CIVIL SOCIETY IN UKRAINE: CURRENT SITUATION AND DEVELOPMENT PROSPECTS

The aim of the article is to study the scientific literature and regulations and practices of their application in relation to the functioning of civil society in Ukraine, to predict its further development, to find ways to improve the legal status of civil society in Ukraine. To achieve it, the following tasks were formed: to consider the theoretical and legal side of understanding the concept of civil society; to study the legal aspects of the existence, formation and functioning of civil society in Ukraine; to analyze the negative and positive influences of civil society in Ukraine. The methodological basis of the study was a set of general and special methods, techniques and tools of scientific knowledge, with their comprehensive application aimed at achieving the goals and objectives of the study. The author used general scientific methods, including the dialectical method, as well as laws and categories of dialectics, in particular, general categories that characterize the development of nature and society: content, form, essence, phenomenon, cause, effect; categories that reflect specific connections in the process of cognition: matter and consciousness, empirical and theoretical, abstract and concrete, historical and logical, etc. The author clarifies the different views on the nature and subjective composition of civil society. The position that the bodies of self-organization of the population are an element of the system of local self-government is substantiated, and therefore their functioning lies in the plane of exercising public power, not civil society. Clarification and argumentation of the position that civil society should not compete with the state, but only is an indicator of real democratic processes in it. At the same time, civil society has a diverse subject composition, where each subject has its own goals and objectives, which they undertake voluntarily.