29 Sikand, Y., 2005. _Bastions of the Believers: Madrasas and Islamic Education in India_ , New Delhi, Penguin India.

US Department of States, 2004. _Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003_ , Washington D.C..

Waldinger, R., 1996. _Still the Promised City: African-Americans and New Immigrants in PostIndustrial New York_ , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Zghal, A., 1991. “Le concept de société civile et la transition vers le multipartisme,” in: M. Camau (dir.), _Changements politiques au Maghreb,_ Paris, Editions du CNRS, pp. 191-205.

1 T. Paine considered civil society to be “a natural condition of freedom” and the last line of defense against state despotism. Keene, 1988.

> 2 K. Annan, _Speech at the 2005 World Summit General Assembly_ , September 14, 2005.The UN’s Department of Public Information now has a special section for civil society issues. Arguing that “the growth of civil society has been one of the most significant trends in international development”, the World Bank has also created a special website that provides information on its evolving relationship with civil society organizations around the world. Many academic institutions have done the same thing. Pioneering institutions in this domain are the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society and the London School of Economics Centre for Civil Society, which seeks to improve understanding and the effective functioning of not-for-profit, philanthropic, or civil society organizations throughout the world in order to enhance the contribution these organizations can make to democracy and the quality of human life.

3 See Putnam et al., 2000. Their data confirm the intuitions already laid out in M. Crozier et al. , 1975. 4 Cohen and Arato, op. cit,. is a notable exception.

5 Coleman (1988) defined social capital as “people’s ability to work together in groups”. Fukuyama (2002) defines the concept more broadly to include “any instance in which people cooperate for common ends on the basis of shared informal norms and values. I prefer to define it here as people’s ability to work together and voluntarily in groups towards freedom, democratic consolidation and other ethical goals. This allows for the distinction between positive and negative social capital.

6 According to Calhoun (1992), London had 3,000 coffee houses by the first decade of the 18th century, each with a core of regulars. Conversations in these little circles branched out into affairs of state administration and politics. In Germany, table societies drew together academics and laymen. In France, salons located in private homes brought together aristocrats and other social groups. On the claim to full accessibility, it must be stressed that the so-called revisionist historiography suggests a much darker picture of the bourgeois public sphere than the one described by Habermas. Women of all classes and ethnicities were excluded from political participation while plebeian men were excluded on the basis of property qualifications. See Fraser (1992).

7 See Rosanvallon and Viveret, 1977. See also Gramsci, 1977, whose theory of hegemony also builds the distinction between political society (political institutions) and civil society (the non-state or private sphere, including the economy). He recognizes that his conceptual categorization does not hold in practice, as political and civil society overlap.

8 While this distinction between governments and NGOs may seem straightforward, the question could be raised in some contexts where ruling entities are dominated by/or essentially reflect the philosophy and implement the agenda of specific non-governmental organizations. This was the case for instance in Iran after the 1979 Revolution or in Afghanistan under the Taliban. It is also the case in Somalia today.

> 9 See the Report of the Panel of Eminent Persons on United Nations-Civil Society Relations, _We the Peoples: Civil Society, the United Nations and Global Governance_ (A/58/817), released on June 21, 2004; and the Letter to the UN Secretary General dated Sep. 1, 2004, http://www.un-ngls.org/10901joint.pdf

10 The Centre stresses that this definition should not be interpreted as a rigid statement See http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CCS/what_is_civil_society.htm 11 Several French-speaking countries such as Benin, Gabon, Congo, Congo/Zaire, Chad, Niger, Togo, avoided civil wars in 1990 and 1991 because of the mediating role played by respected religious leaders. Cf. C. Monga, 1996b.