Civic space as analytical concept: rethinking civil society in an age of autocratization

In an era of deepening autocratization, understanding how civil society actors contest and reconfigure civic space is increasingly relevant. Existing conceptualisations of civic space tend to privilege pro-democratic and exclude “uncivil” actors, and assume a unidirectional “shrinking” of civic space during autocratization. This article synthesizes recent refinements in civic space scholarship into a coherent analytical concept for studying the actions, strategies, and relations of civil society across regime types. The concept redirects attention from normative questions about who belongs to civil society to how civic space is configured, contested, and by whom. It rests on three assumptions: civic space is never fully closed; its boundaries are constantly reconfigured through contestation; and it is co-produced through the interaction between state and civil society and among civil society actors themselves. Operationalized through four dimensions – access, voice, resources, security – the empirical utility of the civic space concept is illustrated by applying it to the case of the Polish trade union Solidarność, tracing its trajectory across four decades and two regime types. The analysis demonstrates the concept’s capacity to reveal dynamics that normative frameworks tend to overlook, including how a single civil society actor may contribute to both expansion and restriction of civic space.