Theorizing NGOs

Victoria Bernal is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Nation as Network: Diaspora, Cyberspace, and Citizenship and Cultivating Workers: Peasants and Capitalism in a Sudanese Village.

Theorizing NGOs examines how the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has transformed the conditions of women's lives and of feminist organizing. Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal suggest that we can understand the proliferation of NGOs through a focus on the NGO as a unified form despite the enormous variation and diversity contained within that form. Theorizing NGOs brings together cutting-edge feminist research on NGOs from various perspectives and disciplines. Contributors locate NGOs within local and transnational configurations of power, interrogate the relationships of nongovernmental organizations to states and to privatization, and map the complex, ambiguous, and ultimately unstable synergies between feminisms and NGOs. While some of the contributors draw on personal experience with NGOs, others employ regional or national perspectives. Spanning a broad range of issues with which NGOs are engaged, from microcredit and domestic violence to democratization, this groundbreaking collection shows that NGOs are, themselves, fields of gendered struggles over power, resources, and status.Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Victoria Bernal, LeeRay M. Costa, Inderpal Grewal, Laura Grünberg, Elissa Helms, Julie Hemment, Saida Hod¿ic, Lamia Karim, Sabine Lang, Lauren Leve, Kathleen O'Reilly, Aradhana Sharma

Acknowledgments viiIntroduction. The NGO Form: Feminist Struggles, States, and Neoliberalism / Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal 1Part I. NGOs Beyond Success or Failure 191. The Movementization of NGOs? Women's Organizing in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina / Elissa Helms 212. Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepal: Rethinking Subaltern Consciousness and Women's Empowerment / Lauren Leve 503. The State and Women's Empowerment in India Paradoxes and Politics / Aradhana Sharma 93Part II. Postcolonial Neoliberalisms and the NGO Form 1154. Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belonging: Defining Violence against Women in Russia / Julie Hemment 1195. Resolving a Gendered Paradox: Women's Participation and the NGO Boom in North India / Kathleen O'Reilly 1436. Power and Difference in Thai Women's NGO Activism / LeeRay M. Costa 1667. Demystifying Microcredit: The Grameen Bank, NGOs, and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh / Lamia Karim 193Part III. Feminist Social Movements and NGOs 2198. Feminist Bastards: Toward a Posthumanist Critique of NGOization / Saida Hodzic 2219. Lived Feminism(s) in Postcommunist Romania / Laura Grünberg 24810. Women's Advocacy Networks: The European Union, Women's NGOs, and the Velvet Triangle / Sabine Lange 26611. Beyond NGOization? Relrections from Latin America / Sonia E. Alvarez 285Conclusion. Feminisms and the NGO Form / Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal 301Bibliography 311Contributors 353Index 357