Reducing Armed Violence with NGO Governance

Rodney Bruce Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135011482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

NGOs have proliferated in number and become increasingly influential players in world politics in the past three decades. From the 1970s, with the access of social movements and private NGOs to local and international institutions, NGOs have enjoyed an opening to bring impact global policy debates. Yet NGOs find themselves highly constrained in bringing their material and epistemic resources to bear in the security arena where their activities normally must be authorized by states, or international organizations acting with authority delegated from states. They also find their activities, particularly in the security arena come frequently under attack as lacking accountability or lacking legitimacy, as NGOs are self-appointed private actors, often representing only themselves, they are seen by many as self-appointed meddlers in transnational affairs,

This book provides a comprehensive and accessible analysis whether, or the extent to which, NGOs can contribute as private actors to authoritative governance outcomes in the security realm, and thereby help mitigate armed violence by plugging governance gaps in this arena that state actors, or international governmental organizations (IGOs) either neglect, or can better address with NGO assistance. This book examines the current and future issues surrounding this objective in four sections: (i) a practitioner's perspective of the potentials of conflict governance NGOs, (ii) global civil society and legitimation of conflict governance NGO activities, (iii) conflict governance NGOs as norm entrepreneurs and norm diffusion in global governance (iv) conflict governance NGOs in action.

1 Introduction

NGO governance and armed violence

Rodney Bruce Hall

• Conflict governance NGOs

• Outline of the book

• Part I: conflict governance NGOs: a practitioner’s perspective

• Part II: global civil society and legitimation of NGO conflict governance activities

• Part III: conflict governance NGOs as norm entrepreneurs and norm diffusion in global governance

• Part IV: conflict governance NGOs in action

• Part V: conclusions and directions for future research

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have proliferated in number and become increasingly influential players in world politics in the past three decades.¹ From the 1970s, social movements and private NGOs have enjoyed an opening in access to local and international institutions. Initially, this opening up applied mainly to “soft” issues that did not seem to engage directly with the Cold War ideological conflict, mainly the environment and women’s issues. For example, the Stockholm Conference on Environment and Development 1972 marked the beginning of the parallel summit as a way of organizing global civil society organizations on particular issues.² By the 1980s, development and humanitarian NGOs also began to be seen as partners for governments and international institutions in agenda setting, and providing nongovernmental sources of expertise to bear on the problem-solving agendas of these issue areas. In the post-Cold War period, governments and international institutions became more responsive to NGO participation in the problems of peace and human rights.

Yet NGOs find themselves highly constrained in bringing their material and epistemic resources to bear in the security arena where their activities normally must be authorized by states, or international organizations acting with authority delegated from states. They also find their activities, particularly in the security arena—where the claims of state sovereignty to represent national polities authorize a monopoly of the use of force, or claims to represent the state-based international community to which the use of force has been delegated—come frequently under attack as lacking accountability or lacking legitimacy, as NGOs are self-appointed private actors, often representing only themselves. Rather than being seen as members of a “global civil society,”³ that is helping to “reconstitute” a global civil “public domain,”⁴ they are seen by many as self-appointed meddlers in transnational affairs, bringing their private resources to bear to push their own agendas into multilateral negotiating forums, and thus subverting the notion of a true global civil society that could contribute to democratic global governance. ⁵

This book seeks to contribute to the debate on the question of whether, or the extent to which, NGOs can contribute as private actors to authoritative governance outcomes in the security realm, and thereby help mitigate armed violence by plugging governance gaps in this arena that state actors or international governmental organizations (IGOs) either neglect, or can better address with NGO assistance. Uniquely, this book begins with a contribution by officers of an NGO, the One Earth Future Foundation (OEF), who propose to do precisely this. The book will then reply in various ways to the NGO’s manifesto, or “mission statement.”

This volume results from two workshops held in Oxford on this topic in the spring of 2011 and the summer of 2012. In the first workshop participants provided and presented a brief, two- or three-page précis of their topics. This useful workshop was employed by the volume editor to refine the intellectual design for a second workshop (and the resulting volume), at which full papers were circulated and presented. New participants with substantive expertise in areas deemed absent during the first workshop were recruited. Participants of the first workshop worked with me at its conclusion to refine and confirm the intellectual design of the second workshop, and the volume presently before the reader.

Conflict governance NGOs

The contributors to the volume reference several types of non-state actors (NSAs), including IGOs as well as NGOs, and civil society organizations (CSOs). For a shorthand to denote the particular form of actor that interests us most, namely NGOs with conflict governance aspirations, we refer to “conflict governance NGOs.” These are NGOs that work and aspire either to prevent or mediate armed conflict, or to mitigate its consequences. As our contributors’ studies demonstrate, NGOs can help prevent armed conflict by providing public and private goods and services that can obviate bases of many local common disputes that lead to armed conflict, and by acting as norm entrepreneurs who originate, diffuse and advocate in international forums, new paci-fic and human rights norms that can result in new institutions. NGOs can mediate ongoing armed conflict through active mediation and dispute resolution efforts, singularly or more often in tandem with IGO mediation efforts. Finally, NGOs can mitigate the consequences of armed violence by providing humanitarian assistance and relief and by working with civil authorities in pacified regions to provide various forms of community support.

NGOs that perform or aspire to perform any of these tasks we refer to as “conflict governance NGOs,” which term should not be confused with “conflict resolution NGOs” that focus exclusively on mediation. The contributions by Amitav Acharya, Eamon Aloyo, Clifford Bob, and Brent Steele all illustrate different means by which conflict governance NGOs help to prevent armed violence. The contribution by Julia Amos illustrates how, with mixed results, conflict governance NGOs can help to mediate armed violence. The contributions by Christopher Lilyblad and Vanessa Ullrich illustrate some means by which conflict governance NGOs help to mitigate the consequences of armed violence.

Outline of the book

The book is organized into four topical sections that grew out of the workshop proceedings and the intellectual design that arose subsequent to the first workshop. Part I has a practitioner’s perspective of the potential of conflict governance NGOs; part II looks at global civil society and legitimation of conflict governance NGO activities; part III is on conflict governance NGOs as norm entrepreneurs and norm diffusion in global governance; and part IV discusses conflict governance NGOs in action. Finally, in part V, Christopher Lilyblad and I will summarize what we’ve learned and discuss implications for future research.

Part I: conflict governance NGOs: a practitioner’s perspective

Jeffrey French and Robert Haywood of OEF provide a trenchant, powerful and erudite critique of state-led and IGO-led global governance, and the tragic failure of our global governance structures to date to prevent or mediate armed violence, or mitigate its tragic consequences for innocent people around the world—violence often perpetrated on people by their own governments. Their criticisms of the “territorial myopia” of states and the “sovereign prize” entailed by their recognition by other states and IGOs indeed identify many sources of armed violence against innocents that they would like to help obviate, even as they recognize that sovereign states protect billions from armed violence as well. They discuss highly plausible sources of NGO authority in participation in governance solutions, as well as many plausible short-term means by which NGOs might help plug governance gaps in conflictual issue areas that are unaddressed or inadequately addressed by state and IGO actors. Their unique practitioner perspective, which they have worked painstakingly to translate into the jargon of our academic literature on global governance, is an invaluable starting point for the debates and studies that follow.

Part II: global civil society and legitimation of NGO conflict governance activities

The organization of the book largely flows naturally from the engagement of each of the academic contributors with claims of the OEF manifesto. part II of the book will constitute analytical contributions by two scholars who have significant doubts regarding whether NGOs can contribute to authoritative governance outcomes by reducing or mitigating armed violence. One skeptic analyzes the issue from the strongly Lockean perspective of republican theory (Jens Bartelson), and a second from a highly critical engagement with the notion of a liberal global civil society (Ronnie D. Lipschutz) as “epistemic violence” in itself. The book cannot avoid the analytical task of addressing the question of legitimation of the “authority” of private actors in global governance in conflict regions. A third contribution (by Rodney Bruce Hall and Christopher Marc Lilyblad) will provide a more positive evaluation, stipulating the sources of NGO private authority, and the sometimes stringent conditions under which it may be enjoyed. We will develop the notion of sociological legitimacy and argue that it is a more appropriate standard for assessment of the question of whether NGOs can participate in authoritative governance arrangements than the highly normative standards that Bartelson and Lipschutz apply in their contributions.

A healthy and good-natured debate regarding the existence and constitution of global civil society, and the question of whether a new global public sphere or domain is emerging for the transnationally public debate of global issues is continued in this section. Participants bring, as they have in earlier manifestations of this debate, highly differ-ent perspectives to the question, apply highly different standards to the question of NGO legitimacy, and draw upon highly different scholarly traditions to answer, ranging from Lockean republican theory, Foucauldian conceptions of “governmentality,” and constructivist notions of authority and legitimacy drawing upon structurationist and organizational sociology as well as organizational ecology.

In Chapter 3 Bartelson asks under what conditions non-state actors in general, and conflict governance NGOs in particular, could be considered legitimate authorities. The chapter makes several important points about the changing conditions of legitimacy in a globalizing world. Yet since much hinges on the legitimacy of these actors, he argues that the issue of legitimacy deserves more attention, analytically as well as normatively. He argues that legitimacy is not only or even primarily a normative concern, but also an important source of compliance in the absence of coercive enforcement.

He notes that global political authority is relatively weak and decentralized, and the pluralistic make-up of global society has conspired against the formation of anything like global demos that could provide global institutions with the kind of legitimacy that derives from popular consent. He dismisses attempts to replace the requirement of popular consent with other standards of democratic legitimacy—such as transparency and accountability—as making any real difference in terms of the possibilities of democratic participation in the absence of a global civil society, which he does not find. His test of the legitimacy of non-state actors engaged in governance arrangements is the question of whether most human beings actually could be said to enjoy the kind of political liberty necessary to respond effectively to a perceived lack of accountability and transparency on behalf of global governance institutions and transnational actors, and whether global civil society networks are inclusive enough to cater to such needs. He asserts that democratic participation is meaningful only in the context of a political community within which they can be effectively exercised, and that exercise in turn presupposes that agents are free and safe to express and act upon their beliefs and desires in ways conducive to such participation. Unless these preconditions are fulfilled, any global governance arrangement will be susceptible to the objection (warranted or not) that it merely serves the particular interests or identities of the dominant actors.

In Chapter 4, Lipschutz asks whether agents of “global civil society” can intervene successfully in violence-torn societies to (re)construct a more peaceful social order. Lipschutz interrogates the concept and practices of global civil society and offers a somewhat contrary view of the role of civil society in liberalism. The general understanding of political theorists is that civil society requires a robust state in order to flourish; absent the commitment of Leviathan to “keep the peace” through the threat of punishment, there is no incentive to organize collectively. Under this umbrella, however, he argues that liberal civil society comes into being with a dual purpose: first, to provide shared goods among group members and, second, to police and discipline group members through peer pressure. Thus civil society shares with the state the task of keeping order through mechanisms of (largely) epistemic violence. Lipschutz posits a problematic of “global” civil society under contemporary conditions of globalized economic liberalism, evident in the diffusion of capitalist relations throughout the world. In the absence of a world state promising punishment of those who refuse to abide by liberal norms and practices, he asks whether a global civil society is even possible. He argues that while there may be an incipient world state in the making, with the rise of state-like authorities, centers of coercive and social power remain strongly national. Hence, missions of peace making tend to reflect interventions by liberal states, acting collectively and with the assistance of transnationalized NGOs.

Finally, Lipschutz examines how such NGOs, notionally acting to support peacemaking and state making projects, also play a role in constructing the conditions of epistemic violence required for successful political liberalism. Hence, civil society organizations play the role of developing the civil associations through which peer pressure can operate and, in so doing, help to create and support the liberalism of fear. He offers examples of how this process operates and how it can fail, generating winning and losing groups as a consequence of liberal intervention, with specific emphasis on Rwanda.

In Chapter 5 Lilyblad and I provide alternatives to the requirements for NGOs as authoritative sources of governance in the conflict arena presented by Bartelson and Lipschutz. While Bartelson argues that legitimacy is an important source of compliance in the absence of coercive enforcement and that defense of liberty is the appropriate standard of legitimacy, we follow Weber’s reminder that many social institutions deemed highly legitimate today originally arose within social relations of coercion. We argue that Bartelson’s highly normative standard, and his insistence that legitimacy must arise within a demos, or a political community, deriving from popular consent among all stakeholders, is too stringent a standard for the successful exercise of authoritative governance, by either public or private actors. We argue that a less normative, more sociological, empirical standard of legitimacy should apply, drawing upon Weber’s sociology of legitimac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: NGO governance and armed violence
• Part I Conflict governance NGOs: a practitioner’s perspective
• Part II Global civil society and legitimation of NGO conflict governance activities
• Part III Conflict governance NGOs as norm entrepreneurs and norm diffusion in global governance
• Part IV Conflict governance NGOs in action
• Part V Conclusions and directions
• Index