Civil society is one of the most contested, ominous, and ambiguous concepts in social sciences. It is contested because it means many things to different intellectuals at the same time. Because of different and even contested views, the notion of civil society has become ambiguous. As a result, it is difficult to attain a united and an integrated understanding of civil society. One of the problems surrounded the analysis of civil society is to adopt universalist view and supposing that civil society “should” have similar features in all contexts. International agencies deal with civil society in developing countries as a metaphor of west. However, developing countries, such as Arab states has different historical trajectories of the civil society developments. In contrast to the universalist understanding of civil society, there is a contextual perception, according to which civil society is embedded in a meaningful mixture of political, social, and historical place. In other words, civil society is embedded in a context. Contextual understanding supposes the heterogeneity of the concerned phenomenon. Studying civil society in this paper adopts contextual understanding to conceptualize civil society in the Arab world. Key words: civil society, context.