NGOs: Global Change Agents or Trojan Horses for Western Hegemony?

2022

The paper examines the status and influence of NGOs on international relations. It analyses major dilemmas regarding the position of NGOs. It examines their historical development, consultative status within the United Nations and possibilities of formal interaction with the UN Security Council. NGOs have had a noticeable impact on the development of international law, particularly in the areas of human rights and environmental law. They have influenced resolutions of the UN Security Council regarding the rights of women and the rights of children during conflicts. Lately, their growing influence has been characterized as problematic by some states. NGOs have been considered non-state actors. The author concludes that NGOs have developed some characteristics of legal subjectivity. The state is gradually losing its exclusivity in international relations. Without NGOs, international law and international politics would not be the same. Having in mind their growing role and influence, the author concludes that NGOs might be considered actors in the future of international relations.

The American Historical Review, 2024

Nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, have been central to the creation of publics, counterpublics, and their globalization. NGOs and the people who work within them have raised awareness about climate change and human rights, protested against systemic racism and sexual violence, provided services such as medical care and legal aid to migrants, and promoted pleasurable hobbies (for example, the Nigeria Flying Disc Sport Association). NGOs serve as a unique case study into the processes through which publics have institutionalized, including but not only through legal registration. An analysis of NGOs also points to potentials and limits in the concept of “globalizing publics.” Problematizing these limitations has application beyond the particular scope of non-governmental organizations. Analyzing NGOs as agents of global (counter)public-making focuses our attention on three points. First, it emphasizes limitations and contradictions in how publics have globalized. This, in turn, disrupts overly rosy depictions of globalization as always smooth, always integrated, and always characterized by connections. Second, a focus on NGOs emphasizes the roles of money and legalities in determining which publics have been able to institutionalize and how. Finally, NGOs draw our attention to the (neo)liberal fantasies and denunciations embedded in some scholarship on NGOs and global publics. In all three cases, NGOs reinforce the continued, if contradictory, role of nation-states in historical and contemporary processes of global public-making. They show that the relationships between publics, globality, and states have been messier than the stock narratives of liberal romanticism or neoliberal doom would have us believe: respectively, NGOs as civil society agents who exist to curb abuses of power from autocratic states in a Cold War and post–Cold War world, or NGOs as pawns of neoliberal capitalism or imperialism, undermining welfare states and national autonomy.

This Critical Reflection Note analyses four paradoxes the authors have identified in their work as organisational learning and change facilitators in Latin America. These paradoxes are a recurrent issue in many of the social change organisations working in human rights and deepening of democracy in the region. The authors find necessary to deal explicitly with the contradictory behaviour of a large number of local NGOs; claiming that not doing so may hinder or severely affect their real contribution to social change in the region. Based on this analysis, the document ends with some critical action-reflection questions directed to International NGO supporting local organisations. These questions are an invitation to develop new criteria for supporting local NGOs, since many of their contradictory behaviours are systematically reproduced with a little help from their international friends.

International nongovernmental organizations (NGOs or INGOs) are studied from a wide range of academic disciplinary perspectives, and the perspectives and literature are diverse and growing rapidly. This article approaches the topic from a political science perspective and, in particular, from the perspective of the international relations field in political science. It also includes a range of sources from helpful instructional readings to more sophisticated works that have been influential among scholars in the field. The list incorporates both some of the newest work of theoretical and empirical importance and older works that have been important to the development of this topic of study. The scholars who study international NGOs use a variety of conceptual categories for their analysis. Hence, anyone searching for literature on this topic will find fruitful results by searching for a number of terms, including, for example: “transnational civil society,” “transnational advocacy networks,” “transnational social movements,” and “global civil society.” NGOs are also variously called “civil society organizations,” “social movement organizations,” or “nonprofit organizations.” In European literature they are often discussed as “interest groups.”