Towards a Colonial Civil Sphere: A Critical Systematic Review of Civil Sphere Theory in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Study design: Systematic Review
Abstract: Jeffrey C. Alexander’s Civil Sphere Theory (CST) has become one of the most influential frameworks in contemporary cultural sociology for understanding how solidarity, inclusion, and democratic life are culturally constituted. Yet CST’s applicability beyond the Western liberal democratic contexts, from which it emerged, remains underexamined. This position paper undertakes a critical theoretical analysis of the scholarly literature engaging with Alexander’s The Civil Sphere (2006) and its subsequent extensions by drawing on a systematic review of 41 studies identified through Web of Science and Scopus. This analysis identifies four structural limitations of CST that render it inadequate for analyzing colonial and postcolonial contexts, namely, Euro-American centric universalism, a liberal democratic precondition, nation-state boundedness, and the erasure of colonial power relations. Based on these findings, the article proposes a Colonial Civil Sphere (CCS) framework, built upon the conceptual pillars of constitutive contradiction, structured partial inclusion, constrained civil agency, and coloniality as persisting structure. The CCS framework reorients analysis from CST’s civil repair to civil construction, offering a theoretically grounded approach for understanding how civil life is constituted with, under, and against colonial domination. This article concludes by outlining implications for future research on colonial and postcolonial civil societies in the Global South.
Source: SocArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Authors: Indra Bhaskar Mishra, Devesh Pandey
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7166864281