lion
Joined: 03 Jan 2005
Posts: 334
Location: beside himself
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| Posted: Thu 08.9.05 2:11 Post subject: My book of the month: Arundhati Roy, |
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"The ordinary person's guide to empire"
The following shamelessly copied and cut:
Quote:
The hazards of the NGO-ization of resistance...
Consider the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context.
The funded NGO boom began in the late 1980s and 1990s. It coincided with the opening of markets to neo-liberalism. At the time, the Indian state, in keeping with the requirements of structural adjustment, was withdrawing funding from rural development, agriculture, energy, transport, and public health.
As the state abdicated its traditional role, NGOs moved in to work in these very areas. The difference, of course, is that the funds available to them are a minuscule fraction of the actual cut in public spending.
Why should agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned missionary zeal? Guilt? It's a little more than that. NGOs give the impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state.
Their real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between the sarkar (rulers) and the public. Between Empire and its subjects. They have become the arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators.
In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among. The greater the devastation caused by neo-liberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs.
In order to make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the governments of the countries they work in will allow them to function, NGOs have to present their work in a shallow framework more or less shorn of a political or historical context. They're the secular missionaries of the modern world.
The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.
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