Civil Society and the State in Democratic East Asia: Between Entanglement and Contention in Post High Growth

Civil Society and the State in Democratic East Asia: Between Entanglement and Contention in Post High Growth focuses on the new and diversifying interactions between civil society and the state in contemporary East Asia by including cases of entanglement and contention in the three fully consolidated democracies in the area: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The contributions to this book argue that all three countries have reached a new era of post high growth and mature democracy, leading to new social anxieties and increasing normative diversity, which have direct repercussions on the relationship between the state and civil society. It introduces a comparative perspective in identifying and discussing similarities and differences in East Asia based on in-depth case studies in the fields of environmental issues, national identities as well as neoliberalism and social inclusion that go beyond the classic dichotomy of state vs & ’liberal’ civil society.

David Chiavacci is Professor in Social Science of Japan at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research covers political and economic sociology of contemporary Japan in a comparative perspective. He is known for his publications on social movements, social inequality as well as Japan’s new immigration and immigration policy. His recent publications include Re-emerging from Invisibility: Social Movements and Political Activism in Contemporary Japan (Routledge, 2018, co-edited with Julia Obinger) and Japanese Political Economy Revisited: Abenomics and Institutional Change (Routledge, 2019, co-edited with Sébastien Lechevalier). Simona Alba Grano is senior lecturer at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at the University of Zürich. She is also a research fellow of the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan (ERCCT), at Tübingen. She has authored several book chapters and articles dealing with environmental and anti-nuclear concerns in East Asia in the past few years. In 2016 she has guest edited a special number of China Information on the topic of ＂Environmental governance in China＂, which includes articles by renowned China specialists on environmental rules and regulations. Her latest book as a single author is Environmental Governance in Taiwan: A New Generation of Activists and Stakeholders (Routledge, 2015), which analyses environmental governance mechanisms and actors in Taiwan through a multi-disciplinary research approach. Julia OBINGER is currently working outside of academia in Hamburg, Germany. Before 2018, she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford, Skoll Centre of Social Entrepreneurship as well as SOAS in London. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Zurich in 2013. Her research projects focused on sustainable and ethical consumption as a new form of political engagement in Japan. Her previous works covered alternative lifestyles, emergent social movements, as well as precarity and poverty in Japan. She is the co-editor Social Movements and Political Activism in Contemporary Japan: Re-emerging from Invisibility (Routledge 2018, co-edited with David Chiavacci) and author of Alternative Lebensstile und Aktivismus in Japan. Der Aufstand der Amateure in Tokyo (Springer 2015).