europe and Eurasia, or as a less territorialized metaphor suggests, in the Global East (Müller 2018).

The alleged lack and/or weakness of civil society has become one of the key markers of the ‘relative backwardness’ (Stenning and Hörschelmann 2008), or the institutional or cultural ‘deficiencies’ (Thelen 2011) of East European and Eurasian societies vis-à-vis the West. This is ironic, given that the rise of the civil society concept, now an indispensable part of vocabulary for liberal, leftist and sometimes conservative voices alike, has been among the longer lasting consequences of the popular mobilizations that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (Wagner 2006). Yet, over the past decades, post-socialist civil society has been condemned from different standpoints. In liberal, mainstream readings, the ‘weak’ post-socialist civil society has emerged as the most prevalent and dominant image of post-socialist civil society (Bernhard 1996; Bernhard and Karakoç 2007; Howard 2012). Critical and leftist readings have found post-socialist civil societies to be elitist, donor-dependent (Hann 2003) and failing to address ‘the major social issues thrown up by transition’ (Gagyi and Ivancheva 2019, 56).

How do we face the narrative of weak civil society in Eastern Europe and Eurasia? How do we account for politics, associational life and resistances? Especially if we concur with the narrative of civil society being detached and elitist, how do we talk about the politics and struggles of subaltern groups? These questions carry heightened weight, not only in the face of the authoritarian turn but also in view of activist and academic circles turning their analytical lenses towards decolonial theory (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006). Such perspectives encourage thinking with erased and marginalized voices and ‘reconstructing experiences, thoughts, and ways of being and living locally’ (Kušić, Lottholz, and Manolova 2019, 12). What conceptual tools do we have to account for what is erased, oppressed, silenced and exploited? So far, oppressed and silenced voices tend to be subsumed under the concept of civil society.

In this article, I first critically engage with such subsumptions and argue against endlessly stretching the boundaries of the civil society concept to accommodate the diversity of associational life. Scholars of post-socialist Eurasia have fruitlessly tried this strategy for more than two decades, but more importantly, I argue that such an accommodating approach discloses the divides and exclusions that existing concepts and practices of civil society reveal and produce. I suggest that being or not being counted as part of civil society shapes who is and who is not considered to be a legitimate political subject and rights-bearing citizen, whose needs, voices and struggles are silenced, marginalized and erased. This means that while we should continue to rework the civil society concept, we should avoid including those struggles and forms of associational life that are not acknowledged or are actively denied the right and legitimacy of being part of civil society by respective legal–institutional settings and political actors. Second, I argue against leaving struggles taking place beyond the civil society framework unnamed and instead draw on the concept of ‘political society’, by Indian historian Patra Chatterjee, to account for currently dismissed forms of associational life. This article is a conceptual exercise in thinking beyond civil society without disengaging from the civil society concept, and it is an invite to elaborate upon the concept of political society in service of comprehending historically and spatially variegated forms of subaltern struggles.

While predominantly offering a theoretical discussion, I recall empirical examples of subaltern struggles in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia – a doubly peripheralized country that rests alongside other borderlands between Europe and Russia. The empirical material predominantly draws on my single-authored and co-authored publications about Tbilisian street vendors (Polese, Rekhviashvili, and Morris 2016; Rekhviashvili 2015b, 2016, 2018a, 2018b), but it is also informed by further works on marginalized groups such as internally displaced persons (Rekhviashvili 2015a; 2012), informal parking attendants (Rekhviashvili 2018c) and informal transport workers (Rekhviashvili and Sgibnev 2018, 2020; Sgibnev and Rekhviashvili 2020). In what follows, I first offer an example of the struggles of Tbilisian street vendors to illustrate the contingent nature of civil society definitions. Second, I show that broadening the civil society concept overwrites how existing definitions of civil society, and existing notions of who counts as a rights-bearing citizen, play a part in the production of inequalities and exclusions. Third, I move to explore the concept of political society to establish boundaries of civil society and reveal the cleavage between civil society and political society terrains and to serve as an alternative meta-level vocabulary for connecting various subaltern struggles. I suggest tentative research questions that emerge from this exercise and explicate the delicate character of studying political society in the post-socialist East. I conclude by bringing different threads of the argument together and formulate an open call to further transform the concept of political society.

Who is counted in civil society?

In early January 2020, female Tbilisian street vendors experienced a rare moment of glory and appreciation. Over the past three decades, street vendors have been criminalized, marginalized, stereotyped and demonized by the state, media, civil society and middle-class urban dwellers in Tbilisi and many other cities across Eurasia (Alff 2015). Yet, during those few days of spotlight in January, the vendors enjoyed wide publicity and expressions of solidarity from civil society groups, especially from the so called Sircʻxvilia (‘shame’) movement. Street vendors received popular praise for their opposition to the decision of Tbilisi City Hall to remove the tent of Makhaz Machalikashvili in front of the Parliament building. Machalikashvili had been camping for months, demanding a fair investigation into the shooting of his 19-year-old son during the anti-terrorist raids of the State Security Services in Pankisi Gorge.¹ City Hall forced Machalikashvili out, making space for the Christmas market. This time, street vendors, who are regularly denied access to public space, were asked to trade at the market. In a widely shared video interview, female vendors explained that even if they had waited all year to earn income during the Christmas and New Years’ celebrations, they categorically refused to occupy the space freed up by the eviction of a father seeking justice for his son’s murder. In response, City Hall intimidated the vendors to trade in front of the Parliament building by restricting their access to alternative trading spots. In order to express their solidarity with female street vendors, civil society groups, primarily representatives of the Sircʻxvilia movement, organized a flea market in support of vendors, asking participants to bring their own tradables with them and also to buy goods from the vendors. The call on social media specified:

those women [street vendors], who showed us an example of solidarity and high civic consciousness, will also come there to trade. It is impossible to leave this without attention […] we will offer music, perhaps also glue wine, warmth, love, friendship, solidarity and cheerfulness.

The revealing potential of this brief episode of solidarity does not only lie in the somewhat obvious inadequacy of using the carnivalesque protest repertoire – characteristic of Tbilisian urban protest culture over the past decade (Berikishvili and Sichinava 2016) – when supporting female street vendors, for whom trade and market are the only ways to earn a living. More importantly, this episode is significant as it exemplifies how civil society is demarcated in the political context of Georgia, and what kind of social exclusions are produced through and reflected by existing demarcations of civil society. A statement by the Sircʻxvilia movement reveals that the vendors, even if they are thanked for showing civil consciousness, remain ‘the women, those women, the female outdoor traders’. Even if vendors were the ones opposing the government at great personal cost, they would never be seen as a constitutive part of civil society, neither by media and civil society groups nor by public authorities. This is the case even though Tbilisian vendors have a rich history of social mobilization and have been in confrontation with Tbilisi municipal authorities over access to public space for more than a decade. In Tbilisi, it is predominantly women over 40, and often into their 70s and 80s, who find it hard to secure employment in the formal labour market or who need additional income while being pensioners and pursue street-vending. They usually sell fruits and vegetables, snacks and beverages, children’s toys and balloons, books, jewellery, cigarettes and other petty tradables. They cluster near established markets or bazaars, but also trade on central avenues, near metro stations or other kinds of larger transit nodes. Vendors have been evicted, assaulted, criminalized, chased and penalized, with various degrees of vigorousness, but in a reoccurring manner, since 2006 (Rekhviashvili 2015b). They have used a variety of conventional and creative resistance tactics unmatched by any civil society group (I would here say any other civil society group, but let us not forget vendors are not seen as civil society). They staged up to 100 organized protests between 2010 and 2012, and they worked on alternative proposals of street-trade regulations, managed to have City Hall discuss their legislative initiatives and even founded a short-lived formal association called the ‘Street Vendors League’ (Polese, Rekhviashvili, and Morris 2016; Rekhviashvili 2016). When such conventional channels of political participation and claim-making failed, when public authorities made it abundantly clear that they would not treat vendors as rights-bearing citizens nor tolerate their civil society-like contention repertoires, the traders started pursuing more invisible forms of resistance, what James Scott would call ‘infrapolitics’ (Scott 1985) and Asef Bayat would call ‘the quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ (Bayat 1997). The temporary supporter of the vendors, the Sircʻxvilia movement, is not a formalized and institutionalized group either. Yet the group is well-placed to owe and exhibit familiar markers of educated, Westward-looking, festive and enthusiastic youth. Despite its open opposition to the incumbent government, the group is easily and indisputably recognized as part of what is known as civil society in the local political landscape. Needless to say, such recognition is not simply a matter of acquiring desirable names but is also a matter of being treated (or not) as rights-bearing citizens, which is a matter of survival, safety, and dignity.²

When studying or being part of social movements, urban grassroots movements, resistances, mobilizations, protest and political processes in broadest terms, should we insist that the entire diversity of struggles by all means qualify and should all be named as civil society? Or should we instead share the overall scepticism expressed by a number of anthropologists (for an overview, see Mikuš 2015, 2018) towards the civil society concept, and set it aside? If so, what kind of vocabulary, what conceptual tools could we use or develop to discuss the political struggles of street vendors and a range of other marginalized and invisibilized groups?

Against broadening the civil society concept

Faced with the dual challenge of civil society being described as weak and deficient and a number of politically relevant struggles remaining unnoticed, several anthropologists, political scientists and geographers focusing on Eastern Europe and Eurasia have resorted to broadening the scope of the civil society concept. Broadly defined, civil society is seen ‘an intermediary space between the individual and the state’ (Javeline and Lindemann-Komarova 2020, 644), with sociological approaches emphasizing collective action and political science approaches emphasizing civic associations (Green 2002). Civil society is not necessarily about the politics of resistance – opposing or fighting off ‘what is pernicious or threatening to one’s existence’, be it through revolution or everyday forms of resistance (Chandra 2015, 563). Yet, if resistance or collective struggles take place, they are often assumed to draw on the collective organization and associational life that is constitutive of civil society.

This broad definition of civil society has been operationalized in various ways. Scholars of post-socialist Eastern Europe and Eurasia have noted the pitfalls of Eurocentric measurements of civil society, focusing on formal memberships in associations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or unions, already by the mid-1990s. In contrast, they have advocated for broadening the scope of what counts as civil society to include moral communities (Hann and Dunn 1996). In the following decades, such calls were followed by a series of attempts to overcome narrow definitions and the thesis of a ‘weak’ civil society. Some of these attempts simply shifted geographies of ‘backwardness’ Eastwards, suggesting that East–Central European civil societies, and hence their democracies, are strong, reserving ‘weakness’ as a characteristic of largely authoritarian post-Soviet Eurasia and its civil societies (Foa and Ekiert 2017). Some scholars have suggested moving beyond equating civil society with NGOs (Ishkanian 2012) and the inclusion of informal and less visible forms of solidarity and association as part of the definition of civil society (Aliyev 2014). Still others have focused on the recent rise of urban movements, which, in contrast to NGOs, are domestically funded and grassroots driven, contesting mega-urban development projects, gentrification and a range of other locally pressing issues (Jacobsson 2016).

One of the most exhaustive summaries of empirical and theoretical entry points to be considered when re-evaluating the concept of a weak civil society in the region is given by Jacobsson and Korolczuk (2020), who emphasize the need to look into uneventful protests and self-organized, less visible activities, referring to the usefulness of Scott’s ‘infrapolitics’ for understanding East European civil society. They further articulate the need to broaden not only what civil society means but also what ‘political’ denotes; they point out the potential of urban space in political subject-formation and reiterate the need to understand the role of informality (Jacobsson and Korolczuk 2020). Such an approach would indicate that the variety of critical concepts elaborated for revealing subaltern forms of resistance and the construction of alternative ways of socio-economic organization in a post-socialist context could be brought together under civil society as an umbrella concept – these alternative organizations could include geographers’ emphasis on space production and the ‘domestication’ of neoliberalism (Stenning et al. 2010) and anthropologists’ emphasis on moral economies and reciprocal and socially embedded informal practices (Morris 2011; Morris and Polese 2014; Rekhviashvili 2017; Rekhviashvili and Sgibnev 2018). The academic and political significance of reconceptualizing civil society is undeniable. Academic insistence on acknowledging less visible struggles as part of civil society could have potentially empowering implications for marginalized groups. Yet we also need to be conscious of the severe dangers of such an exercise. Beyond the obvious trap of fruitlessly asserting to Western audiences that Eastern political subjects also are, or can be, worthy, active and political, endlessly stretching the definition can further undermine the precision of the civil society concept, which is ‘already seen as promiscuous’ (Mikuš 2018, 15).

I suggest that the biggest danger of stretching the boundaries of the civil society concept is concealing and invisibilizing differences between the actually existing civil society and struggles of those groups that are not treated as and/or at points themselves do not claim to be part of civil society in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. As Chatterjee observes in the case of India, civil society is often constrained to demographically limited, culturally equipped groups and individuals (Chatterjee 2004). The ideal of citizens being bearers of equal rights and potentially comprising civil society is ‘not how things work’ (38). In context:

Most of the inhabitants of India are only tenuously, and even then ambiguously and contextually rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by the constitution. They are not, therefore, proper members of civil society and are not regarded as such by the institutions of the state. (38)

Similar limitedness in who comprises civil society is observed in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, where civil society became a paradigmatic concept in the 1990s, when civil society was ‘expected to serve the reintegration of the region into global markets’ and ‘was dominated by an elite- and donor-driven model of organising’ (Gagyi and Ivancheva 2019, 56). Others also observe how civil society predominantly refers to ‘the sector of liberal and pro-Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are nominally separate from the state, party politics and business’ (Mikuš 2018, 15) and remains alienated from the concerns of the vast majority of citizens (Wheatley 2010). In other words, in the past decades, civil society has come to demarcate a limited set of groups and practices, probably with further localized diversity in its meanings across different countries and regions in the post-socialist East. Academic efforts to overcome and broaden existing boundaries risk brushing away the spatially and historically specific forms civil society has taken. Importantly, such ‘charitable theoretical gestures’ (Chatterjee 2004) also risk an underestimation of the difference between those who are negotiating citizenship on a civil society terrain and those who are marginalized, among other reasons, in the name of non-compliance with the norms of civility as dictated by capitalist modernity.

Coming back to the case of Tbilisian street vendors, counting vendors’ struggles as civil society struggles would imply a gross understatement of the difference in political treatment and the availability of tools and resources between vendors and those groups who do count as civil society in the Georgian context. Street vendors in Georgia are part of a much larger group of so-called losers of transition – and probably one of most severely hit ones – who found themselves without property, capital, tradable skills or social safety. Lacking resources as well as support, vendors have been relying on urban commons, or public spaces, and using them as a resource for income generation. It is no surprise that the vendors have been attacked over the last three decades by various city and national governments of Georgia. The draining of public space from commercial activities and the separation of public from private property, which further enables private space and property to accumulate capital, is at the heart of capitalist economy in general (Low and Smith 2006), and of societies attempting to turn into market economies in particular. For a state pursuing marketization, vendors’ claims to public space are in violation of the very logic of capitalist accumulation. Accordingly, vendors are not treated as civil society but as uncivil, premodern, backward and misplaced. Chatterjee (2004) argues, ‘Within its domain, capital allows for no resistance to its free movement. When it encounters an impediment, it thinks it has encountered another time – something out of pre-capital, something that belongs to pre-modern’ (5). Hence, the attempts of capitalist states to create modern, civil, progressive citizenry in the form of a civil society are mirrored by the force of capitalism ‘in branding the resistances to it as archaic, and backward’ (5).

Indeed, in relation to vendors, Georgian authorities played by textbook rules, discursively demonizing vendors for violating public order and sanitary norms, institutionally informalizing, illegalizing and, at points, criminalizing vendors and using newly gained enforcement capacity (Rekhviashvili and Polese 2017) to govern the unruly through various techniques of policing and surveillance. Socialist-era stereotypes against small trade as immoral profiteering (Alff 2015) have further played into the hands of the authorities when framing appeals to support of the urban middle-class in marginalizing vendors. Discursively, the pre-modern, oriental, chaotic, bazaars (Khutsishvili 2012) and vending spots were to be removed to make space for a glamorous, modernizing, tourist-pleasing, Europeanizing image of the city (Frederiksen 2012). Practically, informalization and criminalization, well-rehearsed governmental techniques for producing exclusions (Moatasim 2019; Roy 2005), effectively pushed vendors from the terrain where their claims could be negotiated within the scope of existing legal frameworks, hence outside of the civil society terrain. While numerous other groups have been excluded from and remain outside of the civil society terrain, Tbilisian vendors’ struggle is fascinating for its rare attempt to break out of the less-deserving citizens’ position by pursuing the repertories of contention – protest, formal association, working on legislative initiatives – usually reserved for civil society. Hence, the state’s active and forceful refusal to acknowledge vendors as right-bearing citizens and the crushing of their conventional mobilization strategies becomes even more illustrative of just how important placing certain groups outside of the civil society negotiation terrain can be.

Obviously, in a context such as Georgia, as in many other Eurasian countries, those who count as members of civil society are not immune to state violence. Still, there is a vast difference between the affordances of civil society groups and vendors. Unlike local NGOs, or even urban–grassroots mobilizers, vendors cannot fall back on the support and leverage of Western donors. They cannot shape media discourses, have a presence in social networks or play a part in local knowledge production. They will hardly ever get legal support and guidance if imprisoned of fined. They will not feature academic studies chronicling and analysing urban movements in Tbilisi (Berikishvili and Sichinava 2016). When they do get the spotlight in the media, as described above, civil society groups invite them to partake in festive and carnivalesque protest actions that are otherwise denied to and irrelevant for vendors. Then what, if any, good can come from us calling groups such as vendors civil society and counting their tactics of resistance as part of civil society mobilizing? Turning vendors and numerous other subaltern groups into civil society would require major shifts in political and economic order and the constitution of existing power structures. While one should strive for such a change, incorporating vendors into civil society would only conceal the difference, exclusion and violence that are currently in place and are reproduced precisely with the help of existing definitions that place deserving and rights-bearing members of civil society against those shunted as misplaced, pre-modern populations.

Beyond voids and absences: the political society

If we accept the critical evaluations of civil society to be relatively demographically limited and socially disembedded in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and if we follow the logic in which struggles of Tbilisian vendors cannot be named as taking place on civil society terrain, then how do we name such struggles? So far, neither mainstream nor critical accounts of civil society bother extensively with this question. Those left out of civil society boundaries are sometimes referred to as ‘the majority of people’ (Gagyi and Ivancheva 2019), ‘the public at large’ (Lutsevych 2013) or just as the ‘society’(Nodia 2005). If struggles taking place in the rest of society stay unnamed, then critical accounts of elitist and alienated civil society feed back into mainstream narrative of a ‘weak’ civil society, reiterating political life in the region as a space of voids and absences. Yet, we know through the example of street vendors and of numerous other groups and communities that resistances take place beyond the civil society terrain. To overcome this dual trap of either rendering the majority of post-socialist populations apolitical or overwriting differences in the affordances and repertoires of politicized communities by including all of them in civil society struggles, we need, at least, to develop a new vocabulary and, at best, engage in the theorization of such struggles. Among numerous concepts to describe un-institutionalized or invisible struggles, I suggest that taking up Chatterjee’s (2004) concept of ‘political society’ as an alternative to ‘civil society’ can be particularly helpful for three reasons: First, it enables delimiting the civil society concept and accounting for the exclusions that current uses of the civil society concept (re)produce. Second, it can serve as a broad umbrella term or a paralleling alternative to civil society, enabling dialogues across diverse struggles of subaltern groups. Finally, it allows for the formulation of a range of new research questions with the potential of moving beyond Eurocentric reductionist portrayals of politics in the post-socialist Global East and beyond.

Accounting for exclusions and delimiting the civil society concept

The first, and perhaps most important, theoretical opening offered by the political society concept is its capacity to challenge the charitable broadening of the civil society label. Chatterjee (2004) outlines a contradiction and tension between the idea of equal, rights-based citizenship and the actual need for particularistic treatment of communities:

In terms of the formal structure of the state as given by the constitution and the laws, all of society is civil society; everyone is a citizen with equal rights and therefore to be regarded as a member of civil society. (39)

Yet a significant share of political struggle and negotiation occurs outside of this framework. Political society is such an alternative terrain or domain of political claim-making. In contrast to civil society, negotiations on the political society terrain take place beyond, rather than within, given legal–institutional structures and existing property rights. Collective actors of the political society rely on ‘bending or stretching of rules, because existing procedures have historically worked to exclude or marginalise them’ (66).

Instead of claiming rights guaranteed by the constitution, political society actors claim rights beyond legal ones, such as the rights to livelihood and habitation. The fact that political society struggles do not fit within imaginations of modern democratic capitalism and its civil society framework does not mean they are apolitical, de-political or somehow detached from politics:

As population within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, they have to be both looked after and controlled by various governmental agencies. These activities bring these populations in a certain political relationship with the state. (38)

The resemblance of the illegal squatters’ mobilization, alongside other examples of vendors, landless people and day labourers discussed by Chatterjee in the context of India, to Tbilisian street vendors is impeccable. Tbilisian street vendors consistently recognized the illegal character of their income-generating activities, yet they emphasized that this last-resort occupation was the only survival tactic available to them. They requested concessions from the state not because of but despite the incompatibility of their income-generating tactics with socio-economic and legal order. As one vendor, a mother of an eight-year-old disabled child, explained, ‘you [the state] do not give me social aid, you do not let me work, and you even take away my only means of survival’ (Rekhviashvili 2015b, 488). When their initial hopes for negotiating claims to civil society terrain were crashed by city authorities in 2011–12, they relied on bending and stretching the rules. As using public space or public land for vending was illegal, the vendors started changing locations, dispersing throughout the city, using mobile stalls or just walking around with their tradables, at points negotiating access to private property without having to pay market prices for access. Crucially, such tactics were not pursued beyond and without engagement with public authorities but through informal negotiations with the authorities, primarily with street-level officials. Hence, even if street vendors’ mobilizations might resemble mobilizations of civil society, the concept of political society better captures their political claim-making, particularly the trans-legal, informal-but-still-political nature of their engagement, more presciently.

Furthermore, the concept does not only offer better descriptive accuracy, but its analytical capacity also reveals differences between political claim-making on civil versus political society terrain that makes the political society concept important for understanding the post-socialist Global East. Chatterjee provides conceptual opening where Gramsci (2008) cuts it off. For key critical theorist of civil society Antonio Gramsci, the rise of the interests of subaltern classes materializes through their political becoming as civil society. Such thought is, of course, contextually rooted, and in this particular case, Gramsci’s theorization of civil society is embedded in historical experiences and ‘the anatomy of modern Western states’ (Buttigieg 1995, 3). Gramsci fails to note that subaltern classes are subaltern primarily because of having been deprived the opportunity to form autonomous organizations, and because of having their associational life rendered illegitimate, premodern, irrelevant and ignorable. The struggle is no longer about what kind of civil society is there or not, but about which groups out of all groups with their own diversity of associational life are recognized as, accepted and dealt with as civil society. Even if Gramsci would hope that civil society is a terrain where subaltern groups can, or potentially could, engage in the ‘war of positions’, research on post-socialist Eastern Europe and Eurasia illustrates that in the first place, certain populations and their struggles are not acknowledged as civil – that being or not being recognized as civil society, claiming or not claiming to be part of civil society marks differences across diverse struggles. In other words, there is a war before engagement in the ‘war of positions’, where visible and invisible power structures hamper collectively mobilized populations from entering it. Attending to this difference is particularly important in light of recent literature, in both post-socialist and post-colonial contexts, revealing how informality itself is not a phenomenon simply beyond the state but a process actively produced by the state, ‘inscribed in the ever-shifting relationship between what is legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate, authorized and unauthorized’ (Roy 2005, 80). Chatterjee’s concept of political society forces us to acknowledge this inaccessibility of civil society terrain, to strive for understanding of historically and spatially variegated definitions of civil society and, importantly, to start investigating the mobilizations and governing of populations designated as illegal, illegitimate, backward or premodern.

In summary, civil society and political society both emerge as relational and spatially and temporally contingent concepts. Definitionally, collective action and associational life remain key to both civil and political society, yet civil society operates within and political society operates beyond existing-yet-continuously-shifting legal–institutional frameworks and discourses of legitimacy. Such conceptualizations support and extend previous efforts in the scholarship on post-socialism, to acknowledge that ‘the institution-creating power of the state shapes the nature and extent of civil society’ (Green 2002, 456). Importantly, a range of transnational actors and institutions have been actively engaged in the construction of civil society in the region, shaping or sometimes contradicting state-level institutional frameworks (Gagyi and Ivancheva 2019). This delineation of civil versus political society terrains also challenges the calls to dismiss the civil society concept, as sometimes suggested by anthropologists (Hann 2003). Civil society plays a significant role in supporting and, at times, also subverting hegemonic transformation agendas; for all we know, it ‘is set to stay’ (Mikuš 2018, 7). Instead of dismissing civil society, we should continuously and carefully examine which kinds of associational life and struggles are articulated in civil society or political society terrain, including who is acknowledged as a legitimate actor to strive for collective action within and beyond shifting legal–institutional frameworks. Being unable to afford to operate in civil society terrain, or being denied the access to it, cannot be seen as a solid characteristic of any group. Subalternity as ‘epistemic displacement’ is not a label but ‘a profoundly material process through which institutions of knowledge displace the voices of marginalized thinkers’ (Speer 2021, 6). Exclusion from civil society is one of the processes through which subalternity is produced in Eurasia, while political society is the alternative, perhaps less visible but socially extremely relevant, terrain where associational life, collective action and state–society negotiations play out.

Alternative vocabulary and research agenda

The second purpose of using ‘political society’ is to create an alternative meta-vocabulary for challenging modern scientific practice and to establish dialogues across diverse invisibilized struggles. While modern scientific discourse routinely evokes the shorthand trinity of the state, markets and civil society, still marginal but increasingly vocal decolonial scholars from Latin America (Mignolo 2011) and recently from post-Soviet Eurasia (Tlostanova 2015) have started to engage with the political society concept as central to decolonial vocabulary. In such readings, political society can be positioned as a site of emancipatory struggles:

political society is not a modern concept but a decolonial one. If, within the liberal model of social organization, we can imagine a triangle with ‘the state,’ ‘the economy,’ and the ‘civil society’ as its angles, in the colonial matrix of power, we have to imagine a tetragon, consisting of the modern/ colonial state, the imperial/colonial market, the civil colonial society formed by European migrants, and the political society emerging out of the imperial/colonial history in which these four domains are the sites of struggle for control, domination, and liberation. (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012, 20)

Referencing the diversity of subaltern struggles included under an umbrella of political society is not aimed at reducing such diversity but is rather embedded in thinking of development in pluriversal terms, ‘recognising the diversity of peoples’ views on planetary well-being and their skills in protecting it’ (Kothari et al. 2019, xix). It creates new openings for recently growing critical literature in post-socialist space inspired by decolonial and post-colonial thinking, searching to find points of departure from Eurocentric epistemologies and unequal geographies of knowledge production (Karkov and Valiavicharska 2018; Tlostanova 2018). I suggest that the political society concept can facilitate a re-politicization of knowledge about the post-socialist East and also open up new research questions with the potential of moving beyond the portrayal of politics as absences, voids and deficiencies (Thelen 2011).

While some researchers on civil society in the region have diagnosed those as weak, apolitical or socially alienated, others, without engaging with the civil society concept, have looked into everyday negotiation of state, space and society. Inspired by critical security studies (Jarvis and Lister 2013), recent literature on the region has looked into ‘lived experiences of survival, uncertainty and violence’ (Lemon 2018, 4) as well as at ‘discourses of (in)security at the intersecting notions of modernization/backwardness, formality/informality, criminality/lawfulness’ (Khomeriki 2022, 1). To account for invisibilized associational life, some have proposed the concepts of moral economies (Hann 2018), practices of commoning (Salzer, Neudert, and Beckmann 2020), everyday resistances (Curro 2017), and others, including myself, have written about reciprocal and socially embedded informal economic practices (Morris 2011; Morris and Polese 2014; Rekhviashvili 2017). The so-called informality literature has produced perhaps the most prolific ethnographically grounded research on the region (Polese, Kovács, and Jancsics 2018). Despite numerous attempts to deconstruct negative stereotyping of informality, it has often fed into the narrative of institutional deficiencies and inferior cultural predispositions (Ledeneva 2009). At points, such literature has also illustrated the fundamentally political character of informal practices in their capacity to create alternative spaces of sovereignty (Humphrey, Nugent, and Vincent 2007).

Yet, informality in itself is no counter-concept to civil society. While important in its own right, its focus is not on collective political engagement. As argued above, charitably counting informal practices as part of civil society discloses the inequalities and differences between those groups who claim or are acknowledged by governments, international donors, and media to be civil society and those who are silenced and condemned for the backwardness and incivility of their claims. Not all informal practices can be labelled as political society either. However, looking at some of the practices we usually study under a rubric of informality from a political society perspective can articulate the political character of informal engagements with the state. It can bring together experiences of informally operating agents using communal and collective power to advance their claims on the political terrain. Observing and drawing parallels between collective transformative efforts unregistered by literature on civil society but prevalent in other geographic and anthropological inquiries, then, can move us beyond post-socialist political subjects as a faceless mass of people, as ‘the public at large’ (Lutsevych 2013), exploding in revolutionary moments but incapable of articulating concerns and interests otherwise.

Beyond allowing for a re-politicization of the readings of existing knowledge, the political society concept brings qualitatively new questions to the research agenda for political scientists, anthropologists, and political and economic geographers. First, we need to ask who operates on political society terrain in post-socialist Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and what political claims and what kind of alternative ways of socio-economic organization they advance. In simplest terms, this would mean uncovering so-far marginalized and invisibilized struggles, that tendentially fall out of the scope of research as they do not fit civil society or, at points, social movements or urban movements frameworks. Existing research on urban movements in Tbilisi can serve as a perfect illustrative example, counting a range of largely urban-middle class-driven mobilizations to protect cultural heritage, parks and urban forests, and public space from commodification (Berikishvili and Sichinava 2016). Yet, such research overlooks not only street vendors but also a range of collectively mobilized groups such as informal parking guards, marshrutka drivers, and internally displaced persons, even if precisely those groups have resisted public space commodification and marketization most vigorously.

Second, we need to ask what kind of modernization and marketization projects, and what forms of governance and governmentality, have shaped divisions between rights-bearing equal citizens and framing of ‘backwards’ ‘unenlightened’ populations. Here the distinctions between post-socialist and post-colonial conditions, differences between experiences of global South and East, and differences within post-socialist East space become important. Chatterjee claims that a core purpose of the modernization project in the non-Western world was ‘to transform erstwhile subjects, unfamiliar with the possibilities of equality and freedom, into modern citizens’ (Chatterjee 2004, 33). In contrast to the South, in post-socialist Eastern Europe and Eurasia, those ‘erstwhile subjects’ were condemned not only for their pre-modern particularistic culture and but also for their communist mentality. The formation of post-socialist civil and political societies was influenced by anti-/pre-/non-modern as well as anti-communist frames (Jacobsson 2016). The differences within political landscapes of the post-socialist East further complicates the picture while also opening possibilities for comparative research. In some post-socialist countries, European or, more broadly, Western donors have been shaping which groups count as civil society and serving as leverage for some local mobilizers against state-sanctioned repressions. Yet anti-Western sentiments, especially in countries experiencing democratic backsliding or authoritarian consolidation, have made Western recognition of civil society groups into a liability. The question is, when stripped from legal rights, do those civil society groups continue to engage with the state as a political society? If so, what does it mean to be civil society for the West and political society for local and national public authorities?

Finally, the political society concept prompts us to ask, what is the relationship between civil and political societies? When do civil society groups reproduce the marginalization of political society, when do they ally and partake in the articulation of political society claims, and to what consequences? While existing accounts of civil societies are concerned with a lack of representation and detachment from ‘broader society’, such criticism is also ultimately based on modernist imaginary of formal membership-based representational structures, which clearly have not materialized in most of the post-socialist East. After three decades-long decrying, some civil society groups are quicker than critical researchers to engage with existing, rather than with imagined and idealized political landscapes of mobilization. Recent studies illustrate how civil society groups try to embed themselves in local communities, or ‘indigenise’ (Mikuš 2015), or how typical donor-dependent civil society groups support typical political society-like struggles, such as mobilization of mountainous populations against hydroelectric power stations (Qeburia and Chubabria 2017). In summary, the political society concept allows for questions that are motivated by naming and understanding ongoing processes, instead of either reducing such processes while translating them into Eurocentric vocabularies or dismissing them altogether.

Conclusions

In this article I have argued for the need to talk about the political society, or the politics and resistances of subaltern groups in post-socialist Eastern Europe and Eurasia. I have suggested that the need to talk about the political society emerges in light of current academic debates being dominated by two similarly misleading tendencies: one approach frames a diversity of invisibilized, marginalized resistances and struggles as civil society struggles, while the other decries the weakness of donor-driven, disembedded civil societies. These two tendencies, and more broadly most of mainstream and leftist accounts of post-socialist political life, are united in being constrained by a state–economy–civil society triad, and consequently, both reproduce the understanding of political life in the region in terms of absences, voids and deficiencies. A range of critical studies already relies on diverse and specific vocabularies – be it ‘improvization of urban space’, ‘domestication of neoliberalism’, ‘informal practices’, ‘moral economies’ or ‘everyday vernacular (in)securities’, ‘infrapolitics’ and ‘everyday resistances’ – entirely dismissing the civil society concept to account for subaltern resistances. Yet, when it comes to generalizations, these low-scale resistances are either subsumed under an umbrella of civil society mobilization or dismissed entirely as irrelevant to understanding a broader picture of socio-economic, spatial and political developments in the post-socialist East.

In order to challenge this subsumption or dismissal of subaltern struggles and to extend the vocabulary for ‘thinking from that which is erased, oppressed, silenced, exploited’ (Kušić, Lottholz, and Manolova 2019, 12), I have advanced two arguments. First, I argued against broadening the civil society concept, as it is an analytically inaccurate and politically dangerous project, primarily because of its propensity to erase and overwrite differences between those groups mobilizing as rights-bearing citizens (even when those rights are being stripped) and the ones that are not recognized or treated as civil society. Second, in line with recent calls from decolonial thinkers (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012), I offered Chatterjee’s political society concept to account for subaltern associational life and resistances. I illustrated how this concept, instead of accommodating itself as a minor side or a type of civil society struggle, articulates a cleavage and difference between mobilizations on civil society and political society terrains. It explicates how this alternative terrain is marked by partial or tenuous citizenship and the recognition of some groups and populations who do not fit in modernization agendas yet are exposed to and contest contemporary forms of governmentality. I suggested that on the one hand, the political society can serve as a meta-vocabulary accounting for a diversity of struggles shunted as backwards, premodern and uncivilized. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, this way we can refocus research from studying what is absent to naming and theorizing what exists.

The political society concept needs further theorizing and engagement with already produced knowledge as well as new comparative research agendas if it is to reveal the fabric and divergent spatial and temporal articulations of subaltern struggles in the post-socialist East. Before the concept is up for grabs, becoming mainstreamed in hegemonic tools of managing social and political life and ends up in manuals and on funding agendas of ‘civil society inclusion’ and ‘social participation’, perhaps we still have time to tease out the potential of understanding counter-hegemonic discourses and practices, ‘ways of being and living locally’ (Kušić, Lottholz, and Manolova 2019, 12).

Acknowledgements

This paper draws on the generous and long-term engagement and feedback received from numerous colleagues, friends and research participants. I am particularly thankful to Thilo Lang, Wladimir Sgibnev, Ia Eradze, Ninutsa Abzianidze, Béla Greskovits and Asel Doolotkeldieva for commenting on early drafts of the paper, and to three anonymous peer reviewers for thorough and valuable comments and recommendations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The work undertaken for this article was made possible by the internal project grant of Leibniz Institute of Regional Geography (project title: Counter-Hegemonic Civil Society) as well as the Leibniz Competition Programme [grant number J86/2019].

Notes

1 Malkhaz Machalikashvilis’ son, Temirlan Machalikashvili, was shot in his bed by special forces during an anti-terrorist operation in 2017. According to Georgian human rights defenders, the investigation of the shooting was marked by severe violations, the state failed to recognize the shooting as a crime all the while also failing to provide any evidence for Temirlan’s connection to terrorist groups. Pankisi George is predominantly inhibited by Kists, a Muslim ethnic minority population, and the Georgian state has a longstanding history of pursuing violent special operations in the region in the name of the anti-terrorist struggle. Therefore, the absence of a fair investigation of the case is further problematized in the light of discrimination based on ethnic and religious lines. For further information about the case in English, see (JAMnews 2020; Mikeladze 2019).

2 Mentioning dignity, I have to specify that groups such as vendors or those operating on political society terrain very well understand and articulate that their dignity is at stake when they are not being treated as rights-bearing citizens. Yet, this should by no means be conflated with them wishing to be part of the civil society as they know it.