Building Counter-Power From the Ground Up: Contesting NGOization Through Social Movement Learning and Knowledge Production

• In Event: Roundtable Session 90
  In Roundtable Session: Learning, Knowledge Production, and Research in Social Movement/Civil Society Milieux

Abstract

Social movement and non-governmental organization (NGO) networks are significant sites of informal and non-formal learning: social activists actively produce knowledge and critical conceptual resources. This paper argues that scholarly analyses of social movements and NGOs owe a debt to collective forms of critical knowledge production, learning and debates emerging from within social movements and activist networks committed to progressive social change. Focussing primarily on ‘anti-globalization’/’global justice’ activism, I argue that movements need to create counter-power and radical alternatives to the prevailing world order by building upon the critical intellectual/conceptual resources generated in the course of learning and knowledge production in social movement activism.

A range of critiques of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and “NGOization” have been advanced by feminist, Marxist, and other critical scholars in literature on struggles for social justice. These include Alvarez’s (1998, 2009) reflections on the “Latin American feminist NGO boom”, Jad’s critical work on the NGOization of the women’s movement and other parts of Palestinian civil society (2004), Kamat’s work on the impacts of NGOization on political space and development in India and internationally (2002, 2004), and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence’s (2007) recent analysis of the “non-profit industrial complex” in the Americas and beyond. Petras and Veltmeyer (2001, 2005) contend that the professionalization of NGOs and their depoliticization works well for neoliberal regimes, keeping existing power structures intact while ostensibly promoting a promise of change and development through development projects or forms of advocacy and education which do not seriously challenge the status quo.

The paper focuses on NGO/social movement activist networks opposing the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum during the 1990s, and more recent activism against bilateral free trade and investment agreements in the Asia-Pacific region. Identifying these milieux as significant sites of social movement learning and knowledge production, the paper identifies and questions hegemonic NGO practices, arguing that hierarchies of power and knowledge within ‘alternative’ milieus often reproduce, rather than challenge dominant practices and power relations, and serve elite interests rather than those of constituencies which these organizations claim to represent. In doing so, it draws from insights from critical adult education (Allman, 1999; Foley, 1999, Novelli, 2010), institutional ethnography and political activist ethnography (D. Smith, 1987; Kinsman, 2006; G. Smith 2006) and the author’s involvement in these activist networks (Choudry, 2009; Choudry and Kapoor 2010). Further, the paper contends that academic work on NGOs, NGOization and social movements requires some level of political investment on our part as scholars, must critically engage with the intellectual work taking place within these social action settings, and, following Flacks (2004) and Bevington and Dixon’s (2005) call for movement-relevant theory, should produce research which is useful and accountable to movements for social change.

Author

• Aziz Choudry, McGill University