Paper short abstract:

The paper represents a preliminary discussion of my Ph.D. project's core themes, including a critique of overly essentialistic readings of individual trajectories between activism and NGO work and an exploration of individual strategies to (re)negotiate agency within organisational structures.

Paper long abstract:

The debate on NGOisation has extensively explored the individual trajectories between activism and professionalisation of so-called "local actors" in the Global South, but part of such scholarship restitutes a unidimensional, overly linear picture of their pathways, proposing simplistic or deterministic explanations of their behaviour and aspirations (i.e., McMahon, 2017; Gready & Robins, 2017; Ali, 2018; Abu-Assab, Nasser-Eddin, and Seghaier, 2020).

In this project, I argue that "local actors" coming from activism are often aware of the contradictions implicit in their trajectories, that they develop strategies to navigate the challenges and opportunities created by NGOisation, and that such strategies are deployed in the attempt to (re)negotiate agency amidst several context-specific pressures and organisational constraints. My analysis intends to contest what I believe to be a frequent recur by scholars to morally invested categories in framing the behaviour of activist-workers, and the role of such categories in reproducing biases around the moral exceptionalism of the humanitarian.

The research questions guiding my analysis are how (and why) some activist-workers develop and deploy strategies to (re)negotiate agency and (re)politicise NGO work practices, and how they signify such efforts in relation to their pathways between activism and NGO work.

The research methodology involves an analysis of individual trajectories as case studies. Specifically, I focus on the trajectories of activist-workers from the SWANA region operating in the transnational space (and particularly in the diaspora) because I consider their case(s) to offer a privileged standpoint to reflect on the limitations of the debate on "localisation" and "professionalisation".