Page 367 - The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology

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338 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

Civil society is composed of old and new and events and giving them economic support.
actors, promoting collective actions, such as These actions are considered by the state as
putting pressure on the authorities, mobiliz- partnership projects involving social move-
ing people in the streets and acting with state ments; but, in fact, the majority of these actions
agents in the planning and administration of are developed with NGOs and civil associa-
2
public policies, like the above-cited councils. tions rather than with social movements. The
The defence of the autonomy of civil soci- actions are promoted by the public administra-
ety is no longer a fundamental structuring tion. The poor now have specific public pro-
focal point for building a democratic society. grams, such as the ‘bolsa família’ (family
Old and new players now define the aims of allowance), that provide them with some finan-
their struggles with and conquests over polit- cial support. These programs are introduced
ical society, especially in the field of public because of high rates of unemployment and
policy. The expansion of the number of dependence on government help.
players of and in civil society was prominent Since the year 2000, social movements in
throughout the 1990s. Brazil have reorganized themselves. They did
In the analyses and discourses of the leaders, this by combining their initiatives with the
the decentralization of the popular subject and action of more institutionalized forms of organ-
the emergence of a plurality of new players ization (see Note 2). Examples are: the
bestowed importance on new analytical cate- Movement of Landless Workers (MST) and the
gories such as social exclusion and citizen- ‘Forum Nacional Pela Reforma Agrária’
ship. The latter categories came to the fore in (National Forum for Land Reform). Other
the 1980s, but in the 1990s they took on examples are the cooperation of the African-
new meaning. Political leaders incorporated Descendants Movement, which has partici-
ideas about civil participation, the exercise of pated in the development of government
civility and the social responsibility of citi- policies for the official demarcation of land
zens for their rights and duties into official which was ‘possessed’by their forefathers, and
discourse. the Indigenous Rights Movement, which has
In this scenario, civil society becomes worked together with the Indigenous National
entwined with political society, making pos- Council. These forms of cooperation have
sible a new contradictory and fragmented appeared in a new moment of the democratiza-
character of the State in the 1990s. A new tion process in Brazil (and, more generally, in
public space, a ‘public non-state’, developed Latin America as a whole), in which the strug-
where advisory bodies, forums, networks and gles of the social movements are resulting in the
links between civil society and representa- social inclusion of historically excluded peo-
tives of public power were introduced into ples. This new scenario has attracted the atten-
public administration to meet the highly tion of analysts and policy makers to the study
articulate social demands, treated now as part of social movements. In the next section we
of the country’s ‘Social Question’. The cate- will focus on the main theoretical approaches
gory of social exclusion and the pursuit of that have been guiding these studies.
inclusion dominate the debate on social issues.
In this context, governments consider partici- THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO
pation of civil society crucial to the democrati- ANALYSES OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
zation of public administration so as to change IN BRAZIL
the priorities of the administrations.
Nowadays, there are several programs of the Authors and paradigms used as
state with civil society that initiate policies references
aimed at the regulation of conflicts in urban
areas. The state has ‘captured’ the subject of Briefly we can say that in the studies about
collective conflicts, organizing many projects social movements in Brazil, there are three