yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Civil society | Citizenship | High school civics | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Civil society is one of those terms that you might hear in a politician's speech, maybe in a line about the importance of maintaining a strong relationship between the government and civil society. But what does it actually mean? A society that's civilized? Or maybe the part of society run by civilians rather than government agents? In fact, civil society is a little hard to define.

Let's start with what it's not. It's not government or elected officials who are acting in their official capacity as representatives of the state or nation— that is the political sphere. It's also not businesses or corporations who exist primarily to make a profit— that's the economic sphere. And lastly, it's not purely private aspects of society such as family or home life. Civil society exists in between these three spheres and includes all of the non-governmental groups, associations, and institutions that citizens form and join.

If you and your friends decide to create a neighborhood cleanup club, picking up litter from the streets and planting trees in the park, congratulations! You've just joined civil society. Some other examples of civil society include religious organizations, professional associations, charitable groups, or interest groups. Non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, are some of the most notable actors in civil society. These include organizations like Doctors Without Borders.

Some organizations overlap a bit with other spheres. Labor unions, for example, are voluntary organizations, but they overlap with the economic sphere by petitioning businesses for better wages and working conditions. NGOs that have a humanitarian mission, like Amnesty International, may overlap with the political sphere since they petition governments to change how they treat their citizens. Some non-governmental actors are harder to classify, like the news media. Where does it fall in civil society?

It usually has some goal of making money, but it also helps inform citizens about the workings of government and helps hold politicians accountable to the public. So, the media plays a central role in civil society.

So, what's important about civil society? Well, all of these organizations help connect people to their communities, and many of them strive to improve society by influencing these spheres. Often they're in conflict with one another, but most importantly, they show us that there are many ways beyond voting or running for office to become involved in issues that you care about.

More Articles

View All
Gordon Ramsay Hunts for Native Foods of New Zealand | Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted
Monique: Finally! Good morning! Good to see you! How are you? Interviewer: Good! I’m great! What an amazing place! Welcome to New Zealand. Monique: Fizo is one of New Zealand’s top chefs, trained in Michigan-style restaurants, but passionate about her M…
Introduction to chemistry | Atoms, compounds, and ions | Chemistry | Khan Academy
Here some picture of what most people associate when they think of chemistry. They think of scientists working on a bench with the different vials of different chemicals. They might think of a mad scientist, some of them boiling and changing colors. They …
Climbing Asia’s Forgotten Mountain, Part 2 | Nat Geo Live
Hilaree: So many things went awry everyday. It was a lot of hard work. And to get to base camp when I think of all the times we almost threw in the towel, it was a total relief. Both: Oh, we made it. Climb on. We’re at what… like 11,000 feet we have 7,00…
What Are Tundras? | National Geographic
What are tundras? Tundras are among the Earth’s coldest and harshest biomes. These ecosystems are treeless regions with extreme cold and low rainfall. There are two different types of tundras: alpine and arctic. Alpine tundras occur on mountains where tr…
Atomic Theory
Hi, and welcome to Veritasium, an online science video blog. I’d like to take on scientific topics all the way from the simplest to the most complex. So a good place to start, I think, is with a problem considered by the famous physicist Richard Feynmann…
Where We Are in the Big Cycle of Money, Credit, Debt, and Economic Activity
There’s a cycle. Um, there’s a short-term money credit debt market economic cycle we call it the business cycle also. What happens is, you know, you go from a recession, go to slow inflation. Uh, is low central banks, uh, produce a lot of money and credi…