The distinction between state and civil society is deeply rooted in both sociology and political theory (Barkey and Parikh 1991:525; Bobbio 1999:115; Habermas 1989:19). Even thinkers who argue that civil society and the state ‘interact’ often retain the basic conceptual opposition between the terms. Barkey and Parikh go so far as to characterize recent work on the state as “the state-society li...