The NGO Challenge for International Relations Theory

William E. DeMars, Dennis Dijkzeul

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317542063
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

It has become commonplace to observe the growing pervasiveness and impact of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). And yet the three central approaches in International Relations (IR) theory, Liberalism, Realism and Constructivism, overlook or ignore the importance of NGOs, both theoretically and politically.

Offering a timely reappraisal of NGOs, and a parallel reappraisal of theory in IR—the academic discipline entrusted with revealing and explaining world politics, this book uses practice theory, global governance, and new institutionalism to theorize NGO accountability and analyze the history of NGOs. This study uses evidence from empirical data from Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia and from studies that range across the issue-areas of peacebuilding, ethnic reconciliation, and labor rights to show IR theory has often prejudged and misread the agency of NGOs.

Drawing together a group of leading international relations theorists, this book explores the frontiers of new research on the role of such forces in world politics and is required reading for students, NGO activists, and policy-makers.

Part I Introduction

Introduction NGOing

William E. DeMars and Dennis Dijkzeul

The global surge of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) since the 1990s is still accelerating, as they proliferate in numbers, new issue-areas, and regions of the world. Some NGOs have captured the public imagination with a compelling leader and dramatic narrative—Princess Diana campaigning against land mines, Bono ending extreme poverty, or George Clooney and Angelina Jolie protecting human rights and refugees. ¹ However, NGOs may have expanded their scope, responsibility, and celebrity beyond the limits of their operational capacity. While some NGOs now function almost as local and state governments, ² other governments are pushing back to limit NGO authority. ³

• The NGO challenge … for International Relations theory
• The three traditions revisited
• Anchoring practices of NGOing
• Conclusion: about this book

Indeed, NGOs are facing a paradoxical crisis of trust. On the one hand, their external credibility has never been stronger. According to the 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer, NGOs are revered globally as the most trusted institution, while faith in governments and corporations has plummeted. ⁴ On the other hand, more observers are questioning the presumptive legitimacy accorded to NGOs, which claim to hold states and other actors accountable in global governance while their own accountability remains elusive. Even some of those who know NGOs best are voicing deep disenchantment with their usefulness and promise. ⁵

In this volume we offer a timely reappraisal of NGOs, and a parallel reappraisal of International Relations (IR) theory. Too much of the scholarship in IR either ignores the role of NGOs in world politics, or reiterates NGO self-understanding in theoretical form. As a consequence, even as NGOs spread to fill the interstices of world politics, their significance and impact are still enigmatic. This book is an attempt to prepare the theoretical ground to better understand NGOs.

International Relations theory is our point of departure to address NGOs, because IR comprehends, in principle if not yet in practice, the entire spectrum of social, economic, and political relations entailed by NGOs and their transnational networks as global phenomena. IR theory has attempted to address NGOs, but the relationship remains deeply problematic. We have seen this in our own professional lives and affiliations. One disturbing sign is to meet IR scholars—some with years of operational experience with NGOs—who return from field research to discover that the main lines of IR theory cannot explain much of what they have seen NGOs do. This appears to be a growing problem, particularly among young scholars entering the field. In spite of efforts to bridge the gap, there remains an embarrassing dearth of studies that are both empirically rich and also theoretically engaged with the central debates of IR theory. This presents a challenge to the IR field as a whole, which claims to describe and explain world politics.

This book thus serves a dual purpose: to better understand NGOs; and to inform and renew IR theory through the challenge of understanding NGOs. Hence, the NGO challenge for International Relations theory.

Compared to any other category of actor in world politics, NGOs demonstrate an unparalleled capacity to connect with both political and societal actors (“partners” in NGO parlance) in several countries. This transnational partnering imperative is always pursued in the name of a universal normative mandate. For a simple example, consider the signature proposal of the ONE Campaign: “Join the fight against extreme poverty.” ⁶ The slogan comprises both an invitation to partner with the NGO (Join the fight … ), and a universal normative purpose ( … against extreme poverty). These two practices—a private actor claiming to serve a universal public purpose, and then partnering with societal and political actors in several countries—are vital for making NGOs happen. We propose that they are the two anchoring practices that constitute the process or activity of “NGOing.” ⁷

Starting with practice means looking intensely at what particular NGOs do. In the NGO world, the discourse of “partners” and “partnership” is as pervasive as it is problematic. ⁸ Savvy activists and observers are well aware of the irony of asserting the mutuality of “partnership” in relationships that are marked by asymmetric power, conflict, and mutual political and economic instrumentalization. Having found no clearly superior alternative, we continue to use the terminology of partnership, with its inherent ironies accentuated by our analysis of network politics.

NGOs characteristically work in a networked context with a transnational menagerie of other partners/actors/parties/stakeholders ranging from informal neighborhood groups to warlords and governing elites to businesses and United Nations agencies to ethnic and religious communities. Some “partners” may be hidden in some way, or may not share all the values and norms by which network members identify each other. By raising the controversial questions of hidden partners and heterogeneous networks, we challenge leading theoretical approaches in international relations that tend to overstate the homogeneity of collective norms or the uniform rationality among actors in a network. Through partnering and forming networks, NGOs find themselves almost effortlessly bridging seven critical divisions in world politics:

1. between state and society, and the shifting boundary between public and private;
2. within society, between family and market;
3. between normative and material;
4. between religious and secular;
5. between agency and structure;
6. between conflict and cooperation; and
7. between national and international.

These divides, while resisting theoretical comprehension, are easily bridged by real NGOs in the everyday performance of their anchoring practices, that is, by NGOing. Through bridging, NGOs generate a loose and variegated network form of international institutionalization.

As their anchoring practices lead NGOs to bridge divides in world politics, a third dynamic emerges. By bridging, NGOs generate myriad transnational encounters where power is at play. Belying their idealist and anodyne image, transnational NGOs create the occasion for, and often veil from scrutiny, a growing arena of complex power relationships in world politics. In this way, NGOs and their networks institutionalize both conflict and cooperation. These three conceptual touchstones—practice, bridging, and power—are the foci of the book.

Why examine theoretically marginalized NGOs for leverage to broaden IR theory? The central debates of the field are conventionally understood as a conversation between the three traditions of Liberalism, Realism and Constructivism. Practitioners of each tradition or school of thought focus intensely on a particular set of empirical phenomena. Realists look for the role of power in world politics, liberals focus on the influence and spread of international institutions, and constructivists concentrate on discerning and explaining profound change in the actors or practice of world politics. Each tradition carries a professional responsibility to illuminate and understand its central empirical bailiwick. However, our empirical work on NGOs suggests that all three theoretical traditions are often distorted, and their blind spots reinforced, by the conventional structure and practice of theoretical debate in IR. By marginalizing NGOs, each overlooks a significant sector of precisely those international phenomena with which it is most centrally concerned. We propose that each school, by bringing NGOs in theoretically and empirically, can better carry out its academic, pedagogical, and policy responsibilities. A new theory is not needed; instead, we propose to refine and enrich the practice of all three traditions. Specifically:

• our approach enriches the realist tradition by revealing overlooked power relationships in the transnational networks built by bridging NGOs;
• we bring to the liberal tradition a much broader conception of international institutions by illuminating these transnational institutional networks; and
• the significance of NGO practice in world politics can bolster the constructivist tradition’s ability to discern and explain international political change.

This introduction undertakes two tasks. First, we critically examine the state of IR theory relevant to NGOs, showing how all three theoretical traditions are often distorted, and their blind spots reinforced, by their inattention to NGOs. Second, we unpack the central practices of NGOs themselves, drawing on multiple disciplines, to explain how they generate bridging effects and set up complex power dynamics. Each of the contributors to this volume will show how an empirical case, a comparative study, or a mid-level theory addresses the triptych of practice, bridging, and power.

The NGO challenge … for International Relations theory

How and why does so much IR theory obscure—render opaque and invisible—the complex politics of NGOs? What apertures exist in IR theory for glimpsing the politics of NGOs, and how can those be thrown open for a wider and clearer view? To address these questions, we first review conventional IR theoretical traditions that severely reduce the politics of NGOs, and we map and explain their blind spots. We then reexamine the same traditions, identifying select studies that manage to integrate more of the politics of NGOs.

Myopic realism

Many realist scholars ignore NGOs altogether. According to Stephen Walt, realism, “depicts international affairs as a struggle for power among self-interested states and is generally pessimistic about the prospects for eliminating conflict and war.” ⁹ Although there are many “realisms,” twin premises prevail: pervasive conflict in world politics, and states as the most important actors. These starting points leave all types of international organizations at the margins of the realist world. Most marginalized are NGOs, which appear to be the actors that possess the least resources and rely most on international cooperation. Some realists argue that NGOs address issues with which states are not concerned, or that NGOs are political epiphenomena acting on behalf of state interests. For such hardline realists, neither NGOs nor other international organizations or institutions produce any significant impact on world politics. Unsurprisingly, hardline realism generates little research on NGOs. The watchword of realism may be to debunk the “false promises” of international institutions, or the “false dawn” of global civil society. ¹⁰ Realism’s language of national interests reiterates the discourse of states, or heads of state, facing serious security or economic threats.

Among realist scholars, Kenneth Waltz, in particular, has been a defining figure. His 1959 book Man, the State, and War ¹¹ argued that “third image” explanations of war based on the anarchic structure of the international system were superior to both “first image” accounts that attributed war to human nature, and also to “second image” approaches that explaine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• PART I Introduction
• Introduction: NGOing
• PART II Theory
• 1 How to study NGOs in practice: a relational primer
• 2 Global governance and NGOs: reconceptualizing international relations for the twenty-first century
• 3 Network institutionalism: a new synthesis for NGO studies
• PART III Crosscutting evidence: history, region, accountability
• 4 The co-evolution of non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations in historical perspective
• 5 Being an NGO in the OECD
• 6 The accountability and legitimacy of international NGOs
• PART IV Case evidence: NGOs and networks
• 7 Theoretical and practical implications of public– private partnerships for labor rights advocacy
• 8 NGOs in peacebuilding: high expectations, mixed results
• 9 Follow the partners: agency and explanation in the color revolutions
• 10 Heart of paradox: war, rape and NGOs in the DR Congo
• PART V Conclusions and implications
• 11 Conclusion: NGO research and International Relations theory
• Index
• Routledge Global Institutions Series