Six years of “Civic World” Bringing the civil society concept closer to the people   The first issue of the “Civic World” was published exactly six years ago, in February 2001. A month earlier, in January, the pilot-issue had been published as a “test-balloon”. Since then, this monthly magazine has been published regularly with 11 issues a year. Why “Civic World”? – asks the Director of the Macedonian Centre for International Cooperation, Saso Klekovski – the man who has been the editor-in-chief of the magazine all these years, in the editorial of the pilot-issue. We are going to try to paraphrase part of his extensive answer to that question, including the quotation of Zoran Kostov’s words in the article “Why NGO-ists, and not materialists, surrealists or defeatists”?: the magazine appeared as an answer to the non-understanding or the misunderstanding of the civil society by some, including here the social elite and the state bodies. Perhaps, in six years, some research would confirm that a certain level of understanding the civil sector was reached. How big, in that respect, would the “Civic World” role be? That hypothetical research could not be exactly confirmed (primarily, due to the lack of something previous that would serve as a role-model); However, besides the running the risk of being blamed to be biased, we believe that this magazine has contributed to the better understanding of the essence and the concept, as well as the importance of the civil society in Macedonia. This is not only because of the columns that interpret the notion of “civil society” and its segments theoretically (such as “Concepts”), but also because of the practical approach to the activities of that brave new world that grew in our country and because of dealing with such issue that are common to the world like poverty, education, human rights; then, there’s the possibility of “opening window” to let in the foreign experiences and practices. And of course, because of a lot of other things that if we decided to mention, we would definitely be short of space…   M.I.