Yet the New Left are not alone in deploying the concept of civil society for their own purposes. Within mainstream political science, the concept seems to have taken off as an explanation for the collapse of communist- and other authoritarian - regimes, through the apparent resurgence of independent associational life as a basis for popular political resistance. Here the term civil society becomes central to the vocabulary of analyses of the so-called 'third wave' of democratisation since the 1980s, especially in Central-Eastern Europe.