What do we know about civil society and regime change thirty years after 1989?

This essay discusses the lessons of thirty years of postcommunist politics for our understanding of the relationship between civil society and regime change. It identifies four different modalities of civil society – insurgent, institutionalized, uncivil and firewall – and discusses each in detail with illustrations from post-communist politics. It shows how the politics of the region has been a fertile field of study for innovation in contemporary understandings of civil society in comparative politics.