Paper short abstract

The global NGOs crisis is jeopardising civil society infrastructures as we know it, undermining its capacity to operate and exposing the sector's limitations. Activists in authoritarian regimes navigate the crisis by trying to reimagine nonprofit architectures centring local agency and agendas.

Paper long abstract

NGOs face a global decline in international support and legitimacy in consequence of the crisis of liberal democracy, which is further exposing the limitations of classic conceptualisations of civil society, previously observed in explorations of state-civil society relations in neoliberal-authoritarian regimes (Cavatorta, 2012; Ruiz de Elvira, 2024). Questions around the capacity of civil society to emerge and operate distinctly from the state in the context of declining international support are especially relevant in authoritarian regimes, such as Egypt and Syria, where civil society has emerged despite consolidated patterns of repression and co-optation, and NGOs have sometimes served as abeyance structures (Taylor, 1989) through local activists’ capacity to elicit support from the global nonprofit industry. As international support for the NGO model is fading, activists’ strategies for navigating the crisis interrogate the role of individual agency within global civil society economies.

Combining WPR analysis with interviews with Egyptian and Syrian activists, I explore the conditions under which NGOs in authoritarian regimes can function as abeyance structures, arguing that their effectiveness is contingent upon navigating the complex landscape of international cooperation politics and local patterns of civic sphere co-optation and repression.