Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

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

Paper long abstract

NGOs are globally witnessing a decline in international support and legitimacy which was recently accelerated by the cuts to international aid and cooperation budgets by traditional donor countries. The crisis is further exposing the contradictions, limitations, and power imbalances within the global nonprofit architecture, which NGOisation theorists have long been denouncing.

In hybrid regimes, the crisis impacts not solely civil society's capacity to provide essential services and relief. It also further undermines the legitimacy of CSOs/NGOs in political landscapes where civil society is severely constrained or criminalised, with negative consequences on associational life.

In hybrid and authoritarian regimes of the SWANA region, where the NGO sector has grown exponentially for decades despite consolidated patterns of civic sphere repression, NGOs have provided crucial sites of participation while civic engagement remained severely restricted.

Particularly in the aftermath of 2011 revolutions, many activists turned to NGOs as abeyance structures, a function which NGOs were long able to perform thanks to the international legitimacy enjoyed by the nonprofit sector.

While the current NGO crisis threatens the very existence of their already precarious work, these activist-workers’ efforts at navigating shifting patterns in international aid raise crucial questions around neutrality and local agency in global NGO politics.

Drawing on interviews with activist-workers from Egypt and Syria, this paper explores the conditions under which NGOs can function as abeyance structures in hybrid regimes, arguing that their effectiveness is contingent upon navigating the complex landscape of international aid and local patterns of co-optation and repression of associational life.