Beautifully Imperfect: Applying the Western Civil Society Model to Africa

The thrust of this paper is to show how theories of civil society may be altered by the inclusion of the case of Africa. In order to have a nuanced understanding of the subject matter, the article first traces the concept to some classical scholars, illustrating its dynamism by presenting postulates on the subject matter, and operationalizing it for discussion. It then provides some background to the African civil society, describing how it differs from the global North‟s, thereby having the potentials for altering the crude Western model when the case of the continent is included. Citing example