Taking Aim at the Arms Trade

NGOS, Global Civil Society and the World Military Order

Doctor Anna Stavrianakis

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848139008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Taking Aim at The Arms Trade: NGOs, Global Civil Society and the World Military Order takes a critical look at the ways in which NGOs portray the arms trade as a problem of international politics and the strategies they use to effect change. NGOs have been pivotal in bringing the suffering caused by the arms trade to public attention, documenting its negative impact on human rights, conflict, security and development around the world, and pushing for measures to control or eradicate the trade. Overall, however, their activity has helped sideline debate on Northern military predominance while facilitating intervention in the South based on liberal understandings of the arms trade, conflict, development and human rights. They thus contribute to the perpetuation of a hierarchical world military order and the construction of the South as a site of Northern benevolence and intervention. Stavrianakis exposes the tensions inherent in NGOs' engagement with the arms trade and argues for a re-examination of dominant assumptions about NGOs as global civil society actors.

1 • Conceptualising Global Civil Society

The concept of global civil society has borne the hopes of the post-Cold War world on its shoulders. It is widely deemed to be a pacific site of emancipatory potential, if not practice: our best hope for the promotion of human rights, development and good governance. While most often associated with ‘soft’ security issues such as environmental degradation, poverty, women’s and indigenous rights, or health issues such as HIV/AIDS, global civil society also has a track record of tackling ‘hard’ military or weapons issues. Cold War peace movement campaigns to ban nuclear weapons have outlived the end of superpower rivalry, and new campaigns against landmines, cluster munitions, small arms, depleted uranium and the use of child soldiers have been launched since the 1990s. Commenting on the role of NGOs in the Ottawa process that banned landmines, Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy argued that ‘one can no longer relegate NGOs to simple advisory roles…They are now part of the way decisions have to be made’ (in Brem and Rutherford 2001, 175). Increased political, popular and scholarly attention to civil society activism is predominantly based on a liberal account of the post-Cold War and now post-9/11 context of globalisation and security, often understood as the intensification of interaction between states and communities in an age of global tele–communications, the rising salience of non-state actors, non-traditional security threats, the increasing spread of norms, and the emergence of global governance. However, this chapter seeks to problematise this optimistic assessment of NGO and civil society activism in four main ways.

First, the common definition of global civil society as a non-state, non-market sphere fails adequately to situate it in the historical and social setting of a global capitalist state system. In privileging the agency of global civil society actors such as NGOs and untethering them from the structures that ground them, the constraining and enabling factors that necessarily affect their prospects of success are sidelined. Second, NGOs often claim to be, and are widely understood to be, driven by progressive or emancipatory values. However, the disciplining of NGOs’ activity through their structural position within civil society is such that this normative judgement should be more ambivalent than is usually recognised. Third, accounts of global civil society often rest on a problematic conception of the global that hides not only the uneven geographies of civil society but also the imperial (re)ordering of international relations, and serves to depoliticise the transformatory and universalising urge inherent within liberalism. Fourth, the emphasis on the non-violent nature of global civil society sidelines the violence of capitalism and the state system and disciplines dissent within the NGO and activist world.

These four limitations of the mainstream literature on global civil society stem from a Eurocentric liberal orientation to international relations that fails to recognise civil society as a distinctly modern phenomenon associated with the rise of European capitalism, or, if it does recognise this, continues to apply a historically and geographically specific concept universally. This results in the naturalisation of an idealised conception of state–society relations based on the European experience. It also raises the question of how liberal scholars understand global civil society to operate in non-European and postcolonial contexts, and how NGOs understand global civil society to operate in the regions and countries in which they work. A key effect of both the global civil society literature and NGO practice is to shore up relations of hierarchy between North and South as they facilitate intervention in the South by a network of state and non-state actors predominantly from the North. The conceptual critique set out here lays the ground for the empirical analysis of NGO activity that follows in the rest of the book. Despite their (self-)image, the activity of NGOs on the arms trade is often illustrative of these trends.

Global civil society as a non-state, non-market sphere

Most contemporary accounts of global civil society define their object of study as a realm distinct from both the state and the market. It is referred to variously as a ‘“third system” of agents, namely, privately organised citizens as distinguished from government or profit-seeking actors’ (Price 2003, 580), a ‘third force’ that ‘includes only groups that are not governments or profit-seeking enterprises’ (Florini and Simmons 2000, 7, italics in original), or the organised expression of the public sphere, which resides between state and society (Castells 2008, 78-9). It is thus located ‘between’ the economy and the state (e.g. Anheier et al. 2001, 17; Cohen and Arato 1992, ix).

Following on from this definition, the main focus is on actors such as non-profit groups, charities, social forums and movements, and informal associations; a key role is played by NGOs (Castells 2008, 83-6; Florini and Simmons 2000, 13; Kaldor 2003a, 13; Lipschutz 1992, 390; Scholte 2004, 214-15; Shaw 1994, 650). While there is considerable internal diversity within a broadly liberal approach (from the cosmopolitanism of Mary Kaldor and associated cosmopolitan democracy theorists, to the global governance approach of Jan Aart Scholte, to the constructivism of Richard Price and others working on issues around norms in international relations), there is a dominant ‘distinctive liberal theoretical statement’ that ‘privileges the role of agency, namely transnational civil society activists’, thus challenging other theoretical approaches that privilege other agents, or structures (Price 2003, 601).

In the standard historical tracing of the concept of civil society, scholars often cite the differentiation of civil society from the state as one of the key markers in the development of the concept (e.g. Anheier et al. 2001, 13; Shaw 1994, 647). As Lipschutz puts it, whilst Locke and Marx share the conventional definition of civil society as existing ‘in some twilight zone between state and markets, engaging in activities that constitute and reproduce the fabric of everyday social life’, they deploy it ‘to differing conclusions’ (2005, 758). However, while this difference is initially recognised, there is a slippage in subsequent usage of the concept of civil society in liberal accounts, with the separation between the state, market and civil society being naturalised. That is, scholars often forget that the differentiation of civil society from the state and market is purely methodological, so as to allow ‘a serious thematisation of the generation of consent through cultural and social hegemony as an independent and, at times, decisive variable in the reproduction of the existing system’ (Cohen and Arato 1992, 143; see also Robinson 1996, 352-4). There is a tendency in the liberal literature for this methodological separation to be taken as a substantive separation, with the effect that the structural constraints on actors such as NGOs are occluded.

In contrast, Marxist accounts of civil society emphasise that the modern separation of public from private, state from market, is purely formal. This means that civil society contains the market and is riven by class inequalities (e.g. Colas 2002). In order to participate in the public realm of the state as citizens, people have to abstract from their real lived selves. The state, or political life, in which differences between individuals are seen merely as social differences with no political significance, rests on the inequalities of civil society (Marx 1975, 211-41). Contemporary Marxist scholars such as Ellen Meiksins Wood argue that any adequate account of civil society must expose ‘the relations of exploitation and domination which irreducibly constitute civil society’ because Gramsci’s concept of civil society ‘was unambiguously intended as a weapon against capitalism, not an accommodation to it’ (Wood 1990, 63, 74, emphasis in original; also Colas 2002, ch. 2). Marxist accounts of NGO activity often emphasise its role in undermining emancipatory struggle in the South and reproducing imperial relationships through a failure to tackle structural causes of poverty (e.g. Hearn 2001, 2007; Manji and O’Coill 2002; Wallace 2003).

While there is sometimes a tendency to overdetermine this feature of civil society in an instrumentalist or functionalist manner (e.g. Petras 1999), the key lesson is neatly articulated by Colas, who argues that the predominantly consensual approach taken by international NGOs ‘is not simply a matter of political choice or preference on the part of civil society agents, but rather a structural property of the current relation between global civil society and global governance’ (2002, 156). That is, there is a historically grounded structural bent to NGOs’ political orientation, regardless of the intentions of those individuals working within them. This is part of the ambiguity of civil society: there is a disjuncture between NGO staffers’ intentions and effects, between civil society’s role in the propagation of hegemonic understandings and practices, and its potential role for resistance. While the structuring conditions of capitalist civil society shape and discipline the agency of actors such as NGOs, the precise dynamics in any given situation are a matter for empirical analysis.

The Marxist emphasis on the formal separation of the state from civil society and the historical specificity of its emergence can be productively read alongside postcolonial approaches. Civil society emerged as a geographically and temporally specific phenomenon in relation to the emergence of capitalism. Its application across space and time as a potentially universal emancipatory category is therefore problematic. As Chatterjee argues, the history of state–civil society relations ‘is intricately tied to the history of capital’, meaning that ‘the concepts of the individual and the nation-state both become embedded in a new grand narrative: the narrative of capital’ (1990, 123, 128). It is the ‘moment of capital… global in its territorial reach and universal in its conceptual domain’, that turns ‘the provincial thought of Europe to universal philosophy, the parochial history of Europe to universal history’ (Chatterjee 1990, 129).

Taking seriously the history lesson that the concept of civil society emerges with European modernity, in relation to a particular form of socio-economic and political community, means that the universal application of the concept of civil society is problematic. Thus, the common questions of why civil society is weak, fractured, absent or corrupted in the South assume that a particular historical experience is universally replicable; applying it to the ‘global’ level is an attempt to universalise a concept that is grounded in a specific historical context. This is not to deny that the concept has gained a foothold in the South and may be subject to reappropriation and reworking. Rather, the task of a postcolonial critique is to reveal the parochial nature of Europe, to disturb its self-image as (potentially) universal and to recall the centrality of capitalism to the emergence of civil society and its relations with the modern state.

Modern civil society is based on capitalist economic and social relations, which means that it exists ‘not merely in opposition to the state but in relation to a certain form of state’, namely one with ‘effective rule based on representative institutions, supporting and supported by a system of rights’ (Blaney and Pasha 1993, 6–7) in which the state holds a monopoly on legitimate violence. Analytically, the concept of civil society, like other concepts associated with modernity, ‘is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe’ (Chakrabarty 2000, 4, emphasis in original). This raises the question of how the concept of civil society applies to the non-European world. Blaney and Pasha argue that there is a tendency for commentators to label ‘informal economic activity’ or ‘any organised opposition to the state’ as ‘an emerging “civil society” and the bellwether of a democratic transition’ (1993, 17). Similarly, Garland refers to the practice of ‘looking for non-Western analogues to civil society’ that appear to be ‘the only viable option for a progressive politics’; this has the effect of naturalising the liberal origins of the concept (1999, 74, emphasis in original). She argues that NGOs ‘appear to be almost natural institutional embodiments of the liberal conception’ of global civil society, despite it being ‘an ideologically charged ideal’ (Garland 1999, 73). A postcolonial critique that highlights the particularity of the concept of civil society raises questions about scholars’ and NGOs’ understandings of the relations between state, market and civil society in the South.

A critical stance towards mainstream conceptions of civil society as a sphere substantively separate from the state and market opens up space for analysing NGOs and the arms trade in a different light. Understanding the separation of civil society (which includes the market) from the state to be formal rather than substantive requires us to investigate empirically the relations between the state, arms capital and NGOs. As discussed in Chapter Three, rather than the three spheres (state, market, civil society) that would feature in a liberal account, it is more fruitful to think of two networks of actors, one comprising elements of the state and capital, the other consisting of other elements of the state allied to NGOs. This gives us a more nuanced appreciation of the social forces that NGOs can both draw on and need to challenge. It also helps us understand the consensual orientation of most of the NGO world as a structural property of the sector, rather than simply a strategic choice. While NGO staffers are often highly politicised and critical individuals, and as organisations NGOs exercise agency when designing and implementing campaigns, their choice of issue, target and mode of intervention is shaped by the capitalist social relations of which they are a part. Further, the critique made here opens up space for the argument made in chapters Five and Six, in that the different historical experience of state formation and capitalist globalisation in the South has led to social relations of coercion and resistance that do not match up to expectations based on the European experience. This encourages us to investigate the role of civil society activity in the South, and the relations between Northern and Southern actors.

Global civil society as the locus of progressive values

As agents of global civil society, NGOs claim to pursue progressive social change and are widely heralded as agents of a progressive politics, motivated by shared values such as altruism and a commitment to human rights, development and other common goods (e.g. Etzioni 2004; Florini and Simmons 2000, 7; Kaldor 2003a, 86; Lipschutz 1992). A caveat is often deployed to the effect that, when considered analytically, politically distasteful groups also count as global civil society, such that ‘neo-Nazi hate groups…are just as much transnational civil society networks as are the human rights coalitions’, for example (Florini and Simmons 2000, 231). However, most analyses of global civil society activism focus on its progressive variants. There is thus a broad normative impetus to this literature. This is problematic for at least two reasons: first, that civil society is structurally more ambiguous than we might like to think; and second, that ignoring ‘uncivil’ actors weakens our understanding of global civil society’s progressive potential.

Mainstream accounts of global civil society tend to sideline the ambiguity of the concept and its role in buttressing the status quo as well as potentially supporting social transformation. Civil society has contradictions built into it: it can serve to naturalise and further entrench socially dominant forces but it can also (and perhaps simultaneously, depending on the concrete historical conditions) be the breeding ground for counter-hegemonic resistance and a new social order. In a Gramscian account of hegemony and counter-hegemony, the former...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 • Conceptualising Global Civil Society
• 2 • What’s the Problem? NGOs and the Arms Trade
• 3 • NGO Strategies and the Disciplining of Global Civil Society
• 4 • Arming the North: Transatlantic and European Military Production and Trade
• 5 • Disciplining the South: Development and Human Rights Concerns in the Arms Trade
• 6 • Disarming the South: Small Arms and Conflict
• 7 • NGOs, Global Civil Society and the World Military Order
• Bibliography
• Index