*Topicality/Definitions Democracy Promotion Includes Military Intervention
This Renders Aff Solvency Claims Suspect
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- Civil Society Assistance Fails: Term Too Broad to be Useful
This Renders Aff Solvency Claims SuspectAFFIRMATIVE SOLVENCY EVIDENCE FOR INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SOCIETY AID IGNORES THE NEGATIVE EFFECT OF EXTERNAL DONORS AND MISEVALUATES EMPIRICAL FAILURES Benoit Challand, Research Fellow-European Institute in Florence, 2009, Palestinian Civil Society: foreign donors and the power to promote and exclude, p. 9-10 The second reason for the insistence on culture stems from more general questions that arose in the literature over the last decade and a half. Civil society promotion and the “aid industry” have come under close scrutiny in recent years, unfortunately not always for the best. Despite millions of dollars poured into civil society promotion and NGO support in particular, little success has been noted in the difficult “transitions,” in particular in post-communist, south-eastern European states. This region is another example of the problematic international aid towards civil society promotion. Some scholars have also there tried to explain the failure of south-eastern European states to democratize in terms of the region’s “backwardness,” of its “primordialist” values or of a “Balkanist” substratum that privileges a stronger role of families over individual secular emancipation. In this line of presentation as well, culture comes to the rescue to explain this resistance to a “Western model,” but with the problematic view that it is seen as a reified explaining factor. Again this “western model” of civil society is presented as the panacea to all ills, but is never really questioned. A similar problematique was also spotted in a Muslim majority post-Soviet region, that of Central Asia, where Roy highlighted the danger of “artificially imposing values and institutions from a western model that might be both less universal and less democratic than it claims.” But actually in most of these cases, scholarly research tends to overlook “here” the potentially negative (or problematic) role played by international donors, to privilege models of explanation based on some lack, fallacies or shortcoming “there.” Instead, there has been an over-celebration in the last decade of the benefits of constructivsm and therefore a tendency to magnify only positive elements. Unfortunately, such literature often suffers from a lack of internal knowledge of the societies under which international aid operates. Hence the repeated and advocated necessity to operate a critical study of both recipient NGOs and donors, as well as a double critical study of civil society in general and of civil society in the local context of Palestine and of the feeding loop of production of social science about the matter. CIVIL SOCIETY ASSISTANCE BASED ON INACCURATE AND ROMANTICIZED ASSUMPTIONS OF CSOs Massimo Tommasoli, UN Observer for IDEA, 2010, Engaging Civil Society: Emerging Trends in Democratic Governance, eds. G. Cheema & V. Popovski, p. 134-5 In recent years various critiques of civil society assistance programs have developed around an analysis of donor approaches. Carothers (1999:88), describes the relative weight of work on civil society within the so-called “democracy template,” based on an analysis of US-funded democracy promotion programs. The template is a menu of options for democracy promoters, ranging from support for electoral processes to building state institutions and strengthening CSOs. Civil society, in particular, is seen as the demand side of democracy-building. Influenced to some extent by the romantic connotations of civil society in some new-de Tocquevillean literature, this vision of CSOs is criticized by Carothers and others. A tendency towards top-down approaches in the replication of civil society assistance programs, irrespective of the context of intervention, is coupled with biased assumptions. Some typical donor assumptions wrongly equate Westernized advocacy NGOs with civil society at large, whereas in many cases the ability of such organizations to represent citizens’ views (with the notable exception of women’s rights organizations) is weak. Often donors assume the “mirage of apolitical engagement,” whereas NGOs (hence also the donor programs that support them) are often involved in partisan politics and political struggles (Ottaway and Carothers, 2000).
Benoit Challand, Research Fellow-European Institute in Florence, 2009, Palestinian Civil Society: foreign donors and the power to promote and exclude, p. 33 Beyond the particular approach of the World Bank and its limited view on civil society, development studies have nevertheless managed to offer some more positive views on the question of civil society. There is a growing concern that the way of approaching civil society and NGO assistance is not satisfactory. In particular some authors have critically assessed how grand schemes of “development” promoted by large financial development institutions contribute to a depoliticization within certain domestic contexts. Other researchers have produced alarming reports on how the hegemonic discourse on civil society can have negative effects when taking a step back from the transnational context in which this discourse is defined. Brand and Chatelard in Jordan (both anthropologists stressing now NGOs are rather GINGOs, governmental NGOs), are all examples of this growing literature, that has a rather anthropological grounding. Mendelson is another case in point, but with a wider international politics perspective. Some scholars dealing with democratization and transition studies are indeed also critical of some simple interpretation and straightforward positive views on civil society, to name just a few.
Chantal Mouffe, Political Theory Professor-University of Westminster, 2011, Globality, Democracy and Civil Society, eds. T. Carver & J. Bartelson, p. 95 I personally do not find the notion of “civil society” very useful, and I tend not to use it in my work. The problem with such a notion is that it is much too elusive. It has so many different and conflicting meanings that it has become almost completely indeterminate. First, it is used in very different ways in different geographical and cultural contexts, for instance in advanced Western societies, in ex-Eastern Europe and in the non-Western world. Second, in the West itself, it is used to refer to such different things that sometimes it is very difficult even to begin a fruitful discussion. One usually remains in the first stage which consists in trying to find basic agreement on the definition of what one is going to talk about. BROAD CONCEPTION OF CIVIL SOCIETY MAKES IT UNCLEAR IF ASSISTANCE WILL STRENGTHEN DEMOCRACY Goran Hyden, Political Science Professor-University of Florida, 2010, Engaging Civil Society: Emerging Trends in Democratic Governance, eds. G. Cheema & V. Popovski, p. 252-3 The tendency for civil society to be treated as an “arena” without a specified content is the third problem. In this interpretation, civil society becomes pretty much everything, and therefore nothing. Any organized activities between the family and the state becomes part of civil society, regardless of purpose or objective. What matters to observers and aid administrators alike is the number of organizations, and not their normative orientation. This approach disconnects civil society from democracy or democratization, in this sense that civil society becomes a “value-neutral” concept. It makes no difference if civil society is democratic or authoritarian. Such a definition is fine as long as it is accepted that the focus must then be on associational life as a separate variable. It becomes mandatory to find out what individual associations are doing, and how they do it. This is rarely done in analyses of civil society. Instead, civil society is automatically taken to be a “positive” or “good” thing that must be maximized, regardless of associational content. “CIVIL SOCIETY” LITERATURE OVERLY SIMPLISTIC Fawwaz Traboulsi, Political Science Professor-Lebanese American University, 2009, Publics, Politics and Participation: locating the public sphere in the middle east and north Africa, ed. S. Shami, p. 47 Human rights and civil society occupy the political stage as the same treatment mentioned above is reserved for the state/civil society dichotomy. Rather than being a welcome complement and a corrective to the rich and complex body of knowledge on state/society relations developed by the social sciences over the long decades, the famous “couplet” is turning out to be a factor of theoretical impoverishment due to its imposition as a simplistic and reductionist formula over all the theoretical fields in question. “CIVIL SOCIETY” IS A VERY BROAD TERM WITH NO CONSENSUS ON ITS LIMITS Mathijs van Leeuwen, Professor Radboud University-Netherlands, 2009, Partners in Peace: discourses and practices of civil-society peacebuilding, p. 28 In the 1990s, the meaning of civil society broadened significantly. Kaldor distinguishes three different understandings that developed. Firstly, the term “civil society” was adopted all over the world by the so-called “new social movements.” The language of civil society suited their brand of non-party politics. In a similar way, the term civil society was adopted by transnational activists coming together on issues such as human rights, landmines, HIV/AIDS, that increasingly started imagining a “global civil society.” Secondly, an interest in civil society developed as part of the promotion of the liberal democratic “good governance” agenda. Multilateral donors and governments became convinced of the positive contribution of civil society to facilitating market reform and the introduction of parliamentary democracy. In this, they primarily worked with NGOs rather than with social movements. As a result, to such international actors the term civil society basically came to stand for “NGO”, both international and local. This went along with a formidable growth of the NGO sector. The end of the Cold War brought about a new freedom for international NGOs to operate, while democratization in many developing countries allowed new local NGOs to come up. A trend towards more bilateral grant-making at the expense of multilateral funding, and a doubling in funding for humanitarian assistance stimulated the formation of NGOs. Thirdly, the term civil society came to refer to an assortment of other—often non-western—forms of organization representing a check on state power, including religious and ethnic movements, or local traditional institutions. Consequently, civil society now refers to the entire spectrum of associational life. The only things that are definitely not civil society are the formal structures of government. Nonetheless, the boundaries of the concept remain subject to discussion, for example, whether the term should exclude political parties or labor unions, or even Northern NGOs, as many of the latter heavily depend on state financing. Further, the self ascribed roles in peacebuilding of those organizations which are called civil society are very different, as I will demonstrate in this chapter. Though this book is interested primarily in discourses on the roles of local civil society in peacebuilding, those discourses cannot be properly understood without taking into account how international NGOs have included peacebuilding in their mandates and policy strategies. “CIVIL SOCIETY” IS A CONTESTED CONCEPT Benoit Challand, Research Fellow-European Institute in Florence, 2009, Palestinian Civil Society: foreign donors and the power to promote and exclude, p. 129 Civil society is not a fixed and clearly defined concept, neither in its Euro-Atlantic cradle, nor amongst AME intellectuals. It is a disputed concept that has been and is constantly re-interpreted in a variety of ways but with an increasingly managerial approach at the expense of the diversity of civil societies existing in the OPT. Let us now look more into detail how, when and by whom the concept of “civil society” haws been ushered in, interpreted, and re-adapted to the arena of two sectors of Palestinian NGOs, namely that of health and advocacy NGOs. Directory: assets assets -> Northern territory of australia assets -> Number: caveat in the [Will/Will and Codicil/Estate of] assets -> Invitation for Bid Calact/mbta for Standard Floor and Low Floor Rural Duty Vehicles ifb no. 12-03 November 14, 2012 assets -> 12 Step Retreats For Everyone in Twelve Step Recovery Ratner Fellowship assets -> 12 Step Retreats For Everyone in Twelve Step Recovery Ratner Fellowship assets -> Sigaccess annual Report assets -> Central Government is expected to ask the seventh pay commission to consider merging 50% dearness allowance assets -> List of accessible executive records assets -> Emergency telephone numbers Call toll-free from anywhere in France Download 2.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
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