The International Journal
of Not-for-Profit Law

Volume 10, Issue 4, August 2008

This issue of the International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law features a special section on the Middle East. First, Hoshyar Salam Malo, director of Kurdish Human Rights Watch, analyzes and contrasts two civil society bills submitted to the Iraqi Council of Representatives. Next, Nadine H. Abdalla, Research Assistant at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, considers civil society and democratization in Egypt, with a skeptical eye on the approach adopted by the West. A different perspective on Egypt comes from James G. McGann, assistant director of the International Relations Program at the University of Pennsylvania, who enumerates the legal and extralegal means by which the Egyptian government hobbles civil society.

In our other articles, Katerina Hadzi-Miceva, Senior Legal Advisor at the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law, comprehensively evaluates the mechanisms for cooperation between NGOs and governments in Croatia, Estonia, and Hungary. Donald Morris, who teaches in the Department of Accountancy at the University of Illinois at Springfield, explains the perverse and potentially dangerous ways in which the Internal Revenue Service applies cash-reporting requirements to 501(c)(3) organizations as part of its battle against money-laundering. Scott Atran, Presidential Scholar in Sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, shows how soccer teams and other informal networks within civil society can help spawn terrorism. Finally, Shambhavi V. Murthy Gopalkrishna, Lecturer and Senior Academic Faculty in Political Science at Nigeria’s University of Lagos, meditates on civil society from the mixed perspective of participant and scholar.

For this wide range of perspectives on civil society, we are, as always, grateful to our authors.

Stephen Bates
Editor
International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law
sbates@icnl.org