Blurring the Lines Between Civil Society, Volunteering and Social Movements. A Reflection on Redrawing Boundaries Inspired by the Spanish Case

Abstract

Citizen participation is manifested through various concepts, such as activism, social movements, volunteering or civil society. The different ways of understanding popular engagement are often separated by delimitations that define them, particularly volunteering and civic action, as two highly differentiated forms of participation in the distinct academic disciplines: political science, volunteering studies, social movement studies or civil society theory. This article considers whether this basic theoretical differentiation can be problematised in the Spanish political context by exploring four paradigmatic cases of popular engagement, using qualitative case study methodology, specifically, a historic case from the 1990s and three more recent cases. It is hoped that the results of the study –which differentiates between organisational hybridity and fuzziness– will encourage reflection on the traditional boundaries between different forms of popular engagement.