Description
Civil society is a concept representing space autonomous from both the market and the state, originally encompassing constructs such as families, churches, education and associations. Previous research highlights a shrinking of this space in favour of political society in countries led by populist governments. Yet, the mechanisms underpinning such processes have not been thoroughly investigated and uncovered. In our study, we focus on the governmental rhetoric and practices in Poland between 2015 and 2023, which eroded the foundations of a young democracy. These practices fuelled a rise in nationalism, the marginalisation of minority groups, and the restriction of freedoms, including the right to assembly, women's reproductive rights, and other fundamental human rights. In this paper we bring together, Gramsci's concept of civil society and Lévi-Strauss's process of bricolage, to examine how the government’s rhetoric on both emancipatory and anti-emancipatory social movements is represented in conservative right-wing media, including weekly newspapers and social media posts, supportive of the ruling party. This paper demonstrates that the government engaged in bricolage, such as tinkering with the boundaries of civil society, reframing the roles of civil and political society and the roles of competing social movements. The ruling party utilised whatever means were available to depict themselves as part of civil rather than political society, engaging in street protests, speaking on behalf of families, aligning with the Church, and rallying against vague or unspecified enemies. The results show that the space of civil society has not been shrinking; rather, it has been taken over by the state, which claims this territory as its own. This has left emancipatory social movements at risk of being left without a space or becoming effectively 'dis-spaced', imposing questions such as who they represent and who they are against, if there is no political society. We contribute to two streams of social movement literature: one focusing on the conceptual differentiation and overlap between social movements and civil society, and the other on bricolage, enriching and extending both.| Period | 3 Jul 2025 |
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| Event title | SASE 2025 Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics Annual Meeting |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Montreal, CanadaShow on map |