This study examines an urban community gardening initiative with stated ambitions to contribute to both environmental and social sustainability in Stockholm, Sweden, through the lens of postapocalyptic environmentalism. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews with gardeners as well as local officials, the analysis investigates the links between gardeners' postapocalyptic motivations, their practical work, and the wider institutional context. Rather than viewing postapocalyptic environmentalism as emerging outside of traditional institutions, the analysis reveals the initiative's entanglement and co-dependence on institutional structures and policies. The high level of institutionalization of urban community gardening locally requires the initiative to navigate the 'gray zone' between autonomy and co-optation and balancing between building 'small hope' through gardening work with actively confronting institutional challenges. Vague municipal guidelines, one-size-fits-all regulations and limited resources make urban community gardening in this setting vulnerable to participation fatigue as well as goal misalignment and co-optation.

What can we learn about civil society in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Russia from studies on activism within the region’s urban spaces? In this article, we argue that studying urban activism in CEE offers useful insights for general theory building about the importance of uneventful protests, the formation of agency and the processes of becoming active in the public sphere (conceptualized here as “political becoming”), and the enabling role of informality in collective action in adverse contexts. By contributing to our understanding in this way, these insights help to advance relational and process-based conceptions of civil society.

The text argues that a re-assessment of the post-socialist civil societies in general and Polish civil society in particular is called for on both empirical and theoretical grounds. For the purpose of such re-thinking, the authors address critically the way in which civil society has been conceptualized in the post-socialist context, with special focus on Poland; and, secondly, discuss the limitations of the common indicators used to assess the strength and character of the civil societies in the region. It is argued that there are forms of collective action that have tended to escape observers’ lenses for theoretical, methodological as well as normative and ideological reasons. Consequently, the authors calls attention to the exclusionary practices entailed in the “making up” of civil societies in the region, revealing how the concept of civil society as commonly applied in political discourses as well as empirical research in fact excludes many forms of social activism.

As a consequence of European integration and the EU's expanded social policy, more citizens' interests are today organized at EU level. In the case of the women's movement, there is an umbrella organization-the European Women's Lobby (EWL)-in place in Brussels coordinating national women's movements. The EWL demands from its members that they be nationwide and representative umbrellas, which has structuring effects on the women's movements at domestic level. This article proposes to study the Europeanization of civil society through the lens of meta-organization theory (Ahrne & Brunsson 2008). Europeanization can thus be understood as a process which imposes meta-organizational structures on civil society. Through a case study of the Swedish Women's Lobby, this article analyses the consequences for the women's movement in Sweden of the meta-organizational structure brought into being by Europeanization.

This article considers the strategic choices that radical activists face when a cycle of contention ends. It investigates the re-orientation of the autonomous anarchists or left-libertarian activist milieu in Sweden after the riots at the Gothenburg summit in 2001, which ended a cycle of anti-globalization protests in Sweden. The article identifies five strategies by which this activist milieu attempted to reconstruct collective agency, build a new alliance structure and renew the repertoire of contention: 1) rescaling and targeting of micro-politics; 2) moving from secluded to open communities; 3) rethinking collective agency with the help of a new movement theory; 4) reversing dominant discourses and opening up discursive space; and 5) redefining militancy and shelving of violent confrontation. The study builds on activist interviews and ethnographic research in Stockholm and Malmö.