When networks don't work: the rise and fall and rise of civil society initiatives in Central America

'Civil society,' 'network,' and 'social movement' are imprecise, frequently contested terms. Many social scientific discussions of collective action are characterised by considerable slippage in the use of these and other, similar concepts. To a large extent, this reflects the emergence of new, hybrid organisational forms, as contemporary social movements network with one another, form coalitions, and seek to establish claims to constitute part of national and global civil society. While this paper indicates that it may be heuristically helpful to refine distinctions between these categories, it argues that it is probably more useful to integrate insights from the too often separate streams of scholarship that focus respectively on civil society, networks, and social movements.

In particular, the rise in the 1990s of transnational Central America-wide civil society initiatives (and their decline and re-emergence) suggests that

• Contested notions of civil society have a real-world impact on the shape and activities of diverse social movements and NGOs.
  
• 'Networks' - far from being durable and potent organisational forms, as scholars of the right and left have forcefully maintained - are at times quite fragile and ephemeral and are characterised by periodic cycles like those of social movements (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001a; Castells 1996; Tarrow 1998).
  
• The new prominence of 'networks', whether as political claims or as linked computers or social movements, exacerbates a problem with profound methodological, political, ethical, and representational dimensions that is acknowledged only occasionally in the social movements literature - the appearance of 'fictitious' or 'shell' organisations and, more recently, 'dot causes' or Internet-based advocacy organisations with minuscule or indeterminate constituencies (Tilly 1984: 311; Anheier and Themudo 2002:209-10).

(Introduction)