Chapter 4: IMPACT OF POLITICAL TRENDS ON CIVIL SOCIETY
The views expressed in this chapter are entirely in my personal capacity. Nothing of what I say is the responsibility of any of the institutions to which I am affiliated.
I will not attempt to exhaustively define “civil society”, as opposed to “civic society” or “political society”; such an exercise is essentially sterile and often just boils down to a clash of definitions. For the purposes of this chapter I take a pragmatic approach to include within civil society all interest groups in Singapore save for those formally affiliated with a political party. These interest groups may be purely private: for example residents’ associations. They may have some wider public impact: for example, cultural and environmental groups. Some might even have an overtly political nature: groups that lobby for the abolition of the death penalty or migrant workers’ rights, for instance. The common feature is that they are organised by private individuals, although they may have some official backing to a greater or lesser extent.
