Nongovernmental Politics (review)

Nongovernmental Politics, unlike the tiny and pointed book by David Armitage that I have reviewed separately, is a huge and intellectually sprawling volume, physically large enough to serve as a doorstop or even to be used in self-defense against pointed weapons. The theme, in the editor Michel Feher’s words, is “the governed in politics” and is drawn from Michel Foucault’s 1990 essay “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” which asks what it means “to be governed thusly” (“d’être gouverne comme cela”). The constraints on nongovernmental organizations, according to Feher, are “to be involved in politics without aspiring to govern, be governed by the best leaders or abolish the institutions of government.” He argues that the NGO movement was both stimulated and shaped by two trends that emerged in the 1970s: the increasing demand for governmental accountability and the decreasing willingness of government to fund social programs and economic development (Thacherism/Reaganism). NGOs emerged to contest both of these trends, and the nongovernmental world is still conflicted by their opposing goals. The picture is also, and increasingly, complicated by the emergence of “ambitious and often wealthy” religious NGOs—and by the new imperatives of post-9/11 international politics, which have “at least temporarily modified the conditions under which nongovernmental activism is exercised.”

The authors of the forty-seven contributions here are diverse—a few are university scholars, a good many are activists, some are staff to NGOs and international agencies, several are graduate students. They are predominantly European, with a strong French inflection (doubtless due to Feher’s influence). They reflect as well as anything I have read the range of ambitions and anxieties in the growing NGO movement, although of course they are all committed to some version of the notion that we must find new modes of responding to the inadequacies of formal politics through other means. The term “nongovernmental politics” sounds like an oxymoron, but this interesting volume shows why it is not.