NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects.

• Author: Baykan, Baris Gencer
• Position: Book review

NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects

Edited by Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor

London & NewYork: Zed Books, 2013, 245 pages, 65.00 [pounds sterling], ISBN: 9781780322582.

NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are proliferating dramatically in number (3.3 million in India, 1.5 million in the US), and they are present in virtually in every country in the world. They are involved in diverse issues, and their increasing impact on national and international politics has generated a vast literature on NGOs.

Based on previous work by the co-editors, NGOization: Complicity, Contradiction and Prospects takes a highly critical stance toward the "professionalization of dissent," which is how they define the term, NGOization: "Professionalization, depoliticization and demobilization of movements for social and environmental change." (p. 1) The books main argument is that the process of NGOization frequently undermines local and international movements for social change and environmental justice and/ or oppositional anti-colonial and anti-capitalist politics, in complicity with state and private sector interests.

The book's chapters discuss a wide range of NGOs operating in developing and transition countries such as South Africa, Kyrgyzstan, India, Canada, Serbia and the Philippines and also in different communities, including Indigenous People, fishing communities, feminists, farmers, and the urban poor. There is a common thread to all this. NGOs are the favored institutional form of addressing social problems, be it ecological devastation, domestic violence or food security. The contributors explore whether or not NGOs open up political space or represent specific forms of regulation and containment in the interest of capitalist colonization. This exploration goes hand in hand with the claim that the NGOization obstructs the processes of authentic democratization. NGOs are depicted as the single biggest obstacle to the articulation of the struggles of radical politics. Some chapters also demonstrate how social movements and political struggles respond to these kind of threats and their impact.

Throughout the book, the fragmentation of struggles is depicted as a systematic mission of NGOs, which hinders strategies of action against global capitalism and colonialism. Choudry raised the issue of compartmentalization, occurring around reducing systems to issues: agriculture, services, the environment, human rights, regional and...