Contested Alliances: International NGOs and Authoritarian Governments in the Era of Globalization

Abstract

T he NGO boom of the 1990s was matched by mounting literature on the influence of NGOs on world politics. The 1998 inaugural issue of CICE – Are NGOs Overrated? – brought these debates into the very center of international and comparative education. The journal issue inspired a fascinating conversation about the powers and limits of NGOs in the area of education by highlighting the variety of types, qualities, and functions of NGOs, as well as discussing various NGO roles vis-à-vis the state. Some articles emphasized the virtues of NGOs in promoting educational change, while others criticized NGOs for imposing a neoliberal agenda and maintaining systemic inequity. As Michael Edwards concluded in 1998, there was only one possible answer to the question whether NGOs were overrated or not: " It all depends on the NGOs concerned, the type of work that they do, and the contexts they work in " (p. 55). A decade after the initial debate, the reality is that there is still no clear answer to the question CICE editors originally posed. What a decade of intellectual debate and research has brought, however, is a realization that NGOs are obscure organizations, whose impact is often impossible to predict. NGOs forge contested alliances with governments, international organizations, and local communities (often contested from within and without); and, notwithstanding their success or failure in reaching their officially proclaimed goals, NGOs are capable of altering larger political, economic, and social processes in unpredictable ways. In the words of William deMars (2005), NGOs are " wild cards in world politics: " " their impact is up for grabs, and they attract local and global actors who compete, and sometimes cooperate, to play, capture, and or neutralize them " (p. 4). The status of NGOs as obscure organizations is most evident in the context of authoritarian or centralist states. My own experience of researching (and participating in) the work of international NGOs in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus for over a decade offers some interesting examples. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, NGOs have had a profound impact on political processes in the region, but their impact has been highly variable. NGOs have contributed to overthrowing authoritarian governments (for example, in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan), but they have also inadvertently helped to legitimize some of the most authoritarian regimes in the world (for example, in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan). In this context, the role of NGOs is far more complex than much of the literature would suggest (Mercer, 2002). This paper argues that we should look beyond the officially proclaimed goals of NGOs in assessing their impact. Instead, we should examine the political contexts within which NGOs forge contested alliances with international organizations, authoritarian regimes, and local actors to better understand the hidden agendas inherent in the very nature of these organizations and the inadvertent consequences resulting from these complex interactions.