Paper Titles & Abstracts

Civil society support has become an integral part of the EU's democracy and human rights promotion. While there has been increasing scholarly attention to the instruments and impact of the EU's civil society assistance, so far there has been little research on the question what kind of civil society the EU actually promotes. This paper intends to fill this gap by examining the substance of the EU's civil society support in post-soviet Central Asia, a region where various forms of civil society organisations (SCO) can be observed. Starting from the assumption that the EU uses a (pre-determined) template of CSO, this paper draws on the typology suggested in the 2005 Special Issue of Central Asian Survey, which distinguishes between four conceptions of civil society: neo-liberal, communal, state-led and global. Empirically, the paper investigates four main instruments employed by the EU to support civil society in the region during 2000-2012: the Non-State Actors and Local Authorities in Development programme, the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights, the Institution Building and Partnership Programme and the civil society seminars held in the framework of the human rights dialogues. Data are retrieved from EU documents and complemented by insights from interviews with Central Asian CSO representatives and EU officials involved in shaping and implementing the instruments concerned. The findings reveal a differentiation between civil society types promoted in EU strategic documents and those that are supported in practice. While at the strategic planning level the EU seeks to strengthen civil society broadly construed, at the programme implementation level the (neo-)liberal SCO are the main beneficiaries. At the same time, the EU customizes its civil society assistance depending on the realities on the ground and at times finds itself empowering state-led civil society.