Theorizing

NGOs
N e x t Wav e
New Directions in Women’s Studies
A series edited by
Inderpal Grewal,
Caren Kaplan, and
Robyn Wiegman
 Theorizing
NGOs
States, Feminisms,
and Neoliberalism

Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal, editors

Duke University Press Durham and London 2014
© 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Typeset in Warnock Pro type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-�in-�Publication Data

Theorizing NGOs: states, feminisms, and neoliberalism /
Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal, eds.
pages cm.—(Next wave)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-�0-�8223-�5551-�9 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-�0-�8223-�5565-�6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Non-�governmental organizations. 2. Civil society.
3. Women—Political activity—History. I. Bernal, Victoria.
II. Grewal, Inderpal. III. Series: Next wave.
jz4841.t44 2014
341.2–dc23 2013026388
Contents

vii Acknowledgments

1 Introduction
The ngo Form: Feminist Struggles, States, and Neoliberalism
Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal

19 PART Iâ•… NGOs Beyond Success or Failure

21 Chapter 1
The Movementization of ngos? Women’s Organizing in
Postwar Bosnia-�Herzegovina
Elissa Helms

50 Chapter 2
Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepal: Rethinking
Subaltern Consciousness and Women’s Empowerment
Lauren Leve

93 Chapter 3
The State and Women’s Empowerment in India: Paradoxes
and Politics
Aradhana Sharma

115 PART IIâ•… Postcolonial Neoliberalisms and the ngo Form

119 Chapter 4
Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belonging:
Defining Violence against Women in Russia
Julie Hemment
 143 Chapter 5
Resolving a Gendered Paradox: Women’s Participation and
the ngo Boom in North India
Kathleen O’Reilly

166 Chapter 6
Power and Difference in Thai Women’s ngo Activism
LeeRay M. Costa

193 Chapter 7
Demystifying Microcredit: The Grameen Bank, ngos,
and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh
Lamia Karim

219 PART IIIâ•… Feminist Social Movements and NGOs

221 Chapter 8
Feminist Bastards: Toward a Posthumanist Critique
of ngoization
Saida Hodžić

248 Chapter 9
Lived Feminism(s) in Postcommunist Romania
Laura Grünberg

266 Chapter 10
Women’s Advocacy Networks: The European Union,
Women’s ngos, and the Velvet Triangle
Sabine Lang

285 Chapter 11
Beyond ngoization? Reflections from Latin America
Sonia E. Alvarez

301 Conclusion
Feminisms and the ngo Form
Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal

311 Bibliography
353 Contributors
357 Index
Acknowledgments

When we began this project, we did not realize how long it would take
us to get from start to finish, from a collaborative interest in how non-
governmental organizations (ngos) were changing the nature of feminist
organizing globally to an anthology that ended up reflecting on an already
established new feminist landscape. In this process we benefited from the
work of those who are included in this collection, and that of other schol-
ars who contributed to our thinking on the topic. We read the work of,
spoke to, and participated in conferences with many excellent feminist
researchers who, along with us, have been thinking about the path that
feminism has taken over the last couple of decades. There is a community
of feminist scholars within the academy and outside it, and their writings
on ngos have changed the way we look at activism and feminism. Simul-
taneously they have enabled us to think about the state and civil society,
and thus about culture and politics in the twenty-�first century. This col-
lection is part of the ongoing conversation in that community.
This project has benefited from the support and participation of nu-
merous institutions, individuals, and groups. We would like to thank the
Rockefeller Foundation for funding our Team Project on “Democratizing
Women: ngos, Empowerment, and Marginalization in the 21st Century,”
at the Bellagio Center in Italy in August 2004. Our conversations there
with some superb participants—including Ambra Pirri, Surina Khan,
Lamia Karim, Barbara Einhorn, Sabine Lang, Adetoun Ilumoka, Amina
Jamal, and Mary John—raised important questions that are reflected in
this anthology. We are also grateful both to the Humanities Research In-
stitute of the University of California and its director, David Theo Gold-
berg, for supporting the Conference on Global Circuits of Feminism that
we organized at the University of California, Irvine (uci), in May 2004
and to the scholars who participated: Susan Coutin, Boatema Boateng,
Angelica DeAngelis, Pheng Cheah, Maureen Mahon, Teresa Caldeira, Lisa
Parks, Sabine Lang, Lamia Karim, and Denise Brennan. A grant we re-
ceived from uci’s Computer and Library Collaborative Research initia-
tive supported our collaborative research and enabled us to make further
progress on this project. We received valuable research assistance from
Caroline Melly at uci and from Sarah Haley and Tina Palivos at Yale Uni-
versity. We extend our deep thanks to all of the contributors to the vol-
ume, whose unflagging enthusiasm for the project encouraged us, and
whose patience and willingness to make changes up to the eleventh hour
were crucial to its success. Thanks also to Ken Wissoker and Jade Brooks
at Duke University Press, and several anonymous reviewers at the press for
their interest in our project and their valuable comments on early drafts.

Individually, Victoria would most like to thank Inderpal for a wonderful

collaboration. The high points of intellectual synergy were exhilarating,
and the inevitable obstacles and frustrations that are part of any project
were less daunting because we confronted them together. Our project was
in its own way a form of feminist collaboration that involved working
across disciplinary boundaries and areas of expertise, as well as across
the country, from California to Connecticut. I would like to thank the
Wenner-�Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Ful-
bright Foundation for supporting a year of fieldwork on ngos, women’s
political activism, and donors in Tanzania. Although that research is not
explicitly included here, it played an important part in shaping the con-
tours of this anthology. I also thank the Humanities Research Institute of
the University of California for supporting and hosting the quarter-�long
resident research group I convened in spring 2004 on “Global Circuits of
Feminism.” In that group Inderpal and I first began to explore our interests
in the ngo form and feminism. I wish to thank the past and present mem-
bers of the Women’s Studies Department at uci for the reading groups,
speakers, key word events, and many conversations that have sustained
and challenged me as a feminist scholar over the course of this project. I
also thank my colleagues in the Anthropology Department, and my stu-
dents, particularly Natalie Newton (now Dr. Newton) and Padma Govin-
dan for our critical discussions of gender and ngos in Vietnam and India.

viiiâ•… Acknowledgments
Inderpal would like to thank colleagues and staff at both uci, where this
project began and took shape, and Yale University, from where it finally
went to press. My thanks also go to Victoria for a collaboration that has
been invigorating, generative, and also part of a wonderful friendship. We
shared theories about the state, comparisons between ngos in Africa and
South Asia, ideas about diasporas, and debates about feminism—as well
as discussions about daughters and college admissions. Victoria and her
family became part of the wonderful years I spent at Irvine. She was also a
member of the Department of Anthropology, where I found a welcoming
second academic home, and where so many other colleagues (Bill Maurer,
Mei Zhang, Karen Leonard, Tom Boellstorff, and Susan Coutin), encour-
aged and supported our project. I am also grateful to the Women’s Studies
Department at Irvine, where my colleagues Laura Kang and Jennifer Terry
shared research, theories, and service duties with me to make this project
possible. Colleagues at campuses of the University of California and Cali-
fornia State University have nurtured and supported this project through
many years; Caren Kaplan and Minoo Moallem have wondered when the
anthology would be done. My thanks also to the Women’s Gender and
Sexuality Studies Program at Yale for its support. Yale’s Program on Non-
profit Organizations invited me to present my ngo research in India—
which, though unpublished, has contributed to the introduction in nu-
merous ways—and the provost’s office’s sabbatical leave enabled me to
complete my contributions to the anthology. Finally, I thank two organiza-
tions for teaching me about nonprofit organizations: the Asian Women’s
Shelter in San Francisco and Narika in Berkeley, where I learned about the
possibilities and the limits of states and ngos.

The editors and publishers would like to thank the following for permis-
sion to use copyrighted material:

Chapter 2: Lauren Leve, “Failed Development and Rural Revolution in

Nepal: Rethinking Subaltern Consciousness and Women’s Empower-
ment,” Anthropology Quarterly 80, no. 1 (2007): 121–72.

Chapter 3: Aradhana Sharma, “The State and Women’s Empowerment

in India: Paradoxes and Politics,” is reproduced by permission of the

Acknowledgmentsâ•…ix
 American Anthropological Association from “Crossbreeding Institu-
tions, Breeding Struggle: Women’s Empowerment, Neoliberal Govern-
mentality, and State (Re)Formation in India” in Cultural Anthropology
21, no. 1 (2006): 60–95. Not for sale or further reproduction.

Chapter 4: Julie Hemment, “Global Civil Society and the Local Costs
of Belonging: Defining Violence against Women in Russia,” Signs, 29,
no. 3 (2004): 815–40.

Chapter 5: Kathleen O’Reilly, “Resolving a Gendered Paradox: Women’s

Participation and the ngo Boom in North India,” Annals of the Asso-
ciation of American Geographers 97, no. 3 (2007): 613–34, reprinted by
permission of Taylor & Francis (http://www.tandfonline.com).

Chapter 7: Lamia Karim, “Demystifying Micro-Â�Credit: The Grameen

Bank, ngos, and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh,” Cultural Dynamics 20,
no. 1 (2008): 5–29, © 2008 sage Publications. Reprinted by permission
of sage.

Chapter 11: Sonia Alvarez, “Beyond ngoization? Reflections from

Latin America,” Development 52, no. 2 (2009): 175–84.

xâ•… Acknowledgments
Introduction Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal

The NGO Form

Feminist Struggles, States, and Neoliberalism

In 2012, as we write this introduction, nongovernmental organiza-

tions (ngos) have become normalized as key players in national
and global politics. These organizations are now well established
as an institutional form around the globe, especially in relation
to questions of women’s welfare and empowerment. The “ngo
boom,” as Sonia Alvarez (whose work is included here) calls it,
has been achieved (Alvarez 1999). By 2000 it was estimated that
ngos were disbursing between twelve and fifteen billion dollars
per year (Edwards and Fowler 2002). By 2010, in some parts of the
world, the ngo sector had become more powerful than the state
itself.1 Yet ngos remain poorly understood despite their ubiquity,
or perhaps partly because of their rapid proliferation and diversi-
fication. However, they have created a track record over the last
three decades, and this record as well as the need to move be-
yond the celebratory perspective on ngos that characterized the
1980s and 1990s has led to a more probing analytical stance. This
anthology explores what is distinctive about ngos, and how and
with what consequences they have come to be so strongly asso-
ciated with women and feminist issues.
Today feminism as a social movement seems less visible than
the plethora of ngos addressing gender issues and women’s wel-
fare. Scholars such as Sabine Lang (also a contributor to this vol-
ume) used the phrase “the ngoization of feminism” to describe
this development (Lang 1997). As a response to these changes,
a body of feminist research has emerged that interrogates the
nature and functioning of ngos, as well as the impact of their emergence
on nations and states, feminisms, and ongoing processes and institutions
that produce gender. This collection brings together feminist research
concerned with global and local configurations of power and inequality
to explore the relationship between feminist concerns and ngos. The re-
search examines ngos that are organized by or for women and that seek
to address some aspects of the welfare of women, and it aims to under-
stand both the variety of these organizations as well as their relation to
states, markets, and feminist movements in the current phase of global-
ization.
Clearly, the ngo is no longer seen as the panacea that it once was
thought to be, yet the number and scope of ngos—and other organiza-
tions that call themselves ngos—continue to grow. ngos have prolifer-
ated, some emerging from long-�standing institutions (churches, for in-
stance) and some from new social movements, corporate enterprises, or
new needs (for example, ngos focusing on global warming or other en-
vironmental issues). ngos can be conservative or progressive, from left-
ist or rightist political positions. In short, it seems as if every agenda and
political project has a corresponding ngo, and this diversity has com-
plicated theorizing about ngos as a unified field of power. Given the di-
versity of ngos and the contexts in which they operate, this collection
brings together a range of disciplines, research approaches, and regional
expertise. The essays show the variety of ngos that target women as well
as the diversity of feminist research approaches and theoretical perspec-
tives. We know by now that women all over the world have become prime
targets of neoliberal restructuring and development. The essays collected
here take that context into account but also demonstrate powerfully that
neoliberalism can look very different across the world, and that neoliberal
conditions do not dictate everything that an ngo does or practices. Like
capitalism, neoliberalism has not eliminated all the desires and projects
that might be associated with goals of social justice, equality, and democ-
racy that can be imagined outside of its capitalist and consumer-�oriented
framework. Feminist struggles may be altered, but they continue to pro-
liferate—shaped by, but not completely governed by, states, neoliberalism,
and the rise of ngos.
The contributors to this volume all work from a feminist perspective
and are concerned with contemporary conditions and contexts, but they
take a variety of approaches: some draw on personal experience in ngos;
some take a regional perspective, some a national one, and some conduct

2â•… Introduction
a fine-�grained analysis of a single organization. The collection spans the
range of issues with which ngos are engaged, from microcredit to domes-
tic violence, and explores contexts of postwar and postsocialist societies,
as well as ethnic, religious, class, and rural-�urban differences.
Although many of the studies focus on a particular region, country, or
nation, many also address the issue of North-Â�South relations—or, in the
case of Eastern Europe, East-Â�West histories—seeking to understand how
ngos from less powerful regions come to network with those from more
powerful ones as well as how, in these transnational contexts, the state
or multiple states involved provide or restrict ngos’ access to resources.
Some of the research pursued here seeks to understand the impact of the
search for resources on ngos’ agendas, on power differentials within and
between ngos, on the language they use to express the problems they
are hoping to alleviate, and on their organizational structures. The essays
suggest the relevance of specific contexts of historical and contemporary
projects of colonialism and empire, geopolitical asymmetries, and old and
new nationalisms that are deeply intertwined with feminist movements
and with women as subjects and objects of development. Consequently, all
of the essays in this collection, whether overtly or not, work in this larger
framework, in which multiple states and suprastate organizations such as
the United Nations intersect with particular national and local contexts.
In this introductory essay, we argue that some of the diverse perspec-
tives and controversies surrounding ngos—seen, for example, as agents
of neoliberalism, grassroots alternatives to the state, parts of local civil
society, or too tied to transnational organizations—arise from the diver-
sity of what can be encompassed under the rubric “ngo.” We develop an
analysis of the ngo form that explains how such contradictory political
projects can be brought under the same label, and we argue that the defini-
tion of what constitutes an ngo is profoundly gendered. An understand-
ing of ngos as gendered can account for the engagement of feminists and
other women with and by ngos. But before we turn to an analysis of the
ngo form and the relationship between feminism and ngos, we examine
some of the key scholarship and ongoing debates about ngos that inform
our analyses and those of our contributors. It should be noted, however,
that a great deal of the scholarship on ngos pays little theoretical atten-
tion to questions of gender, and that omission provided part of the impe-
tus for this anthology.
The scholarship on ngos remains divided. A large body of literature
has emerged that sees ngos as providing an improved way to deliver de-

Introductionâ•…3
velopment (Fowler 1991; Mehra 1997; Bhatia 2000; J. Fisher 2003), as ve-
hicles that allow grassroots organizations to voice their concerns, as the
organized form of social movements, and as having the ability to “em-
power communities and to build social capital in civil society” (Kudva
2005, 234). For some scholars, ngos are civil society organizations that
emerge in opposition to the state and provide important checks to state
power (Bratton 1989; Clarke 1998). Others contend that ngos are best
understood as agents or consequences of neoliberalism, expanding glob-
alization processes (Schuller 2007), reducing local power (Feldman 1997),
and forming part of a “contemporary neoliberal aid regime” (Schuller
2009, 84).
Much of the recent literature provides more critical and contextual
understandings of the relation between ngos and development (Mercer
2002), including those by scholars who view ngos as a form of neoliberal
cooptation (Kamat 2004) and by others who locate ngos within transna-
tional circuits of neoliberal power (Grewal 2005). Some current scholar-
ship, such as a special issue of PoLAR (PoLAR 2010), looks at ngos as they
are caught up in relations with funding sources, governments, and neolib-
eral processes that create a double bind for ngos, situated between the
powerful forces dominating them and the disenfranchised communities
they intend to serve.
Debates about the impact of ngos on states follows neoliberalism and
globalization discussions in which some argue that ngos may strengthen
states while others contend that they weaken states. Those in the former
group cite ngos’ contributions to stronger civil society, while those in the
latter group maintain that ngos weaken states by allowing outside in-
fluence in a country or by reducing states’ sovereign power over citizens.
Even within the latter line of argument, there are different approaches.
Some suggest that ngos are agents of neoliberalism or imperialism (Funk
2006; Kamat 2004; Hearn 2007) and that they undermine states’ sover-
eignty by weakening the social contract between states and citizens. Yet
others suggest that it is in the accounting practices and entrepreneurial
strategies adopted by ngos, rather than in the weakening of the state,
that we see a move into neoliberalism. For instance, a number of schol-
ars have drawn attention to the ways ngos are marketized, engaging in
entrepreneurial strategies to compete for funding (Feldman 1997; Paley
2001; Elyachar 2002).
The theorizing around ngos is thus deeply tied to theories of the state,
globalization, and neoliberalism. Scholars seem divided between classical

4â•… Introduction
liberal theory and more poststructuralist ideas of the state. For example,
theorizations using the former make a clear distinction between private
and public, civil society and state, with boundaries between the nation-�
state and what is outside it. Liberal scholars argue for ngos as “transna-
tional civil society” (Batliwala and Brown 2006, 2), as a “new paradigm of
civil society” (Stromquist 2002), or as a “sub-Â�species of civil society orga-
nization” (Eade 2000, 12). Habermasian theories of the “public sphere”
also fall into this category of theorizations, suggesting that ngos are sepa-
rated from the state. According to such theories, ngos lie within the pri-
vate sphere that is separate from the state, and feminist ngos are seen as
potentially oppositional to the state.
In contrast, a poststructuralist approach to the state relies on contested
state boundaries, transnational connections forged through the globaliza-
tion of finance and corporations, ambiguous and dynamic constructions
of public and private, and a more Foucauldian idea of governmentality
that sees continuities between the state and civil society. Here there is a
focus on the everyday practices of ngos, their strategies of rule and ex-
pertise, and struggles both within them and between staff, donors, and
clients. This allows a focus on the professionalization that takes place in
ngos and on the production of entrepreneurial subjects within capital-
ist ideologies, even in the nonprofit sector. It may also make visible the
unintended effects of ngos. As Lauren Leve shows in this volume, such
uncertainties mean that ngos should be understood in light not only of
their own ostensible goals, but also of the kinds of subjects they produce.
Scholars have attempted to understand ngos through a variety of ap-
proaches, some through classifying their target populations and others
through the nature of their relationship with the state; their mode of orga-
nization, degree of professionalization, and/or scale; their resources and
relations with donors; their specific goals; or their ideology or political
economy. Clearly the question of resources plays a role in ngos’ goals,
practices, and strategies. Thus the research tells us that some ngos are
local, remaining steadfast in connecting to local resources and setting
their own agendas, and to their resource base, thus suggesting authen-
ticity and allegiance to grassroots or local goals and a resistance to insti-
tutionalization. Other research may show that ngos can become vehicles
used to accomplish goals for established authorities or to pursue agendas
determined by donors and other powerful institutions, rather than agen-
das driven by feminist activism (Silliman 1999). Many ngos have become
transnational, linking themselves to international donors or professional

Introductionâ•…5
networks and receiving not only resources but also agendas, practices,
and discourses through these mainly European and American founda-
tions (Aksartova 2009). Research on funding and resource strategies re-
veals great diversity, from the blatant example in Mexico where political
candidates create ngos “whose sole purpose was to purchase goodwill
and name recognition” (Richard 2009, 176) to the intermediary type of or-
ganization that serves to mediate among different scales and institutions
(Schuller 2009; Richard 2009). These ngos negotiate between agendas,
concerns, and local and translocal institutions and languages.
The scholarly feminist work on ngos collected here reveals the fluidity
between the supposedly separate domains of state and society. Public and
private partnerships have come into existence even as states have increas-
ingly incorporated transnational and neoliberal governmentalities. Initial
ideas that feminist ngos stood outside of and in opposition to the state
are no longer tenable. Some ngos have enabled feminist advocacy and
activism, while others have professionalized feminist agendas in collabo-
ration with states and corporate-�style bureaucracies. These alterations
have occurred in tandem with changes in governmentalities and geopoli-
tics within and between states since the 1980s as transnational corpora-
tions, humanitarian aid networks, and structural adjustment programs
became increasingly powerful in the new economic order of neoliberal
policies adopted by the US and European states (Williamson 1989).
For us, the key question is not to debate the pros and cons of ngos or to
perform policy-�oriented assessments of their accomplishments, though
readers interested in those issues will certainly find our collection infor-
mative. Rather, we explore the nature of the ngo as a form of organizing,
how ngos have altered relations between feminisms and the state, and the
ways ngos are contributing to new constructions of gender and changing
relations among women as well as between women and men.

The NGO Form

Since ngos are diverse and heterogeneous, even if they share a focus on
women or gender, what is important to note is how ngos have nonethe-
less come to be seen as a unified phenomenon. ngos seem present in
every country and associated with every social issue and political debate.
ngos of varying types now make up a large share of the organizations
and bodies undertaking welfare and empowerment work among women.
However, despite their variety, ngos are often understood as an alterna-
tive to the state as well as to corporations, taking the place of the state

6â•… Introduction
in the work on development and welfare, and providing services free or
at much lower costs than private businesses (Richard 2009). ngos seem
to be a unified domain, crucially in terms of their distinction from the
state and the market. Moreover, many ngos work to maintain this dis-
tinction as a central feature of their institutional identities, even as they
develop state-�like and/or corporate aspects and influences. This is true
especially in the so-�called developing world and the global South. Even in
more developed contexts and the global North, we find that much welfare
work is understood as the domain of ngos. In the United States, for in-
stance, such organizations were often called nonprofit organizations and
thus were positioned in relation and opposition to the private corporate
sector. Increasingly, however, they are now understood and designated as
ngos, a label that highlights their distinction from the state rather than
from market-�driven organizations.
We contend that the term “ngo” has come to make sense through an
articulation of a negative form: it is defined by something that it is not—
in other words, it is assumed to be not the state. Yet this negative form
means that the term has a capaciousness that may be responsible for its
popularity and widespread usage globally. This umbrella term covers over
many differences among ngos so that all kinds of organizations can be
brought together under one label; those practicing more conservative and
regressive politics can exist under the same label as their political oppo-
nents. The negative form of the ngo has the capacity to encompass many
different political projects. The negative aspect of the form—that which
is not the government—comes to be normative, and it supports a clear
divide between public and private realms of power that is consistent with
models of the normative liberal state. The ngo, therefore, obscures the
contingent nature of such domains of struggle.
Thus ngos may even help produce the state, through what Timothy
Mitchell (1999) has called their “state effect.” They make the state visible
by emphasizing that they are not the state, even as forms of governmen-
tality proliferate within them. For instance, the Indian government has
a set of rules and regulations for ngos, which have to register with the
government even as it continues to subcontract out welfare and other
projects to them. Thus, although the distinction between state and ngo
disappears in relation to many state projects, the construct of ngos as a
separate sector is kept alive.
One important contradiction masked by the broad umbrella term
is that despite the diversity of states, markets, and institutions through

Introductionâ•…7
which ngos come to be legible as different, ngos are not separate from
the state or from markets. The designations “nonprofit” and “nongovern-
mental” should be taken instead as pointing to complex relationships that
need to be investigated and analyzed. Such relationships are complex not
simply because of the diversity of ngos or states, but also because ngos
exist in a geopolitical context of the knowledge and power frameworks of
the expanding modern West. This context includes new and old networks
of finance, communication, and knowledge that take for granted and pro-
mote assumptions about the nature of states, markets, and civil society, as
well as other issues such as gender relations.
The United Nations conferences on women made visible the gaps be-
tween women’s lives and the official representation of women. Particu-
larly at the Beijing conference, the ngo emerged as a feminist form for
representing women’s interests that were not or could not be easily con-
tained or represented through official logics or institutional frameworks.
ngos served to include as well as to manage powerful nonofficial repre-
sentations. But their very name—“nongovernmental organization”—gave
ngos a kind of official, yet simultaneously nonofficial, status. The ngo,
thus, came to exist in continuity with the state. We argue that the ngo
form produces and converts what is outside the state into a legible form
within a governmentality that parallels official state power. In this way
the ngo form, somewhat paradoxically, derives power from working with
the biopolitical logics of the state. Moving across what is included and ex-
cluded by the state also makes the ngo form key to neoliberal projects of
privatization and state withdrawal.
These politics of official and unofficial exclusions and inclusions are
profoundly gendered through divisions between public and private and
through the powerful circulation of liberal democracy, which is assumed
to have social and sexual contracts that define women in terms of the pri-
vate sphere and as subordinate political subjects. The notion of the liberal
state, as it has been globalized, assumes that such a private sphere exists
everywhere and that the division between public and private is central to
liberalism and also gendered. In such a context, the ngo (defined by its
lack of official status and its position as outside the state) politicizes and
globalizes the private as an organized entity, but also as a private entity
that is not a profit-�making enterprise. Since women are generally under-
represented in official positions and in the public political space, the ngo
thus becomes a recognizable platform from which to make claims by and
for women, and to legitimately represent them. ngos are powerful in part

8â•… Introduction
because they are a recognized form of public engagement that is legible
to states, donors, other ngos, and wider publics. This recognition of the
ngo form is significant given that the variation among ngos is actually
so great.
The label “nongovernmental organization” is not simply vague, it is
often deceptive. If the main distinguishing characteristic of ngos was
their independence from government, then many ngos would fall outside
that designation because they are not so much separate from or dependent
on states as they are entwined with states. In some settings, ngos have
become so associated with the state and with established power that some
groups no longer want to be labeled as ngos, a name now seen as tainted
with the same elitism as the state. The members of one long-�established
ngo in India were emphatic in telling us that their group was a “civil so-
ciety organization” and not an ngo. As the studies included here demon-
strate, the fact that ngos may become so intertwined with the state that
their ideology and practice become less radical is a profound concern, but
the integration of ngos into the power structure is also an achievement
that underlines the character of the form—which gains traction from its
ability to move across borders and institutional boundaries.
Even where ngos may seem to be separate from the state in which
they are located and where they operate, they may not be separate from
the states that serve as donors. It may be that some ngos are connected to
multiple states—near and distant—and that these state interests may con-
verge or diverge. New terms have been developed to indicate government
involvement, but they are either oxymoronic—government-Â�organized,
nongovernmental organization (gongo)—or unclear. An international
nongovernmental organization (ingo) could be related to a distant state,
foundation, or the United Nations. Instead of new labels, what is needed
is a way to categorize different types of ngos. Our analysis of the ngo
form makes sense of the ubiquity of the term and its circulation in differ-
ent parts of the world.
Clearly the appeal of ngos extends beyond women and those con-
cerned with feminist issues. But the gendering of politics and the con-
structions of public and private spheres give the ngo form a particular
resonance with feminism. The fact that the ngo can move across the
boundaries between insider and outsider, official and unofficial, or pub-
lic and private explains both the proliferation of ngos concerned with
gender issues and liberal feminist investments in the form. The state-�like
and state-�linked, yet nonstate, form of the ngo has particular synergies

Introductionâ•…9
with neoliberal discourses and policies. Neoliberalization fosters feminist
ngos on two levels: first, the withdrawal of state and public resources
from welfare sectors creates a gap that ngos seek to fill, taking on public
roles from private positions and second, those spaces of state withdrawal
were often already sites of women’s paid and unpaid labor and feminist
struggles for resources and services.
It is significant in this neoliberal moment to consider that the ngo is
not radical in its form—which is separate from the question of whether
any particular ngo is radical in its agenda or organization. Because the
ngo form mimics bureaucratic state forms, ngos are easily embraced
by donors and states. Many international state or corporate donors easily
switched from channeling their funds through states to channeling them
through ngos, and in that process furthered the state-�like aspect of ngos
through bureaucratic accounting, reporting, and administrative require-
ments. Although the rationale for the shift of donor funds from states to
ngos is often framed in terms of how different ngos are from states, we
argue that it is actually their similarity that partly accounts for the ease
and enthusiasm for this huge shift. ngos appear far less threatening than
mass movements, and part of their appeal to donors and states comes
from the way the ngo form seems separate from the state even as it is a
site of governmentality.
Partly as a result of these processes, ngos are well ensconced within
development regimes and programs of social welfare; they are not going
away, and neither are neoliberal articulations of productivity, entrepre-
neurship, and empowerment. Also important to the rise of ngos is the
assumption that they are less hierarchical, more democratic, more de-
voted to welfare and to serving subordinate or minority populations, and
more cost-�effective than states. ngos themselves often rely on discourses
of connection to grassroots movements, efficiency of resource use, and
representation of women’s groups and issues. However, ngos’ disavowal
of ties to states often is not borne out in their everyday practices or agen-
das. Their relations with states are often contentious but also dependent
in many ways. Inderpal Grewal has argued that ngos reveal that feminism
has become neoliberal in both the global North and South, and that such
neoliberalism has become the condition of possibility for most ngo work
(Grewal 2005). Even in countries such as the United States, ngos are part
of the privatization of social work that neoliberal governments have en-
abled, and in other parts of the world—especially in what are called “failed

10â•… Introduction
states” and those that are seen as corrupt—ngos may be the only source
of welfare possible in an era of government cutbacks.
Although feminist work may become institutionalized within ngos
and is often bureaucratized within development and empowerment
frameworks promoted by states and international bodies, many ngos are
working to address these problems and to maintain close ties to more pro-
gressive and movement agendas. In Tanzania we found that ngos formed
coalitions to communicate and collaborate so as to counteract the influ-
ence of donor states and foundations and the competition for funds that
pit progressive ngos against each other. Theory and practice, in some
ngos, are not separated. At the same time, it is now clear that feminist
research does not support many of the claims that ngos are more produc-
tive, more effective, and closer to grassroots movements than are states.
Nonetheless, given the dominance of neoliberal policies and the fact that
many states are not eager to take on social welfare burdens, the ngo form
is now a well-�established element of the political landscape that itself is
shaping the conditions of feminist struggles.

Feminism and NGOs

The rapid global expansion of ngos over the past two decades has pro-
foundly changed the conditions and context of feminist activism. Many
researchers have pointed out that by the end of the twentieth century,
feminist activism had shifted from participation in political movements
to advocacy and action in feminist and women’s ngos (Lang 1997; Alvarez
1999; Bernal 2000; Halley 2006). In the process, ngos have participated in
changing what we mean by “civil society” and “the state” and have altered
the terms of feminists’ engagement with states. ngos themselves are sites
of feminist struggles as they promote various constructs of “women” and
as their activities produce new categories of women.
In terms of feminist struggles, ngos’ connection to women and devel-
opment was catalyzed by the UN conferences on women held in Mexico
City, Nairobi, and Beijing. ngos came to world attention and to the fore-
front of feminist activism starting with preparations leading up to the
World Conference on Women in Beijing (Timothy 2004). Feminist schol-
ars understood the spectacle of women creating their own networks and
forums outside of official institutions as heralding a new era of grassroots
organizing and empowerment. ngos emerged as a promising form of or-
ganization and a vehicle of development for an array of groups and causes.

Introductionâ•…11
Over the following decade such hopes were expressed by diverse scholars,
activists, and organizations, as well as by development experts and inter-
national agencies (W. Fisher 1997; Appadurai 2002; Edwards and Fowler
2002).
These UN conferences explicitly included nongovernmental confer-
ences alongside the governmental ones (Joachim 2002; Zhang 2009), so
that the term “nongovernmental” became prominent for feminist activ-
ism internationally. Certainly ngos existed prior to these landmark con-
ferences. However, the significance of women’s organizing outside of what
was defined as official or governmental delegations at those conferences
brought the ngo to the world stage as a form of feminist organizing. Prior
to these conferences, women collectively were largely absent from official
state delegations, and they perceived themselves to be excluded from state
treaty making. The ngo forums at these conferences, despite the termi-
nology of “nongovernmental,” led not only to the treaties and Agreements
(such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimina-
tion against Women or the UN Millennium Development Goals) but also
to the hope and the possibility that such goals would be carried out by
the work of small organizations, so-�called grassroots activists, and local
feminist and women’s movements (Dunlop, Macdonald, and Kyte 1996)—
often with the help and support of transnational organizations.
The ngo movement in the 1980s and 1990s also heralded a more trans-
national turn in feminist activism, propelled by the international nature
and agendas of the UN conferences, the new phase of globalization, and
the emergence of technologies that made collaborations across borders
easier to sustain. Margaret Keck and Kathyrn Sikkink have argued that
transnational advocacy networks “helped instigate and sustain the change
between 1968 and 1993” in the expansion of human rights within feminist
activism (1998, ix). Despite such an expansion of and diversity in national,
regional, and local projects undertaken by ngos, many researchers point
out that the kinds of issues that they have taken up have been limited.
Keck and Sikkink state that by the 1990s approximately “half of all inter-
national nongovernmental social change organizations work[ed] on . . .
three issues”: women’s rights, human rights, and the environment (1999,
ix). Sally Engle Merry suggests that the activities of ngos and the United
Nations have focused on human rights and together may be seen as an
international civil society” (Merry 2001). Amrita Basu argues that though
women’s transnational ngos have proliferated, the results of their work
are not that diverse—for example, they have been less successful in argu-

12â•… Introduction
ing for economic rights and more successful in campaigns against sexual
violence (Basu 2000).
Everyday politics of ngos may be simultaneously local, national, and
transnational. Feminist activism may be inspired by movements in other
parts of the world, and new communication technologies may facilitate
borrowings and commonalities, but also resistances. ngos may be funded
by international donors, but they engage with and are affected by local
state practices as well. Hiring staff members and deciding on priorities
and political strategies may also require engaging with both nearby and
distant institutions, social and cultural projects, and agendas. Although
some transnational ngos that focus on women’s issues may have limited
agendas based on colonial ideologies, others—whether transnational or
local—may be creative in working with these ideas or may modify them
to engage with specific contexts and thereby change who counts as femi-
nist and what can be understood as benefiting women.
In addition, over the last decades, new donor states and organizations,
not just those from the West, have emerged to create agendas that may
be distinct in some ways but similar in other ways to existing develop-
ment and welfare issues that are understood to be pertinent to women as
a global target of policy and development efforts. Current struggles in the
Middle East have created new kinds of female subjects of revolutionary
and postrevolutionary states, supported by Islamic ngos that work in the
community. It is not just US and European foundations and states that
fund such work, but groups such as the Aga Khan Foundation and con-
servative Saudi petrodollars support these ngos. Such ngos have distinct
ideas about women and feminism, especially with regard to what a gen-
dered modernity may look like. Yet, like so many other global foundations,
they also focus on women’s health, education, microfinance, and develop-
ment. Neoliberalism may thus create a recognizably homogeneous frame-
work for contemporary ngos working on women’s issues, but it does not
control all the practices and agendas of these organizations.
The diverse research in this volume, furthermore, suggests that distinc-
tions between public and private, foreign and local, and state and ngo are
often ambiguous and always contested. These boundaries are continually
shifting and dynamic, and the authors of the chapters in this volume pro-
vide a number of reasons why feminist organizing continues to work—as
well as engage critically—with neoliberalism.
Feminist movements within states and in organizations linked trans-
nationally have led states themselves to claim that they are devoted to

Introductionâ•…13
women and to development and gender equality. Development and
women’s empowerment, in many states, is now a state enterprise, some-
times done in collaboration with ngos, as Aradhana Sharma shows in
this volume. ngos may be subcontractors for development, with benefits
accruing to the state through reduced salaries and pensions because of
the differential between the costs of state employees and ngo employees.
However, many of the ngos discussed in this collection are a source of
employment for women. Through ngo work, middle-�class women gain
access to national and international networks that expand their oppor-
tunities, skill sets, and outlooks, although ngo positions are often tem-
porary and lack the pensions and other benefits that state employment
provides.
The changing state-�ngo relations produce changing feminist and
female subjects. Goals of development have shifted to empowerment
and capacity building, involving the production of new subjects. Femi-
nist struggles are ongoing precisely because of these fluctuating lines be-
tween public and private, of which dynamic ngos are both a product and
a catalyst. States, too, are always challenged and changing. If at one point
in Western feminist theorizing, socialist feminists argued for greater state
involvement in women’s welfare, the fall of the Berlin Wall that signaled
the end of the socialist state in Europe was followed by the emergence
of new female capitalist subjects, consumers, and entrepreneurs (Ghod-
see 2004). The emergence of the European Union, with its own projects
of so-�called gender mainstreaming was designed, as Sabine Lang argues
in this volume, to propel gender politics in particular directions while
foreclosing others. Long-�standing feminist issues still frame ngo work,
especially in poverty alleviation and health and welfare, even as interna-
tional migration, wars, environmental emergencies, and new forms of re-
source extraction alter how these issues are experienced and dealt with.
Sexual politics of contraception and reproductive rights has also been a
long-�standing site of struggle, and so have racial politics, but changing
populations within states are now creating new agendas in these areas
for ngos. Debates about veiling in Europe, for instance, have led to anti-
racism efforts by ngos. The production of new regulations over some
groups of women shows that states’ engagement with women’s bodies is
ongoing, contingent, and negotiable. ngos also emerge and disappear,
which suggests that they are subject to the demands of new activisms and
political imperatives.
Many of the debates about states and ngos overlook the power of the

14â•… Introduction
market and corporate interests with which ngos must engage. The trans-
national corporation has emerged as another domain of private power
that can challenge ngos and the state, though it may also collaborate
with them. Many large transnational corporations support ngos through
private foundations, so it is not surprising that the language of entrepre-
neurial capitalism has also entered the discourse of ngos. Because both
ngos and corporations belong to the private domain and are supposedly
separated from the state, they are sometimes seen as working in tandem
to challenge or bypass state power. The Soros Foundation, for example,
helped support the establishment of women’s studies centers and femi-
nist ngos in countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,
establishing a presence in newly formed nation-�states and newly capitalist
countries. Some of these ngos had overtly capitalist ideologies, support-
ing women’s empowerment through producing subjects of consumption
and capitalism. Julie Hemment’s essay in this volume captures some of the
complexities of transnational ngo politics in Russia.
Finally, social movements and emerging political projects mean that
new ngos may be created and old ones may have to alter their existing
practices. In the process, there are shifts in the relations between states
and ngos and between transnational and local ngos. For instance, the
transnational politics of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender move-
ments has given rise to ngos that struggle for sexual rights as human
rights. These universal formulations are challenged by local organizations
that are contesting social ideas of sexual difference and gender binaries. In
the context in which women’s rights is a long-Â�standing language of ngo
activism, the new frameworks of sexual rights change existing subjects
and strategies of activism.
ngos constantly negotiate with a dynamic state and multiple con-
texts as well as with traditional and new ideas about feminist struggles.
Questions of social justice, critiques of heteronormativity and racist and
colonial practices, and the current state of capitalist market democracies
also help unsettle neoliberal power relations and constructions of gender.
Thus, ngos are simultaneously neoliberal entities and sites of struggle
for feminists.

The Anthology
This collection contributes to the understanding of the nature and pro-
liferation of ngos and provides a nuanced and complex picture of the
potentials and pitfalls of the concentration of feminist action and women’s

Introductionâ•…15
welfare work in ngos in the twenty-�first century. The essays collected here
do not seek to provide a history of the ngoization of feminism, since that
has already been discussed in a wide range of research that covers quite
a few national and state contexts (Lang 1997; Alvarez 1999; Moghadam
2000; Poster and Salime 2002; Ferree and Tripp 2006; Dolhinow 2010).
Instead, we take ngoization as the starting point from which to approach
the changing relations of ngos to the simultaneously changing nature of
the state and to constructions of gender and feminism. The essays dem-
onstrate the variety of histories of ngos relating to particular national
and regional differences and to the distinct temporalities and trajectories
of the emergence of ngos and their involvement in gender issues in dif-
ferent contexts.
The essays ask how activism within and through ngos empowers and/
or subjugates subaltern and nonsubaltern women, exploring the ways
in which ngos transcend or perpetuate North-�South inequalities and
how ngos transform or reproduce divisions among women. The femi-
nist analy�ses and theorizing offered here avoid simple assessments of best
practices or verdicts of success or failure for ngos. Rather, the essays
demonstrate that the intersection of feminism and ngos has yielded un-
expected results, new collaborations, struggles, and conflicts.
The three parts of the anthology focus on different aspects of feminist
mobilization and ngos. The first section, “ngos Beyond Success or Fail-
ure,” sees ngos as deliberately or inadvertently leading to new struggles.
The second part, “Postcolonial Neoliberalisms and the ngo Form,” ex-
amines ngos in relation to inequalities of class, North-�South relations,
urban-�rural divides, and other boundaries that marginalize some groups
of women while other women may benefit. This scholarship also makes
visible the neoliberal logics underlying the global proliferation of ngos
and the dynamics of ngos’ relations to states. We see not only feminist
struggles with the state, but also new local and transnational partner-
ships—involving feminists, states, and corporations—that are emerging
because neoliberal logics pervade state, ngo, and development ideolo-
gies. Our final section, “Feminist Social Movements and ngos,” looks at
how, despite the imbrications of ngos in neoliberal and corporate logics
(analyzed in the previous section), feminist struggles and movements re-
main alive—or are reinvented and restored. Perhaps, as Saida Hodžić sug-
gests, the present has produced nostalgia for a kind of feminism that may
never have really existed.
All of the essays also bring to the fore feminist questions that are now

16â•… Introduction
being debated widely. Some of these questions are pertinent to gender
and development, since in the last two to three decades ngos have be-
come key institutions for delivering development. Some of the questions
are about the present condition and future of feminism itself—whether
the ngoization of feminism has depoliticized feminist struggles. Other
questions revolve around the tensions created by ngos’ use of corpo-
rate ideologies and organizational practices, as well as state-�like forms of
bureaucratic management, while seeking to change society and pursue
issues of social justice. The essays examine the results of feminism in col-
laboration with neoliberalism, states of various kinds, and international
institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank. In bring-
ing together these essays by feminist scholars and researchers working in
disparate sites around the globe, we find that ngos are part of the geo-
political order, producing new local and transnational partnerships and
conflicts that are profoundly gendered. Moreover, we argue that ngos
are engaged in representing and producing “women” as a category, while
also constructing new categories of women, such as “grassroots women”
and “trafficked women.” Through their work, ngos are giving rise to new
divisions among women, as some are professionalized through ngo work,
others are engaged as beneficiaries, and still others may be excluded or
unable to participate in ngo activities. Divisions and struggles among
women should not be interpreted as a failure of feminism, however, be-
cause “women” never were a homogeneous category. Feminist struggles
are also struggles among differently positioned and differently subjectified
women, whether in the North and the South or in urban and rural areas
(as LeeRay Costa’s essay shows).
The volume builds on, among other things, the exciting interdisci-
plinary body of work that has explored postcolonial feminisms in rela-
tion to nationalism (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Badran 1996; Bernal,
2000; Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 1999; McClintock, Mufti, and
Shohat 1997; Rofel 1999; Williams 1996; Yang 1999). By asking questions
regarding women’s participation, activism, or empowerment, the authors
included here explore crucial questions about the North-�South dimen-
sions of transnational feminist practices. Their research on ngos pro-
vides evidence of the nature of political activism and the ideas, practices,
discourses, and agendas of feminists working in ngos. These dynamics
can be understood only when viewed in the larger context of social move-
ments, state formation, national institutions, and international bodies.
The anthology takes up questions of identity, difference, the gendering of

Introductionâ•…17
space, belonging versus exclusion, imagined communities, the natural-
ization of power, and the gendering of modernity and explores them in
relation to contemporary feminism and the global significance of ngos.

Notes
1. Institute for Security Studies, “ngo’s and Their Quest for Legitimacy in Africa,”
April 8, 2010, accessed July 4, 2011, http://reliefweb.int/node/350810.

18â•… Introduction
╉Part I╅ NGOs Beyond Success or Failure

T
he essays in Part I draw particular attention to the dynamic
relations among ngos, civil society, states, and social move-
ments. The research demonstrates that the intersection of
ngos and feminism has surprising and diverse effects. We
begin with an essay by Elissa Helms, for whom the relation be-
tween the state, feminist movements, and ngos is rather different
from what we have come to expect from much feminist research.
Helms shows that ngos may produce feminist movements in-
stead of the other way around, thereby turning on its head the
thesis that ngos have debilitated feminist movements. Drawing
on more than a decade of research in Bosnia-�Herzegovina since
the recent war, Helms finds that ngos there are becoming like
movements. In other words, there is a movementization of ngos
rather than an ngoization of feminism in this region. Helms’s
research suggests that there can be no simple linear movement
that represents developments in the ngo form or its relation to
various feminisms.
Lauren Leve’s essay on ngos in Nepal offers another example
of the diverse and unexpected effects of ngo activities. Leve’s re-
search shows that ngos working on education have produced
revolutionary consciousness among women, who end up as Mao-
ists, rather than the docile, capitalist subjects they were expected
to become. This result cannot easily be viewed as a success or a
failure of the ngo project. Examining rural women’s participa-
tion and support of Maoist movements in Nepal, Leve finds that
theories of resistance or empowerment often presume a particu-
lar, autonomous subject; in this case, the “Nepali woman.” This
“Nepali woman” is seen through a development framework whose defini-
tions of success and failure underlie scholarly understandings of women’s
participation. Leve argues that what happens to the ngo project and
women’s responses to it must be analyzed in relation to the specific con-
text, culture, and historical moment. The outcomes of a project may not
be contained within a “success or failure” accounting of a particular ngo,
or even within a “feminist movement” narrative. As in the case Leve de-
scribes, the liberal assumptions of the ngo about women and participa-
tion may unwittingly spark more revolutionary actions by women, going
beyond the project to address larger questions of social justice.
Aradhana Sharma’s research in rural India explores the practices of a
gongo, the Mahila Samakhya project. Sharma discovers that this state-�
ngo coalition provides spaces of possibility for women to address some
local problems, but it also replicates and reinforces social hierarchies.
Sharma’s research suggests that such partnerships are now an ongoing
part of the neoliberal state as the state collaborates with ngos to work
on welfare and women’s issues. ngo staff may either use this partnership
or disavow it, depending on their agendas and goals, and this flexibility
becomes part of how the state and ngos operate. Sharma’s examination
of the goal of empowerment of women also reveals how difficult it is to
settle the question of whether the Mahila Samakhya program is a suc-
cess or a failure. It employs women, pushes the state to address the needs
of women, and achieves some goals, but is unable to make progress in
other areas. Ultimately, she argues, women’s ngos are engaged in con-
stant struggle with the state even as they work with it, since many ngo
goals and principles run counter to those of the patriarchal and masculin-
ist state.

20â•… Part I
╉CHAPTER 1 Elissa Helms

The Movementization of NGOs? Women’s

Organizing in Postwar Bosnia-�Herzegovina

Bosnia’s NGO Boom

During the first few years after the 1992–95 Bosnian war, nongov-
ernmental organizations (ngos) were “springing up like mush-
rooms after the rain,” as it seemed to one women’s organization
leader in the town of Zenica, Bosnia-�Herzegovina (BiH).1 Cynical
urbanites joked that any old nobody who could gather the signa-
tures of twenty-�nine of their relatives and friends (the law then
required that number of signatures) could become an ngo. In-
deed, although many ngos were local spin-�offs of international
ngos with professionalized staff members, there were also many
groups of purely local origin. The latter were often a clutch of
friends or even just one active person who registered as an ngo in
the hope of garnering funding from one of the foreign and trans-
national donor agencies that had descended on BiH during and
especially after the war. Some of these groups were the remnants
of socialist-�era community clubs, others had started out doing re-
lief work during the war, and still others were forming for the first
time. In a manner reminiscent of a cargo cult, people all over BiH
set up ngos hoping that the donations would come pouring in: if
we build it, they will come!2 A large proportion of these organiza-
tions were women’s ngos.
Much of the hope generated around ngos was in response to
donors and foreign intervention agencies in charge of postwar re-
construction. These actors forcefully encouraged the formation of
more and more ngos that, when they appeared, were touted as evidence
of the growth of civil society and ultimately democracy (Sampson 2003;
Stubbs 2007). Feminist observers, citing the great numbers of women’s
ngos, marveled at the extent of the Bosnian “women’s movement.” But
there were ngos and there were ngos: the use of a single label masked
the organizations’ varying forms; motivations; conceptualizations; and en-
gagements with communities, donors, and the state. It also hid the dif-
fering expectations of donors buried in their calls for BiH to build civil
society, fight ethnonationalism, democratize, or simply “join Europe.”
Moreover, the terms “women’s ngo” and “women’s issues” were applied
to, and understood as referring to, a wide range of stances and activities,
from self-�described feminists critical of established gender norms to those
who promoted a return to traditional women’s roles in the patriarchal
family—as well as everything in between. Added to this variety were the
many different ways in which the new rhetoric and practices were accom-
modated into existing society.
This essay traces the trajectory of women’s organizing in BiH since the
end of the war, exploring the disconnects and convergences between the
discourses and practices of donors and of local women’s ngos. I unpack
assumptions about women’s activism and ngo work, historical patterns
and the legacies of socialism, and relationships among ngos, civil society,
and the state. Instead of, or in addition to, what scholars working in other
parts of the world describe as the ngoization of feminism (Alvarez 1999;
Lang 1997; Silliman 1999), I argue that BiH has experienced what might
be called a movementization of ngos, although not in absolute terms.
This does not mean that the negative effects of ngoization have not been
strongly felt in BiH, but that more positive effects from a feminist perspec-
tive can also be identified. Like Aradhana Sharma in her work on an ngo
program to empower poor women in India, I do not aim to negate exist-
ing criticisms but to “ethnographically tease out the tensions, contradic-
tions, redefinitions, and, indeed, suppressions” (2008, xxiv) of ngo work
from a feminist perspective. Although emphasis on the ngo model in BiH
could be said to have impeded work toward social change in many ways,
the conditions of ngo promotion—foreign intervention and the involve-
ment of democratization and development donors—ultimately facilitated
what we might now call a nascent feminist scene.
Writing about these groups is difficult to do without using the very
concepts that I argue need to be scrutinized. First, because of the range of
forms taken by ngos (Klees 1998; Martens 2002), it needs to be made clear

22â•… Elissa Helms

that I refer to local organizations rather than the foreign and transnational
organizations also called ngos that were perceived more in this context as
donors and representatives of the international community than as local
actors. This is not to say that foreign ngos were not also participants
in local processes, but to point out that they were not often referred to
in these terms: usually “ngos” referred just to local groups.3 Second, al-
though foreign donors and intervention agencies tended to label any in-
dependent group as an ngo and every group of women a women’s ngo,
everyday understandings of community engagement, organized groups,
donors, and gender underpinned a more complex set of categories used
to describe what groups called women’s ngos were doing. I thus argue
for a more precise use of terminology, including the concepts of “ngo,”
“women’s,” and “activism.”
My analysis is based on ethnographic research among women’s organi-
zation participants conducted since 1997, most intensively in 1999–2000,
when I was based in the town of Zenica for two years, and continuing since
then in stays of several days to several months (see Helms 2013). The re-
search included participant observation at ngo activities and gatherings
where ngo leaders interacted with each other and with donor representa-
tives; formal and informal interviews with ngo women and donor repre-
sentatives; collecting written materials from ngos and donors; and moni-
toring public discourses on gender and ngo activism in the local media,
both television and print. Quotations given come from these interactions;
first names are pseudonyms while I give the full name of one activist who
requested to be identified. Translations from the Bosnian language are
my own.
The organizations I studied were ngos in that they were not govern-
mental, although they did not all make consistent use of this label and this
definition did not rule out their receiving funds or use of facilities from
governmental bodies. I studied groups whose membership was made up
of women and that professed, through names or mission statements, to
exist for the betterment of women’s lives. I began with three core ngos
in Zenica, but I soon met women from a variety of other organizations
all over BiH as I accompanied the Zenica women to meetings and con-
ferences. As I learned, being a women’s organization could mean any-
thing from helping women fulfill traditional roles as wives and mothers to
pursuing feminist advocacy for the realization of women’s rights and the
breakdown of patriarchal ideologies and practices. Most women’s groups
fell somewhere in the middle. Donor organizations and representatives

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…23

were similarly heterogeneous, as I discuss below. Here I explore this com-
plicated terrain in a context that was simultaneously postconflict and
postsocialist, as well as caught up in the historical moment of globaliza-
tion, neoliberal trends, and European Union enlargement.

Foreign Intervention, NGOs, and Donors

Bosnia’s ngo boom (Alvarez 1999) was intensified by a convergence of
various forms of international attention during and especially after the
war—a conflict that garnered significant media attention for the brutal
way in which gender and ethnicity became central to atrocities like ethnic
cleansing and mass rapes. The signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement
brought the fighting to an end in late 1995 and gave BiH a new consti-
tution, making the fragile state a signatory to every major international
human rights treaty, including the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against Women (see Inglis 1998). It also estab-
lished a complicated, decentralized political system based on consocia-
tional power-�sharing mechanisms meant to keep in check political domi-
nation by any one ethnonational group, the war being seen as a conflict
among the main three (Serbs, Bosniacs [Bosnian Muslims], and Croats).
These mechanisms functioned only minimally at the state level; while
state institutions were gradually being strengthened, governance in prac-
tice functioned most meaningfully only at the level of the two ethnically
defined “entities”—the Serb-Â�dominated Republika Srpska and the Fed-
eration of BiH, dominated by Bosniacs and Croats. Furthermore, espe-
cially in the Federation, significant political units broke down into even
smaller territories where control by one ethnonational group was undis-
puted. These smaller territories were cantons and—in the case of “mixed”
cantons—municipalities (Bieber 1999; Gagnon 2003). The contested state
was held together by a pseudoprotectorate led by the Office of the High
Representative, the osce (Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe), and an array of other foreign governmental, intergovernmen-
tal, UN, and nongovernmental agencies and organizations commonly re-
ferred to as the “international community” (see, for example, Bose 2002)
but more accurately described as foreign intervention agencies (Jansen
2006).4
These actors came to BiH with a variety of projects and approaches,
including crisis intervention and humanitarian aid, Third World sustain-
able development approaches (including gender and development), post-
socialist democratization and marketization, and religious solidarity mis-

24â•… Elissa Helms

sions. Most of them shared a commitment to help build a functioning
multiethnic state with a market economy and robust civil society that
would eventually join the European Union.5 BiH was part of the global
neoliberal trend of promoting minimal state apparatuses, shrinking wel-
fare programs, and touting ngos as a new, more flexible way to admin-
ister social programs (see, for example, Edwards and Hulme 1998; Hann
and Dunn 1996; Feldman 1997; Klees 1998; A. Sharma 2008; and the intro-
duction to this volume). As was the case elsewhere, civil society came
to be equated in dominant usage with the number and distribution of
ngos (see, for example, Belloni 2001; Feldman 2003; Wedel 2001). Inter-
vention agencies pushed strongly for the establishment of as many ngos
as possible, especially in areas controlled by hard-�line separatist nation-
alists (Sampson 2002; Stubbs 1999). In the late 1990s the osce actually
labeled such places “neglected areas,” implying that donors had not made
sufficient efforts there, and as a result, ngo creation was more a prod-
uct of donor attention than of local initiative. Intervention agencies (that
is, governing institutions that sponsored, both logistically and financially,
programs and policy initiatives) and donors (that is, those who directly
funded ngos)6 thus set local ngos up as an alternative to the exclusivist
ethnic nationalism that reigned in the sphere of government and poli-
tics; this so-�called third sector served as the great hope for the future of
a peaceful, democratic BiH. There was thus a merging of global trends of
ngo promotion with the practical goals specific to postwar reconstruc-
tion in BiH.7 Local ngos tried to make the most of the attention from
donors and intervention agencies, in some cases virtually ignoring local
governmental structures and even the local population (for critiques of
Bosnian NGOs and notions of grassroots responsiveness, see Belloni 2001;
Chandler 2000; Stubbs 1996, 2007). Such tendencies decreased during
the 2000s, when many donors withdrew from the country and local gov-
ernance was strengthened, but they remained a part of the operational
habits of ngos.
Although some intervention agencies focused on women’s rights issues,
including feminist donors and agencies in which individual feminists had
initiated projects, gender issues were not high on the list of priorities for
the main actors of the international community (Rees 2002). Many agen-
cies and organizations gradually did put in place special gender units and
projects, and in the early 2000s the Finnish government bankrolled the
establishment of a state-�level Gender Equality Agency and entity-�level
gender centers as part of the state apparatus.8 On the whole, however,

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…25

intervention agencies were most intent on facilitating refugee return and
setting up political and financial institutions that would function in a uni-
fied state; “women’s rights” and “gender” were prominent buzzwords in
ngo and human rights circles but seldom appeared in high-�level politi-
cal discourse.
Given the polarizing nationalist politics and violence of the recent
past, ethnic reconciliation and refugee return (to areas now controlled
by different ethnonational groups) were major priorities. It was here, at
the local level, that women were targeted, not only because they made up
the majority of the surviving displaced population but also because they
were believed (or at least said) to be pragmatic and forgiving peacemakers,
more willing to bridge (ethnic) differences than men, especially those in
power (Helms 2003, 2013). Some women’s programs were even hijacked
by these other priorities, as was the case with the Bosnian Women’s Ini-
tiative, which was funded by the US Agency for International Develop-
ment. The initiative was subcontracted out to organizations not spe-
cializing in women’s issues and ultimately set aside its original women’s
rights goals in favor of projects focused solely on refugee return (Baines
2004). Many other projects aimed at women were also introduced, driven
mostly by donor agendas; these had more to do with adapting to the neo-
liberal logics of a reduced state, such as numerous microcredit and other
income-�generating schemes as well as the provision of social services not
covered by the state (see, for example, Pupavac 2005). However, despite
some efforts by donors to frame these activities as responses to “tran-
sition” or steps toward rejoining Europe, most ngo projects were seen
through the lens of postwar reconstruction (Jansen 2006; see also Gilbert
2006). For example, microcredit schemes were described as a way to aid
internally displaced women, and small-�scale crafts production was pro-
moted as psychosocial help for women who had been traumatized by their
experiences in the war.
Feminist organizations and individuals were also involved, some chan-
neling the same government development funds as the mainstream agen-
cies.9 In some cases, solidarity networks made up of women activists
formed ngos in their home countries to collect donations for BiH, and
several set up ngos in Bosnia that were based on feminist principles and
were later taken over by Bosnians (this was the case with Medica Zenica,
discussed below). Many of these feminist donors were initially mobilized
by reports of wartime sexual violence against women, although those who
worked closely with Bosnians soon moved to other issues vital to local

26â•… Elissa Helms

women in the postwar era, such as domestic violence, housing, and in-
come generation. Feminists from other parts of the former Yugoslavia
were also key, acting at times as consultants to donors or trainers at skills
workshops and at other times as fellow recipients of foreign donor aid.

The NGO as “Claim-Â�Bearing Label”

Not all local organizations regularly or consistently called themselves
ngos. In fact, “ngo” was not a legal category—under the socialist-Â�era
law, the term was “association of citizens,” while a 2001 reform allowed
groups to register as “associations” or “foundations.” What the leaders of
local organizations called their groups, and in which settings, was there-
fore telling. Especially for people who had grown up under socialism, to
use the term “ngo” was at first a conscious departure from natural speech
(World Bank 2002). Under socialism, community-�level associations had
been organized around interests like folklore, skiing, chess, or pigeon
breeding. Like the socialist-Â�era women’s groups I discuss in the next sec-
tion, they were apolitical at least officially and by reputation, though they
functioned with communist party approval (Andjelic 2003).10
During and after the war, “ngo” became associated with foreign fund-
ing and other forms of support. It was the organizations associated with
donor circles where the idea of ngos as the vanguard of civil society and
democracy was heavily promoted that regularly used this label and that
were seen by others as a new form of association. The use of the ngo label
was itself part of the language of “ngo-Â�speak” (Wedel 2001; see also Samp-
son 1996). But for other organizations hoping to attract foreign funding,
the claim to belong to the ngo sector was not only a plea to be included
into the ranks of the funded but also to be accepted and validated—at the
individual and the group level—as cultured agents of democratic toler-
ance, instead of being seen as the petty, tribal nationalists that they felt
the media had unfairly painted them. ngos became associated with the
West and all its purported modern attributes, from cosmopolitanism and
enlightened human rights standards to the material accessories of com-
puters, mobile phones, jeeps, and nice offices.
Thus the ngo attribution operated as what Dorothea Hilhorst calls a
“claim-Â�bearing label” (2003, 6–8): what people called their organizations
conveyed more about their aspirations and desired messages to specific
audiences than about the organization’s actual activities. Calling one’s
group an ngo was meant to signify that one was “doing good” (W. Fisher
1997) for society. In the Bosnian context, it was also a way to distance one-

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…27

self from the widely distrusted realm of “dirty” politics, government, and
corrupt business dealings. I often heard organization leaders say the words
“nongovernmental organization” rather than use the acronym ngo (nvo
in Bosnian), also adding “nonparty” and “nonprofit” to their list of descrip-
tors, lest their meaning be lost. For similar reasons, it was common to
stress the humanitarianism of ngos as the polar opposite of the political.
To be an ngo was to claim moral superiority, an interest in the well-�being
of others, and even patriotism or ethnonational pride—but by no means
motivated, like politicians, by a desire for personal power or financial gain.
Women were especially credible in putting forward this claim, given
the widespread association of politics and war with men, a view widely
shared and also exploited by donors and intervention agencies (Helms
2003, 2007, 2013). Many ngo women thus linked humanitarianism
to their being women, contrasting selfish, corrupt, and greedy men to
women who cared about society because they cared about their children’s
future. As one woman politician put it, “women always put general inter-
ests first, common interests, while men are in it for personal interests.”
Furthermore, because it was taken for granted that women were mothers,
I often heard at meetings of women’s ngos statements like: “If women
had been in power, there would not have been a war.” It followed that
electing women to office, or accepting women ngo leaders as legitimate
political actors, would “clean up” politics.
However, the term “nongovernmental” could also be perceived as a
threat by local government officials who interpreted the label as “anti-
governmental” or who regarded ngos as irrelevant to the functions of
government. This suspicion was reinforced by the fact that many ngos
received funds and support from foreign-�associated sources and operated
largely outside of government control, often including an avoidance of
taxation. This situation also meant that ngos were not overly concerned
with how they were seen by local officials or even community members
(cf., S. Henderson 2003; Hrycak 2006; Stubbs 1997). It was only later, when
donors’ priorities shifted, that some ngos saw a need to cooperate with
local governments and sought to win their trust and support.
The ngo label was also less effective among the general population,
many of whose members were skeptical of foreign-�supported ngos and
the locals who worked for them for, it was imagined, enormous salaries.11
ngos offering social services such as the free women’s health clinic
operated by Medica Zenica were evaluated much more positively than
those perceived to be pursuing political goals like social or legal change

28â•… Elissa Helms

(Grødeland 2006), even though in the case of Medica, the organization
also carried out activities seen as political, and its members sometimes
identified themselves publicly as feminists. This meant that in everyday
speech, ngos were often referred to according to their particular repu-
tation: an ngo offering social services might be referred to as a humani-
tarian organization, one that ran a youth center would be called just that,
and a women’s group known to organize women’s social events would be
called an association of women (udruženja žena). There was little popular
sense that the ngo sector was a potential force for collective action or for
serving as a watchdog on government, as donors advocated.12 References
to such functions came mainly from ngos, their donors, and democra-
tization officials, as well as appearing in media coverage of ngo events.

Activism and the Notion of a Women’s Movement

Donors and local ngo members alike were prone to enthusiastic exclama-
tions about the sheer number of women’s organizations in so many parts
of BiH, both urban and rural. This was especially true, in my experience,
of feminists from Western countries on short visits to BiH. If the many
women’s organizations were not always proclaimed to be a women’s move-
ment, their numbers were frequently pointed to as evidence of women’s
desire for change, democratic participation, peace, and ethnic tolerance—
for a united, multiethnic, democratic BiH where human rights, including
women’s rights, were respected. But there was no necessary link between
the formation of women’s organizations and commitment to such goals,
certainly not in the way foreign agency representatives and donors imag-
ined there to be.
The first reason for this has to do with how social activism was under-
stood in BiH and abroad. When foreign agency representatives talked
about how ngos should operate, they often envisioned Western Euro-
pean and North American models of activism, nonprofit organizations,
and volunteerism that assumed a level of motivation and commitment
to causes that did not necessarily match those of local ngo participants.
The disconnect reflected not only the legacies of socialism but also cur-
rent economic realities and the way in which democracy aid and the ngo
sector have developed in BiH. The starkest example was in the periodic
suggestion that Bosnian ngos might solicit funds or volunteer labor from
the local population, an idea that Bosnians dismissed as ridiculous at best
and immoral at worst. For an ngo to ask for time or money from an im-
poverished population that considered ngos to be overflowing with for-

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…29

eign money was truly beyond the pale. Both foreigners and Bosnians had
grown used to the presence of foreigners supplying aid (Belloni 2001).
The atmosphere was a far cry from the radne akcije (work actions) that
had been organized by the Communist party to rebuild the country after
World War II, a comparison I heard from a few older people who had been
drafted into such activities as youths.13
“Activism” thus had a different meaning in BiH than it did for many
foreigners. This was so even for many members of ngos in BiH who had
a sense of working for social and political change and did refer to them-
selves as activists (others called themselves simply “ngo women”). It
could not be taken for granted that Bosnians did ngo work out of dedi-
cation to a cause, for lower pay or even in their spare time, though few
would admit to working in an ngo solely as a job.14 Indeed, funded local
ngos offered some of the best paid and most stable work available to the
average educated person (surpassed only by foreign ngos and agencies).
The few who volunteered their time for an ngo tended to be younger
people who were still supported by their parents (who may have hoped
that volunteering would turn into paid employment) or older women with
grown or no children who, even if employed, found time to dedicate to
ngo activities under a different model of social engagement (see below).
One ngo in Zenica, Bosanka (the female form of “Bosnian”), fit the latter
pattern of older women who treated their mostly unfunded group’s activi-
ties as both a contribution to society and a personal social outlet. These
activities were lower priorities for such women, however, as was the case
with Edina, a core Bosanka member who eventually abandoned the group
so that she could spend time with a new grandchild.
Those employed by ngos treated it, unsurprisingly, as a job that had
to be balanced with one’s personal life, which for most women meant
also attending to many more duties at home (much like under social-
ism). Such employees placed limits on how much overtime or travel they
would do for their work, and especially on how far they might risk their
personal well-�being by speaking out on political issues or attempting to
affect change. There were definite exceptions to this, but they were not the
norm among those who called themselves activists.
The second reason was that there were different types of women’s
ngos in terms of their dedication to changing gender norms, promoting
women’s rights, or advocating feminism (however defined). Some groups
had been started by international humanitarian organizations and be-
came locally run ngos. Such organizations, along with some locally ini-

30â•… Elissa Helms

tiated ngos, tended to provide social services and employ professionals
on the basis of their skills as social workers, therapists, accountants, and
so forth, rather than as social activists per se. Medica Zenica, one of my
primary research sites, was one such ngo. Founded by German feminists
as a therapy center to aid women war victims, especially survivors of war-
time rape, it had been taken over by Bosnian women and continued to
provide a range of medical, psychological, social, and vocational training
services to women in the community, now through a focus on combat-
ing domestic violence (see Cockburn 1998; Helms 2013). Although there
were a dozen or so Medica activists who were very strongly committed to
changing existing gender norms even to feminism, including a few who
turned down better paid jobs to continue working at Medica, this was not
a necessary given among the nearly seventy employees of the organization
working there at the time of my initial fieldwork. Medica women were by
no means against goals of gender equality; indeed, they all expressed pride
in Medica and its special atmosphere of an all-�women organization. But
this model of women helping women and their children was not so dis-
ruptive of traditional gender hierarchies as to force the employees to see
the work as political. Members of Medica had not necessarily become or
stayed involved out of deep conviction that the patriarchal gender order
should be overturned, or because they wanted to devote significant energy
to this goal through political action. Indeed, some women revealed dis-
tinctly conservative personal views on gender or a distaste for the feminist
label under which the organization officially operated.
The example of Medica is a bit atypical for a service ngo, as its femi-
nist roots infused much of its therapy work—especially the activist de-
partment called Infoteka, which in March 2009 split off to form an inde-
pendent, feminist ngo. Activists from Medica have also gone on to found
other feminist ngos and to contribute in other ways to the challenging
of patriarchal norms in BiH. In BiH generally, self-�described feminists
or even politically active women’s ngos were relatively few in number
and concentrated in larger urban centers like Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Tuzla,
and Zenica (see Cockburn, Hubić, and Stakić-Â�Domuz 2001). These groups
took on feminist characteristics thanks partly to individual activists who
had developed a political or feminist stance and partly to personal con-
nections among donors and other activists from Germany, Croatia, Serbia,
and elsewhere. However, the general climate of disdain for vocal women
with political opinions and the widespread rejection of the feminist label
in BiH ensured that only the most confident women, usually those with

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…31

cosmopolitan support networks and links to other feminists, adopted
such stances. Most of the larger funded women’s ngos kept a low pub-
lic profile and concentrated on service provision rather than issues seen
as political. Moreover, the professionals employed in such ngos did not
necessarily think of themselves as activists; rather, they saw themselves as
social workers, therapists, medical personnel, and the like. This trend con-
tributed to a depoliticization of ngo work, similar to the process noted in
the context of Third World development (see, for example, Escobar 1995;
Ferguson 1990).
The type of ngo that most defied donor expectations for political en-
gagement was the “association of women.” Such groups were organized
along the model of socialist-Â�era women’s community organizing, which in
turn fit neatly into widespread gender-�separate social patterns.15 During
the socialist period, after the dismantling in the early 1950s of the more
vocal Anti-Â�Fascist Women’s Front (Antifašistički Front Žena, AFŽ), official
women’s organizing had been reduced to a loose network of community-Â�
based organizations called aktiv žena (“women’s actives,” also sometimes
used in the sense of women’s auxiliary), while communist party officials
asserted that the “woman question” had been solved (Sklevicky 1984,
1989; see also Jancar-Â�Webster 1990).16 Aktiv žena groups were organized
through local party cells but were expected to be apolitical, engaging in
charity drives, community beautification projects, and social events for
women such as excursions or celebrations of March 8th, International
Women’s Day. All-Â�women groups were considered the most respectable
social outlets for women, both married and unmarried, and were a natural
outgrowth of social networks and neighborly relations in neighborhoods
and villages. Women socialized at each other’s houses over coffee and in
evening gatherings (which sometimes included men), while men had pub-
lic places like political meetings, religious services, workplaces, and pubs
(Sorabji 1994; Bringa 1995).
These patterns were most pronounced in rural areas and small towns,
as well as among people from such areas, though there was a range of atti-
tudes toward women’s organizing even in larger towns where gender re-
lations were considered more modern (Denich 1976; S. Woodward 1985).
The Zenica ngo Naš Most (Our Bridge) prided itself as an association of
ordinary women—that is, working-Â�class women or those with rural back-
grounds). Its members expressed appreciation that this was a women’s
organization, because otherwise their husbands or fathers would not ap-
prove of their participating in it. A mixed-�sex group would not be respect-

32â•… Elissa Helms

able. As I met representatives from other women’s groups from around
BiH, I asked them why they had chosen to be a women’s organization. The
majority of those from small towns and villages reacted as if this was a silly
question: they formed women’s organizations because they were women.
It was the natural, normal thing to do, not least because men and women
had different concerns (Helms 2003, 2010). “Let the men organize their
own group,” quipped a member of a women’s group in a village in north-
west BiH when I asked her why the group had organized as a women’s
organization.
The aktiv žena model also lived on in the kinds of activities that these
groups imagined and organized. Naš Most carried out donor-Â�designed
projects when they won funding, such as for support of (ethnic) minority
returnees or microcredit schemes for women, but their one constant ac-
tivity—whether there was funding or not—was to provide a social space
for women. Regular women’s gatherings were held, including elaborate
celebrations of March 8, which featured dinner, live music, bingo, and
dancing until late in the evening. This was considered a once-�a-�year break
from women’s usual housework and family care. At the gathering I at-
tended in 2000, the assumption that the women participants adhered to
such traditionally female domestic roles was reflected in the bingo prizes,
which included sets of pots and pans, cleaning gadgets, beauty products,
and dishes.
Another Zenica women’s group, Merjem (the Islamic version of Mary,
Mother of Jesus), organized similar social activities. A conservative, reli-
gious organization, Merjem made no efforts to secure funding from West-
ern sources (it did organize religious activities for women sponsored by
Islamic groups from BiH and the Middle East). Among its activities were
the type of excursions once organized by aktiv žena groups for the pur-
pose of getting to know new towns and areas of BiH and “exchanging ex-
periences” with other women. As with social gatherings, these trips were
considered sufficiently respectable activities, even though they involved
travel, because they were only for women. Still, when such an excursion
was planned, many of the women would fret beforehand about whether
their husbands or parents would allow them to go, and they scrambled to
complete their domestic chores before the big day.
“Exchanging experiences” was also a phrase that Bosnian participants
used to describe donor-�organized ngo gatherings. Indeed, although
there was a strong resemblance to older patterns and conservative gen-
der regimes, these activities also blended into new-�style ngo organizing

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…33

and were mixed with the discourses of multiethnic civil society, human
rights, and gender equality being promoted by intervention agencies. The
March 8 celebration described above, for example, included speeches
about women’s rights and encouragement to vote for women political
candidates, although the audience was mostly interested in the dancing
and other entertainment.
Bosanka straddled these worlds. Its activities conformed to older pat-
terns: it had been formed during the war to distribute humanitarian aid to
refugees and soldiers, and its members later offered their expertise as pro-
fessionals to educate village women on topics ranging from hygiene and
health to voting rights and even religious or national identity (a role that,
though ideologically very different, recalls the literacy courses run by the
AFŽ in the late 1940s and 1950s). Bosanka also organized social gatherings
and excursions with members of other women’s ngos. At the same time,
its president, Šehida, became interested in democracy and civil society
initiatives. Mostly on her own but always as a representative of Bosanka,
she got involved in various BiH-�wide ngo initiatives. This involvement
may have been motivated in part by a desire to secure funding for Bosanka
from the donor representatives with whom she interacted, but I believed
her enthusiasm to be genuine: she herself had a respectable position as a
district appeals judge and did not have to do this work.
Given this exposure to donor-Â�led initiatives, Šehida’s views and way of
talking quickly diverged from those of most other members of Bosanka.
At Bosanka activities, it was striking to see “old-Â�style” activities such as
excursions and social gatherings become infused with talk about democ-
racy, civil society, and women’s rights. On one occasion, Bosanka hosted a
women’s organization from another town on an excursion to Zenica. After
showing the visitors the main shopping street, the theater, the art gallery
in a former synagogue, and the Islamic pedagogical academy, nearly all
on foot, Šehida had them walk nearly an hour more across town in order
to show them Medica as she considered it important to point out that
Zenica was home to one of the strongest women’s ngos in BiH. After
this stop, Šehida talked to the visiting women about the Zenica women’s
contributions to people’s survival during the war, aid to refugees, postwar
reconstruction, and now the democratization process. The visitors, who
had snapped up Medica’s literature on gender-Â�based violence, feminist
therapy approaches, and women’s rights, were abuzz with talk about the
strength of Bosnian women and the things they were doing to make their
own town a better, more democratic place despite the failings of the male-�

34â•… Elissa Helms

dominated political establishment. What looked from the outside like a
typical women’s excursion—an apolitical, unthreatening diversion for a
group of married women and dutiful daughters—thus became inflected
with the political language of ngo and democratization projects.
A similar mix of styles was to be found with the ubiquitous women’s
knitting projects. One of the first phases of donor interest during and
just after the war was psychosocial therapy, which usually meant women
coming together under the guidance of a psychologist to knit, weave, or
sew products they could later sell. The idea was for women to discuss their
war traumas and find support from each other. Foreign feminists often
criticized such activities as reinforcing traditional gender roles rather than
challenging them. At Medica, however, the Bosnian women defended
their therapeutic knitting and sewing workshop with rural refugee women
as the only way to get women together to talk and be helped. Such women
would never have willingly gone to therapy due to its stigma—they weren’t
crazy, they said. Likewise, activists from Medica Mondiale, Medica’s Ger-
man donors and founders, expressed concern that Medica Zenica’s voca-
tional training in hairdressing, weaving, and sewing reinforced gender-�
typed professions for women (see Walsh 1998). But the Bosnians spun it
differently, evoking a feminism of women’s entrepreneurial independence.
As the coordinator of the training project wrote in Medica’s newsletter,
these activities “contribute[d] to women’s economic independence” and
“strengthen[ed] their self-Â�confidence and their self-Â�reliance” rather than
reinforcing gender-Â�typed professions (Zvizdić 1996, 33):

We are often asked why Medica, as a feminist organisation, trains the

women in “typically female” activities. The reason is that we believe
that traditional women’s activities neither conflict with feminism, nor
with the things feminism fights for and against [sic]. These activities
simply have to be valued correctly. . . . When women form cooperatives
or workshops together and develop an organised system for marketing
their products, they are on the way to economic independence. This
is why women must not allow their work to be forced into categories
which are defined by men. (Ibid.)

Of course, members of the local community and even the women partici-
pants themselves were more likely to interpret such training programs
as precisely the sort of occupations that were suitable for women, as the
natural caregivers and homemakers of society. But the ambiguity in the
two ways of reading the same activities worked to Medica’s advantage, en-

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…35

suring that the group would not be seen as rocking the boat too much. Or-
ganizational forms and activities were thus difficult to read, especially as
many ngo women were proficient in the language of foreign intervention.
In a similar vein, foreign feminists, including those from Medica Mon-
diale, also asked the Bosnian women why they were not more political.
They clearly thought of political activities in terms of public visibility, lead-
ing campaigns and protests, and writing letters to the media, while the
Bosnians had a different vision of the political. “They [the donors] wish
we’d bark [lajati] in public,” explained Duška Andrić-Â�Ružičić, Infoteka’s
president, when I asked her and her colleagues about this one day over
coffee. These activists saw feminists as being “louder” in Zagreb and Bel-
grade, not only in Germany, than in BiH, but they were convinced that
such approaches would backfire in their more conservative country. They
wanted to be more muted; theirs was “feminism the Bosnian way.” As one
of the women put it, “it’s one thing to live here and stay here over the long
term and it’s another to come here for a short time and then go back to
your safe, secure country where the rule of law is in place,” as the Ger-
mans would. Medica and other women’s ngos in their network were in
fact working behind the scenes to improve legislation and to change the
way local institutions responded to gender-�based violence. This approach
had often been successful: they had contributed to the passage of stronger
laws against domestic violence and marital rape and of a state level gender
equality law, and to efforts in many municipalities to respond in a more
supportive way to women victims of violence. Meanwhile, it was some of
the most conservative women’s groups, the mostly female survivors of the
Srebrenica genocide, who were the most public and vocal, actually dem-
onstrating in the streets. Their message had nothing to do with women’s
rights or feminism, however, and in fact largely reinforced conservative
nationalist gender ideals.17
The contrast between groups like Medica and the Srebrenica women’s
groups highlights one of the fundamental critiques of the ngoization of
feminism. On one hand, feminist ngos that preferred to keep a low pub-
lic profile and to get things done behind the scenes challenged the ex-
pectations of feminist donors and supporters as to what women’s rights
(or feminist) activism should look like. Bosnian women who saw them-
selves as feminists maintained that they were taking a much more effective
course by moving slowly and quietly, hoping for long-�term change. They
were also acting on their conviction that the state had an important role
to play, in contrast to neoliberal trends toward the reduction of state wel-

36â•… Elissa Helms

fare programs. It was therefore vital to pursue change on the level of law,
public institutions, and state benefits.
At the same time, however, when viewed from the perspective of cri-
tiques of the ngoization of feminism (Lang 1997), Bosnian feminists were
following precisely the neoliberal script that pushes ngos toward profes-
sionalization and institutional approaches, creating dependence on the
state and donors and stifling mass mobilization on issues of social jus-
tice (Alvarez 1999; Hrycak 2006; Lang 1997; Silliman 1999).18 In this re-
spect, Bosnian feminists were living up to the models put forth by donors
and intervention agencies, including some feminist ones, that encour-
aged ngos to become a link between government and society by honing
their skills in policy advocacy. In fact, most Bosnian feminists considered
this advocacy role to be what made their work political. They were thus
caught between contradictory notions of what political activism should
look like and were more inclined to choose the prevailing model of ngo
advocacy that was backed by most of their donors and potential donors.
They described their choice as a necessity in light of cultural norms and
resistance to publicly active women, but it also helped that this way of
working meant easier access to donor funds and cooperation with state
institutions.

From Boom to Sputter to . . . Movement?

Most of what has been criticized as negative aspects of ngoization were
also present in postwar BiH. ngos employed small numbers of increas-
ingly professionalized staff members, and very few thought of engaging
in activism for its own sake, unpaid or in their spare time. Dependence
on donor funds created disincentives to making contact with the grass-
roots—that is, members of local communities—except as beneficiaries of
services. Indeed, even ngo agendas were donor-�driven. Many avenues
of funding were available for donors’ priorities like refugee return, anti-
trafficking initiatives, and legal aid, issues that only partly or sometimes
barely coincided with activists’ notions of local needs. It was harder to
fund initiatives with more abstract goals like influencing popular notions
of acceptable gendered behavior and increasing public awareness of gen-
der discrimination: such things were not as easily translated into “de-
liverables” as required by donors. It was thus difficult to see how they
could meet the expectations of foreign feminists for public campaigns
and political agitation. Furthermore, many ngos were now offering ser-
vices once provided by, or that could conceivably have been provided by,

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…37

the state, such as shelters for victims of gender-�based violence, which were
never provided by the Yugoslav state but which had now come to be con-
sidered part of a state’s duties according to the norms and regulations of
the European Union. Not all service-�providing ngos stayed away from
political initiatives, but many of them did, choosing the smoother path
of professional rather than (political or feminist) activist identities, com-
munity acceptance, and often also access to local government funds. As
in other parts of the world, then, in BiH ngos were not conducive to pro-
ducing forms of feminism that would emerge as a social movement or a
challenge to the social and political status quo.
It is not surprising to find such characteristics in BiH, given that it
has been caught up in the same global trends—led by some of the same
international, governmental, and private donors and institutions—as are
present in the rest of the world. At the same time, the specifics of the
BiH context produced some opposing tendencies, and I argue that they
arose from circumstances in which women’s activism grew out of ngo
creation and not the other way around. This prompts the question of
whether Bosnia’s is less a case of ngoization of feminism—that is, as a
movement—than it is an example of the movementization of ngos. Let
us consider the trajectory of women’s organizing in BiH since the initial
postwar ngo boom.
As noted above, before the war and the arrival of ngos and foreign
intervention in BiH, there was no women’s organizing beyond the com-
munity level, workplaces, or the communist party.19 The Yugoslav second-�
wave feminist network of the late 1970s and 1980s, made up mostly of aca-
demics and journalists concentrated in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana
(Jancar 1985; Benderly 1997), was hardly noticed in the politically closed
climate of socialist-�era BiH.20 It has only been since the establishment of
ngos, with the support and sometimes also at the initiative of foreign
donors, that any groups or individuals emerged who could be classified as
women’s rights activists or feminists.
After the initial boom of the first few postwar years, ngo leaders began
to worry about the survival of their organizations. There were constant
troubling rumors that donors were leaving BiH and funds were drying up.
Some of this was true, as humanitarian aid agencies and others, including
Medica Mondiale, turned their attention to the next crisis zones, first in
Kosovo and then Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond. However, the major
intervention agencies did not close their offices in BiH, though their repre-
sentatives began to argue that the number of ngos in the country—which

38â•… Elissa Helms

they had done so much to create—was too high for the size of the popula-
tion. Only the fittest organizations would survive, and the struggle favored
those with the right connections and skills, including knowledge of Eng-
lish, to produce fundable project proposals (see, for example, S. Hender-
son 2003; Hemment 2007; S. Phillips 2008). ngos were still operating on
short-�term project budgets, however, and even the strongest faced uncer-
tainty about the months ahead. For example, Medica, one of the oldest
and best established ngos in BiH, went through periods in the mid-�2000s
when it could only sporadically or retroactively pay some of its staff mem-
bers, and in early 2007 it had to drastically cut back services and close the
largest of its facilities. Eventually it found new donors, but these also made
only short-�term commitments. By 2009, the organization had to scale
down significantly, although it continues to be a strong ngo.
Unfunded groups like Bosanka were organizing fewer and fewer activi-
ties in the late 1990s, as its members became more preoccupied with their
families and the challenges of the struggling economy, as noted above in
the case of Edina. Some, like Šehida, Bosanka’s president, continued par-
ticipating in women’s rights initiatives through other funded organiza-
tions. In the run-Â�up to the 2000 general elections, Šehida became involved
with the Bosnian League of Women Voters, which had secured a grant to
promote women candidates. As she traveled around BiH with this project,
Šehida continued to introduce herself as representing Bosanka, although
it was getting more and more difficult to engage the other members of the
group in any activities aside from meeting for coffee and cakes in Zenica.
Šehida complained: “These women just wait around to be told what to do,
where to go. And these are housewives and pensioners who have time to
do something!”
After the 2000 elections, however, even the League’s activities dried
up. Šehida maintained her network of ngo acquaintances and partici-
pated in a few more women’s initiatives, but by 2003 she was fully im-
mersed in some new professional activities and was no longer involved in
women’s issues. By 2007 Naš Most was still operating out of its president’s
house, organizing social gatherings and taking on funded projects when it
could. ngos in rural areas were still active where the refugee reintegration
process was deemed unfinished and donor funds were still available. But
many smaller groups had folded for lack of funds and/or interest.
In the meantime, the established core of the funded women’s groups,
among them most of those that described themselves as feminist ngos,
had strengthened their ties and come together on several entity- and state-�

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…39

level issues, both under donor initiatives and on their own. Cooperation
was not always smooth: competition for diminishing resources brought
out territorial rivalries, and there remained sensitive politicized “ethnic”
issues they were not able to tackle as a collective. Still, they banded
together to support legislative changes, protest acts of sexism, publi-
cize international women’s rights initiatives, and represent BiH abroad.
Among other things, their work spurred the passage of a gender equality
law (2003) and stricter criminalization of domestic violence (by 2005), as
well as the inclusion of survivors of wartime sexual violence in the Fed-
eration law entitling civilian war victims to state benefits (2006). New
organizations have been formed by now-�experienced activists as well as
by younger women eager to try different tactics to bring feminist voices
into the public arena.
Can we call this a movement? Cynthia Cockburn and her coauthors
from Medica posed this question in their research on seven Bosnian
women’s ngos conducted in 2000. They found little evidence of a move-
ment outside of ngos and even found these lacking in their capacity for
“campaigning and advocacy” (Cockburn, Hubić, and Stakić-Â�Domuz 2001,
150). Over a decade later, what advocacy work there was had achieved
some concrete results, and networks among women’s ngos, at least a
select group of them, were even stronger than previously. However, as Jael
Silliman argues, ngos should not be expected to become social move-
ments on their own, though they can be a crucial part of a broader-�based
movement and even function as its initiators (Silliman 1999, 46–48).
Encouragingly, then, developments outside the ngo sector have also
contributed to a sense of an emerging women’s, even feminist, critique
of Bosnian patriarchal norms. Critical journalists, many of them women,
have increasingly taken on issues such as sexual harassment, sex traffick-
ing, the difficulties faced by women in politics, and open intolerance of
homosexuality. The 2000s have seen the emergence of several women film
and documentary directors whose work has taken on women’s perspec-
tives and subjects such as wartime rape (Jasmila Žbanić), fundamentalist
Islam (Žbanić again), female survivors of war (Aida Begić), or the objecti-
fication of female pop singers (Danijela Majstorović). The work of female
visual artists, writers, and poets has also brought forms of gender critique
into public view (see Simmons 2010), as have the women’s art festivals
organized by the feminist foundation cure (Girls) in Sarajevo.21 Bosnian
academics, some with graduate degrees from abroad, have begun to intro-
duce women’s and gender studies into university curricula; a master’s pro-

40â•… Elissa Helms

gram in gender studies was started at the University of Sarajevo in 2006
with an inaugural class that included some of the very professionals, ngo
activists, and journalists who have been driving the increase in visibility
of women’s and gender issues. Debates about gender issues are further en-
couraged by increasing Internet use among younger Bosnians, including
discussions about local topics through social media, chat forums, and web
portals. Feminists and women’s activists have also been part of a general
increase in citizens’ protests on the street and online (see Kurtović 2012),
most encouragingly in the current “Babylution” demonstrations (as this
text goes to press) sparked by government failures to provide something
as basic as personal identification numbers for newborn citizens. Further-
more, besides some now-Â�veteran women’s activists, most of the women
involved in these developments are from a younger generation than the
majority of those active in women’s ngos, suggesting that awareness of
feminist critiques and their impact on public opinion will grow. In these
ways, something approaching a movement or a Bosnian feminist scene
that is broader than ngos may in fact be taking shape.
Still, most of this new activity remains within urban and highly edu-
cated circles, dealing with abstract concepts of art, representation, and
academic theory. The larger public is more likely to respond to practical
issues depicted in an accessible way, even when informed by theoreti-
cal principles. And there was considerable resistance in society as well as
among activists to truly radical campaigns for change (Cockburn 2013).
Again, the way in which ngos developed under the tutelage of foreign
intervention agencies has meant that their work is less visible to the pub-
lic except where they provide services. Women providing care services fit
neatly into patriarchal assumptions about what women should be doing
in society and reinforced the idea of women as (nothing but) vulnerable
victims in need of such services. Many foreign agencies contributed to
this view; even where they encouraged campaigning and advocacy, it was
mostly through quiet lobbying behind the scenes—which, though some-
times effective, did little to influence public awareness. Most crucially,
there was therefore little sense of critical mass in terms of public opinion:
“woman” as a mobilized identity had not been made “politically relevant”
(Gal and Kligman 2000, 106).
Instead, most political initiatives on behalf of women—or using the
new, poorly understood term “gender” (džender)—came to be seen as ad-
dressing the narrow causes of a few ngos working at the behest of foreign
donors. This was also the case when local ngo leaders or Bosnians work-

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…41

ing in international agencies appeared as the spokespeople for such initia-
tives: they tended to be written off as foreign stooges. After all, most suc-
cessful women’s activists were employed by foreign-Â�funded ngos, having
gained the skills necessary to survive in the world of donor projects (see
Hrycak 2006). With the ngo model, there was little room for new people
to get involved: most ngo positions had long ago been claimed, and in any
case their numbers were dwindling as funding decreased. Organizations
trying new forms of activism, such as cure’s arts festival and other public
events, found it difficult to engage volunteers, even among young people,
precisely because the ngo model of employed activists had become the
norm. Despite the rhetoric of intervention agencies about the potential
of ngos to “transform society” or act as “initiators of social and politi-
cal change,” to use slogans from two donor-Â�sponsored ngo meetings I
attended, the ngo model they promoted in many ways hampered the
development of a more widespread or grassroots activism or movement.
Despite the drawbacks of major donor support, its subsiding has also
been troublesome. Some women’s ngos have turned to state institutions
as partners in their work, although they had long operated only under
the scrutiny of their donors, letting the state off the hook in terms of re-
sponsibilities for social welfare. Medica Zenica enjoyed full funding from
its German founders for years, a time that allowed the group’s members
to build up their expertise and work out their political and professional
stances. When German funding dwindled, the Bosnians were forced to
hone their proposal-�writing skills so as to garner funds from other sources.
As mentioned above, they were not always fully successful, and the ngo
has struggled to stay in existence. Its members saw a need to reach out to
government institutions if they were to succeed in realizing their goals.
With the support of foreign institutions based in BiH (particularly one
with a feminist at the helm), in 1999 they began to work with local public
institutions to improve responses to gender-�based violence (Helms 2006).
This cooperation improved their powers of advocacy and their public visi-
bility in ways that had a direct positive impact on the lives of women sur-
vivors of violence, many of whom did not belong to the educated elite.
At the same time that women’s ngos have turned to the state in their
quest for sustainability, donors have also shifted their attention and funds
to the state, as they look for exit strategies or seek to uphold standards of
the European Union that make the state responsible for providing certain
social services, such as those addressing gender-�based violence. However,
feminists like those at Medica’s Infoteka were also wary. Too much merg-

42â•… Elissa Helms

ing of their activities with the state, they felt, would erase the feminist ap-
proach; they preferred to stay independent. As Medica itself, led by one
group of women within the organization, moved closer to integrating its
services with those of local state institutions like the Center for Social
Work, another group formed Infoteka as an independent ngo in 2009.
Both groups continued to see their work as feminist but in different ways
(see Cockburn 2013).

Conclusion: Weighing the Effects of the NGO Boom

Bosnian women’s ngos suffered from many of the problems that char-
acterize contemporary ngos in general and women’s ngos in particu-
lar. However, I maintain that it is unwarranted to reject the ngo form
altogether or to condemn across the board the donors and transnational
agencies that promote ngos, which Steven Sampson has cautioned
against as too simplistic (2002). As the Bosnian case shows, the situation
is more complex.
First, as I have discussed in this essay, what was treated by major inter-
vention agencies as one category—the ngo—was actually a variety of or-
ganizational forms with very different modes of activity and visions of the
groups’ roles in society. Whereas intervention agencies expected all ngos,
and especially women’s ngos, to act as agents of social transformation,
many women’s ngos were focused (nominally) on such issues only be-
cause they either had or hoped to attract funding to work in those areas.
Women did not necessarily see their groups as political actors or agents
of social change; rather, as in the case of those operating along the aktiv
žena model, they saw the organizations as apolitical social outlets for their
members, mutual aid societies, or service providers for the more vulner-
able members of society—that is, as mitigators of the effects of postwar
and postsocialist hardships. Only a handful of ngos, however modestly,
took on the tasks of working for legislative reforms, raising public aware-
ness about forms of gender inequality, or bringing critical voices to their
local communities in ways that might lead to change in dominant gen-
dered practices and cultural expectations.
Second, precisely because of this diversity of forms, it is too much of
a generalization to condemn ngos altogether. Certainly, many women’s
ngos were ineffective, short lived, coopted by state interests, or turned
into professionalized service providers with little or no involvement in
social or political debates. But being an ngo did not necessarily mean
an organization could not have a political edge or take a cautious stance

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…43

toward involvement with the state, as the handful of Bosnian ngos like
Medica/Infoteka show (see, for example, Funk 2006; S. Phillips 2008).
Critics have also attacked the ngo for its dependence on donors and
foreign governments, particularly those pushing neoliberal agendas of
private entrepreneurship and a scaling back of postsocialist or welfare
states (see, for example, Feldman 1997, 2003; Silliman 1999; Ghodsee
2004; Hrycak 2006). Nanette Funk (2006) has offered a range of argu-
ments showing this critique to be too simplistic and too much of a gen-
eralization when applied to postsocialist Europe. The Bosnian case, tar-
geted by both postconflict reconstruction and development agencies as
well as those promoting postsocialist democratization and marketization,
only adds to the complexity that must be considered. In BiH it was more
difficult to see the effects of neoliberal agendas, since processes of post-
socialist economic reconstruction were often masked by discourses of
postwar reconstruction and state building (Jansen 2006; Gilbert 2006).
Bosnian ngos that provided social services were indeed often stepping
in where state programs had collapsed and had not been reinstated under
the logic of marketizing reforms.22 But this was not always so, especially
with women’s ngos that provided aid to women war victims or, later,
shelters for survivors of domestic violence and sex trafficking—the state
had never addressed such issues. Without ngos and particular officials
who were specifically concerned about women, it is doubtful that such
services would have appeared.
Furthermore, we cannot assume that either the intentions or the effects
of all donor policies were neoliberal or even upheld the interests of West-
ern governments. In the Bosniac-�dominated areas of BiH, donors from
Muslim countries financed a range of humanitarian and educational
projects, including those for women that were aimed more at strength-
ening Bosniacs’ commitment to Islam. If we consider only Western-Â�based
donors, which did share a large set of goals in BiH, there were also alter-
native donor organizations with environmental or feminist approaches
that did not share neoliberal agendas (see Funk 2006). Indeed, as men-
tioned above, most aid to Bosnian women’s groups, both feminist and
non-�feminist, was the result of a desire to help women victims of war and/
or support women in peace and reconciliation efforts (a focus not without
its own problems: see Helms 2003, 2010, 2013). Furthermore, if we con-
sider the European Union as a major Western donor and policy maker, we
see in the case of women’s shelters that it shifted its focus from ngos to

44â•… Elissa Helms

the state: even though women’s ngos had begun the only existing shelters,
EU standards now dictated that this was the responsibility of state institu-
tions and channeled funds for such projects away from ngos.
Feminist donors and individuals working for intervention agencies
were also instrumental in fostering connections among women’s activists
in BiH and beyond, which Millie Thayer has argued is a powerful effect
of contemporary ngo activism even in the most remote corners of the
world (2010). Bosnian activists had built working relationships across a
fractured BiH, the successor states of Yugoslavia, other postsocialist states
in transition, and globally, leading to increased awareness of gender issues
elsewhere and lessons learned from the experiences of other activists. This
facet of the activists’ work carried its own dangers, because connected
women’s activists could spend more time networking on the Internet and
traveling to conferences abroad than connecting with their own local
communities. Nevertheless, these connections ultimately spawned new
levels of awareness and critique and fostered a sense of common cause, at
least among a small group of activists. This effect may be limited, but it is
not inconsequential.
In the case of BiH, it must therefore be acknowledged that most of
these ngo women would not have become activists at all had it not been
for foreign intervention.23 Given the global ngo trend (Silliman 1999;
A. Sharma 2008) and developments in the rest of postsocialist Europe
(Wedel 2001; Mendelson and Glenn 2002), it is difficult to imagine a sce-
nario in which ngos would not have emerged in BiH. The wartime vio-
lence spurred many women into action, but even if there had not been a
war, the burgeoning women’s ngo scene in the larger cities of Yugoslavia
in the 1980s would certainly have spread into BiH. However, without mas-
sive foreign intervention, it is doubtful that so many ngos would have
emerged, especially in so many smaller towns and villages. Despite the fact
that the bulk of this activity eventually petered out, did nothing to chal-
lenge patriarchal norms, or became little more than professional service
provision, organizations and individuals were still exposed to critiques
of established gender ideologies and began to formulate their own new
awareness of gender inequalities (Cockburn, Hubić, and Stakić-Â�Domuz
2001). This was due to the great mobility of people, ideas, and resources
that characterized the donor-�driven ngo scene, and to the fact that inter-
vention agencies kept women’s roles visible, even if in sometimes conser-
vative ways.

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…45

 In her essay in this volume, Sonia Alvarez notes that social activists
in Latin America have managed, in spite of the structural obstacles she
critiqued in her earlier work (1999), to do some unseen movement work
toward social change. Women’s activists in BiH have also engaged in such
work. The critique of ngoization must therefore be more precise in its
terms. ngos come in many forms in terms of their organization and mis-
sion and the motivation of those involved, as well as of their relationships
with different kinds of donors and the state. Donors also come in differ-
ent guises. The Bosnian case demonstrates that committed feminist activ-
ism or movement work, however limited, can indeed emerge from the
ngo world. Although any movementization will have to encompass more
than just ngos, the possibility is there precisely because of the exposure
to women’s and feminist issues afforded by and through women’s ngos.

Notes
For their helpful feedback on this essay, I thank Paul Stubbs, Duška Andrić-Â�Ružičić,
Jill Benderly, and this volume’s editors, Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal. For
financial and institutional support of various stages of the research on which this
analysis is based, I thank the International Research and Exchanges Board, the Insti-
tute for the Study of World Politics, and the Central European University. A version
of this text appears in Helms 2013.
1. A key informant of Sarah Phillips—an anthropologist who studied women’s ngo
activists in postsocialist Ukraine—used the same metaphor about the ngo boom
in that country (Phillips 2008, 65).
2. Cargo cults, first described around the turn of the twentieth century by anthro-
pologists working in Melanesia and the Pacific islands drove people to dream of
riches (cargo) arriving for them by boat or plane in the same way they saw hap-
pening for colonizers and white traders. The cults’ adherents imitated white be-
haviors, even constructing fake harbors and landing strips out of bamboo so as
to lure ships and planes full of cargo.
3. Edwards and Hulme (1998) might call them gros (grassroots organizations), dis-
tinguishing them from transnational ngos. I avoid such terminology since the
connection to grassroots or local communities was often tenuous, despite claims
to the contrary.
4. Stef Jansen (2006) uses “foreign intervention agencies” as an improvement on
the standard “international community,” a misleading term for what is in fact a
diverse group of actors and interests. I, too, refer to these actors collectively as
intervention agencies, emphasizing Jansen’s caveat that the “foreign” designation
reflects more the ways in which these agencies were seen and sought to portray
themselves than an objective reality, since such actors were well integrated into
local and regional networks, employing “locals” at many levels (see Lendvai and
Stubbs 2009; Pugh 2003).

46â•… Elissa Helms

 5. The main exceptions to this were donors from Muslim countries that primarily
worked to strengthen Bosniacs’ devotion to Islam and the global Muslim com-
munity. Additionally, certain smaller donors and individual activists, including
feminists, were less explicitly dedicated to free-�market goals.
6. What I refer to as agencies or institutions were therefore sometimes also donors,
sponsoring short-�term projects, training programs, and myriad ngo meetings.
Institutions like Office of the High Representative, osce, and the World Bank
also made broad policy and set the tone for more traditional ngo donors, orga-
nizations that of course had their own sets of goals and principles. The interven-
tion agencies were mainly responsible for maintaining the focus on ethnic recon-
ciliation, refugee return, and the weakening of nationalist political forces, along
with a less explicitly stated but equally strong emphasis on dismantling socialist
economic structures and establishing a market economy that was receptive to
foreign investment.
7. An interesting contrast can be drawn with Western, especially US, strategies to
build civil society in other postsocialist countries. Thomas Carothers has noted
that US policy in Romania in the 1990s focused specifically on “civic advocacy
organizations . . . seeking to affect government policy” (1996, 65) in order to pre-
vent a return to communism. In BiH the focus on opposing nationalists has led
to sometimes blatant support of former communists, seen as a multiethnic and
nonnationalist alternative.
8. The Gender Center of the Federation was established at the end of 2000, followed
by the Gender Center of the Republika Srpska at the end of 2001 and the state-�
level Agency for Gender Equality on February 19, 2004 (see http://www.arsbih
.gov.ba/, accessed June 20, 2013).
9. Prominent actors in this field were the star (Strategies, Training, Advocacy for
Reconciliation) Project, a US-�based feminist group that for a time distributed
US Agency for International Development money (the project was initially part
of Delphi International, though it later joined World Learning), and Kvinna til
Kvinna (Women to Women), a Swedish group formed by feminist peace activ-
ists that operated with a budget from the Swedish International Development
Agency.
10. The official name of the communist party was the League of Communists of
Yugoslavia. I use the generic name for simplicity.
11. In a ruined economy where jobs were scarce and salaries low, ngos were indeed
a lucrative source of employment for those who could get it. They also offered
travel opportunities that were less available to the general public due to both ex-
penses and visa restrictions.
12. This function was already being attempted by the independent press, but many
Bosnians noted wryly that the media’s exposure of scandals, hypocrisy, and cor-
ruption rarely had any repercussions for those in power.
13. Socialist-Â�era community organizations (the aktiv žena discussed below) and
neighborhood-�level administrative units (the mjesna zajednica) did occasionally

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…47

 recruit volunteers—mostly youths or women—to clean up a park or distribute
toys to an orphanage, but that was during more prosperous times.
14. Given these realities, it is therefore disingenuous to discount local ngo partici-
pants as cynical manipulators or insufficiently committed because they are em-
ployed in ngos (Stubbs 2007).
15. Elsewhere, I discuss both these legacies in the context of women’s roles in ethnic
reconciliation and refugee return (Helms 2010).
16. Official women’s organizations continued to exist under the umbrella of the Na-
tional Front of the Working People. They were led by women high in the com-
munist party hierarchy, many of whom had been active in the World War II par-
tisan movement that spawned the afž (see Dobos 1983; Sklevicky 1984). A new
feminist movement began in the 1970s, flourishing in the 1980s and giving rise
to the first feminist and lesbian ngos, but these activities were little noticed in
BiH (see below).
17. Positioned as grieving widows and mothers, the Srebrenica women’s groups’
cause was the location and burial of their missing male loved ones and the prose-
cution of those responsible for their deaths; they explicitly distanced themselves
from feminism or any initiative concerned with women’s rights (Helms 2013).
18. Among women’s activists, I heard no shortage of criticism of the effects of neo-
liberal logics, not in such terms but as complaints about “wild capitalism” or in
contrast to the positive aspects of socialism. However, there was no discussion
of the role of ngos in neoliberal formations. I heard the term “neoliberalism” for
the first time in BiH in 2008, and it was used by a young progressive male activist
who had been educated abroad and was plugged into transnational networks of
resistance to globalization.
19. It is important to note, however, that voluntary organizations, including women’s
and feminist groups, were present in BiH even before the socialist era, starting in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hadžibegović and Kamberović
1997; Sampson 2003).
20. One Sarajevo sociology professor, Nada Ler-Â�Sofronić, who was a member of
those prewar feminist networks, brought feminist critiques of Marxism into
her university lectures and radio show, which no doubt influenced some people.
However, I have never encountered a women’s ngo activist in BiH who said she
was aware of those activities before the war.
21. One could also add the Queer (arts) Festival organized in September 2008 in
Sarajevo and subsequent activities of BiH’s small but growing queer activist com-
munity, although public reactions to these developments have been mixed, both
increasing awareness of gay rights issues but also bringing hitherto hidden homo-
phobia into public debates.
22. At the same time, some benefits programs were thriving. These were mostly
aimed at categories of people created or given new meaning by the war, usually
defined by ethnicity and/or loyalty to nationalist parties, which used such bene-
fits as clientelistic networks to maintain their power. Thus, even the World Bank

48â•… Elissa Helms

 found it was politically impossible to reign in benefits to war veterans or families
of fallen soldiers (see Bougarel 2006, 2007; Grandits 2007).
23. Some, particularly in the younger generation, were on this path only because they
had been educated abroad, having fled the war or sought educational opportuni-
ties that were unavailable in BiH.

The Movementization of NGOs?â•…49

╉CHAPTER 2 Lauren Leve

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepal

Rethinking Subaltern Consciousness and Women’s Empowerment

Humanity is a modernist figure; and this humanity has a generic face, a

universal shape. Humanity’s face has been the face of a man.
—Donna Haraway, 1992

If the question of female subaltern consciousness is a red herring, the

question of subaltern consciousness as such must be judged a red her-
ring as well.
—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1988

I am worried about my own country. In our country, nothing has hap-

pened besides murders and killings. Our country is our home. If the
country is destroyed, our village is disturbed, and if the village is dis-
turbed, our home is disturbed, and if our home is disturbed, then we’re
destroyed too.
—Padam Kumari Gorkha

On February 13, 1996, a homemade bomb exploded at the agri-

cultural development bank in rural Gorkha district, Nepal. The
blast damaged the building and its furniture; more importantly,
the attack destroyed all records of the bank’s agricultural loans.
Within hours, nearly simultaneous attacks took place at police
posts in Rolpa and Rukum districts, further west. Together, these
assaults announced the commencement of a decade long armed
Maoist revolt against the government of Nepal and what their in-
stigators defined as 200 plus years of feudal exploitation of Nepal’s
peasantry, the beginning of the jana yuddha—or “People’s War.”
 The onset of the insurrection took most Nepalis by surprise.1 Initially
dismissed by the political center as an aberrant phenomenon confined
mainly to a few areas in the far western region, the movement grew by
leaps and bounds; less than six years later it had penetrated almost all of
Nepal’s seventy-Â�five districts, and by 2006, 70 percent of the countryside
was said to be under Maoist control. As the scale of the conflict grew, so
too did its casualties. By 2006, more than 13,000 people had been killed
in connection with the uprising and state efforts to suppress it. Rape, kid-
napping, and disappearances have become commonplace, and both the
Maoists and the state have been accused of human rights abuses. Schools,
health posts, and development projects have been disrupted or forced to
close all over the country, and infrastructure such as airstrips, bridges,
and telephone lines have been destroyed. As a result of all this, as many
as 200,000 people have fled their rural homes, which are now sites of vio-
lent struggle, seeking work abroad or migrating to Nepali cities as internal
refugees (idps).2 Today, it is brutally clear that the insurrection and its at-
tendant violence, insecurity, and infrastructural destruction have threat-
ened—and in many cases destroyed—millions of rural and urban people’s
abilities to sustain themselves and pursue their social lives and livelihoods.
The speed and intensity with which the insurgency gained support in
the countryside has inspired an abundant literature on rural life and the
roots of the rebellion.3 Almost immediately, four factors were identified as
motivating popular support: (1) popular disillusionment with the failure
of the Nepali state to deliver the expected democratization of local social
relations and political authority after the victory of the first jana andolan
(People’s Movement) and the establishment of multiparty democracy in
1990; (2) continuing poverty and a widening gap between rural and urban
quality of life despite four decades of intensive development; (3) wide-
spread frustration with corruption at all levels of government; and (4) a
backlash against the brutality of police, and later army, counterinsurgency
campaigns.
The first three of these have been glossed as related elements of a broad,
singularly encompassing cause: that of “failed” or “incomplete” develop-
ment. Pointing to the fact that the districts at the heart of the insurrection,
Rolpa and Rukum, were among the poorest in Nepal, many analysts have
explained the revolt as the result of rising expectations combined with
continued or even increasing deprivation.4 Despite the fact that millions of
dollars had been devoted to rural development, uneven distribution of aid

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…51

benefits and political voice between urban centers and rural hinterlands,
between rural districts, and between classes of rural and urban people
themselves was recognized as a development failure and a threat to the
state. The most common prescription for this malady—advanced at aca-
demic conferences, ngo seminars, political summits, and in a host of
books, articles, and working papers on the topic—was more and better
development aid.
As we will see, all of these factors are important. Yet they are all gen-
der blind—a remarkable oversight given women’s extraordinary visibility
in the revolt. One of the most commented on features of the rebellion is
the unprecedented degree of women’s participation, and the rebels’ own
emphasis on women’s liberation has been widely discussed.5 One-Â�third
of all foot soldiers in Maoist strongholds are said to be women. Women
occupy positions of leadership throughout the Maoist hierarchy, partici-
pate actively in village defense groups, and work as couriers and guides.
It is reported that some of “the most violent actions against local ‘tyrants’
are associated with all women-Â�guerrilla groups” (Gautam, Banskota, and
Manchanda 2001, 236–37). Indeed, the journalist-Â�scholar and human
rights activist Rita Manchanda has suggested that Gorkhali women’s
active support for the Maoists reflects not the absence or failure of de-
velopment activities there, but, to the contrary, their surprising success.
In an essay titled “Empowerment with a Twist” (1999), she proposes that,
at least in Gorkha district, the insurrection has benefited from two de-
cades of development work. In particular, she and her colleagues Shobha
Gautam and Amrita Banskota propose that women’s presence among the
rebels has been boosted by the adult women’s literacy programs run by
an American ingo:

In Gorkha district, it is literate women and men who are joining the
struggle. Ironically, it is the success of the adult literacy campaign
which has paved the way for women to become active in the public life
of the community, for girls to go to schools and for girls politicized in
school to be drawn into the armed struggle. (Gautam, Banskota, and
Manchanda 2003, 121)

By this theory, far from discouraging violence, development activities have

actually helped catalyze it: “Literacy campaigns . . . designed to promote
the empowerment of women inadvertently encouraged many conscient-
ised young women to choose subsequent empowerment through armed
struggle” (Gautam, Banskota, and Manchanda 2003, 121).6

52â•… Lauren Leve

 The contrast between this hypothesis and the “failed development” ac-
count raises questions about the relationship between development and
rural insurrection in Nepal, especially given the industry’s concern to pro-
mote “participation” and “empowerment.” Does popular support for the
rebellion reflect the incompleteness or failure of the development enter-
prise, or is it an inadvertent result? What is “empowerment,” and how is
it related to democracy—and/or violent resistance to the developmental
state? Are women different types of social actors than men? What are the
relations between—and/or results of—transformations in political, de-
velopmental, or gendered consciousness? As we will see, addressing these
questions requires ethnographic engagement with development as both
ideological practice and practical enterprise. It also demands a critical re-
thinking of conventional understandings of subaltern subjectivity and its
relation to oppositional political consciousness.
This study is focused on the same Gorkhali women Manchanda re-
ferred to above, women who participated in an ingo-Â�run rural women’s
literacy and empowerment program in the mid-Â�1980s—and who are for
the most part actively sympathetic to the uprising now, even as they criti-
cize the violence and lament lives lived in fear—and lives lost. It is impor-
tant to note at the outset that the women on whose experiences my re-
flections are based are not official members of the rebel cadre. They have
not left their homes to join the People’s Army in the forest; nor are they
party activists or members of the local militia, on the whole. Yet they sup-
port the rebels by feeding them, housing them, and, most importantly,
not informing the government about their activities or whereabouts. As
in other parts of the country, such help can tax already stretched food
supplies and inspire violent retribution from military forces, so this inti-
mate proximity is also a source of fear, which is a reality that shaped all the
communications on which this chapter is based.7 But without their sup-
port, these women told me, the insurgents would be lost. And as I have
learned through my observations of daily life in this “conflict zone,” the
notion that there are two distinct and opposed sides is mostly an illusion
anyway (Leve 2004).8
My approach reflects the difficulties of doing direct ethnography with
the Maoists themselves. It is also, however, a result of circumstance. I first
learned of Manchanda’s article when it was forwarded to me by the direc-
tor of the ingo she credited for helping to catalyze Gorkhali women’s
revolutionary consciousness. A note attached concluded with the ques-
tion: “Interested?”

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…53

 Given my relationship to the program and its participants, it was hardly
surprising that the director thought I might be interested. At the point
that Manchanda made her trip to Gorkha and published her article, I’d
known the women from the program she was talking about for nine years
and had published two commissioned studies on the effects of the pro-
gram, one specifically focused on the question of women’s empowerment.
My first research trip to Gorkha was in 1991, at which time I did ethno-
graphic interviews and organized a quantitative survey of women who had
taken part in the course in order to understand the effects of the program
five years after it was completed. On the basis of this report, the ingo,
which I will henceforth refer to as dfa (Development for All),9 asked me
to return in 1995–96 to do a ten-Â�year retrospective evaluation. Women’s
empowerment was a particular concern in the development world at that
time—as well as a personal interest of mine—so I centered my next round
of research on this. What all this meant when the director contacted me
was that I had a decade of longitudinal data on the effects of the program
on its participants as individuals and the community as a whole.
Plus, I’d made friends—the women I’d stayed with and worked with
while doing the research, field-�based employees of dfa who helped me
at every stage, the teachers, keepers of tea stalls and shopkeepers that
I’d interviewed or bantered with on the path, and, of course, the women
themselves, plus various of their parents, husbands, brothers, sisters,
mothers-Â�in-Â�law, and children I’d met along the way. When I returned in
early 2001 during a ceasefire, Gorkha was officially classified as a “severely
affected area,” and I wondered how—and whether—I’d be received. The
fact that people remembered me and the relationships that dfa had built
meant that I was welcomed, however, and I found familiar faces willing
to work with me again. Since then, I’ve stayed with participants and their
families every time I’ve returned to Gorkha, and, when the war made it
impossible for me to go there myself, local women who’d worked with me
in the past—including some who had learned to read in the program I’ll
be discussing—continued the interviewing for me. At those times, I also
worked with Gorkhali migrants to Kathmandu and met others in the dis-
trict center.
This chapter attempts to bring what I have learned from them to bear
on the “failed development” thesis—and Manchanda’s ironic “successful
development” one. It seeks to understand participants’ understandings
of development and its relation to social and gender justice, the forms

54â•… Lauren Leve

of consciousness that participants took from their experience of literacy
study, and their redeployment of these against the state in the context of
changes in the material realities and human expectations of men, women,
and families in the region. At the end, we will see that while there is no
single reason for the support Gorkhali women feel for the insurrection—
understandings of it and affinities for it reflect multiple circumstances and
subjectivities—all their own stories, reflections, and explanations presume
a very different sort of self: a self that is not, could not be, and does not
wish to be purely autonomous in the way most theories of rural empower-
ment presume, but rather defines itself by its relationships and, especially,
its commitments. This is a self which, as Bakhtin might have put it, only
exists at the point where it meets others. This insight has implications for
theoretical understandings of rural empowerment and political radical-
ization, which in turn, has implications for imagining why some people
might wish to leave their homes and take up arms, and thus what kind of
human development projects are likely to support peace.

Women’s Empowerment in Gorkha District

The ancestral home of the Shah dynasty, Gorkha is probably the district
with the greatest name recognition beyond Kathmandu. Indeed, it was
from a palace that one literally passes on the way to the villages I will be
describing that Prithvinarayan Shah, tenth generation grandfather to the
current king, Gyanendra, set out with his armies to conquer—Â�nationalists
say “unite”—the lands that collectively comprise the sovereign space of
modern Nepal.10 As a result of this privileged history, the district has as-
sumed a pride of place in the nationalist consciousness. Indeed it was one
of the first regions targeted for intensive development, and Gorkha Bazaar
remains one of the few district centers in the mid-�hills accessible by road.
Nevertheless, the district has a strong leftist past, was one of the early
Maoist strongholds, and remains a hotbed of insurrectionary support.
In the first eight years of the war, no fewer than twenty-�one individuals
from the two Village Development Committees (vdcs) that I will collec-
tively refer to as Chorigaon left their homes to join the Maoists in the for-
ests and underground.11 By 2006, eleven people had been killed in the two
vdcs by the state security forces (all were civilians, of whom nine were
local residents, including three teenagers and two teachers), in addition
to at least two others from the area who had joined the People’s Army and
died fighting elsewhere. For their part, the Maoists had killed more than

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…55

forty police and army personnel posted there, including the dramatic mas-
sacre of twenty-�three soldiers in a single attack on a police post. To get a
sense of what these numbers mean in terms of the experience of violence
in everyday life, consider that all of this has taken place in a community
consisting of just 801 households spread out in an area of less than ten
square miles (twenty-�five square kilometers).12
Geographically, most of Chorigaon is laid out vertically: it is bordered
on three sides by rivers and ranges up to about 1,230 meters in altitude
at its peak. Socially, it comprises about eighteen ethnically diverse settle-
ments, all of which are predominantly Hindu. The fastest way to reach
there from Kathmandu is to take a bus or other vehicle to the district cen-
ter (approximately 190 kilometers, a six- to eight-�hour ride), and then walk
another six to nine hours on an unpaved path down a river valley and back
up the mountain and along the ridge on the other side. A twisting road to
a nearby village, where the Maoists ransacked a small dfa office in 199613
and which now hosts a military barracks, was constructed sometime be-
tween 1996 and 2001. It remains unpaved, however, and is only motor-
able in the dry season. A small part of one vdc became electrified in the
mid-�1990s; a telephone line that was also installed then has since been de-
stroyed in the war. What this means is little electricity, no reliable roads,
and, since many of the water taps that dfa installed in the 1980s are no
longer functioning, women may walk an hour or more in the dry season
to get drinking water an average of nine times per day.14
Despite this, Chorigaon is fairly well off compared to other hill vil-
lages in other parts of Nepal. dfa’s early investments in schools, health,
agriculture, and microcredit programs—and especially its commitment
to employing local people in the region, at its central offices and, since
leaving Gorkha, at other project sites—has helped promote education, im-
prove health and nutrition, and elevate the standard of living in the area
as a whole. Moreover, its location, only a day’s walk from the road head
and less than a day from the capital by bus, makes it relatively accessible
by rural Nepal standards. In fact, little of the mid-�hill region is electrified
or has road access, despite the fact that Nepal was 90 percent rural be-
fore the start of the war. Most families are subsistence farmers: in 1983,
when the literacy program began, 98 percent of households owned land,
although less than 55 percent were able to feed themselves from their land
for more than six months in an average year.15 Neither of these patterns
has significantly changed, although cash needs have increased. Before the

56â•… Lauren Leve

conflict began to force people out of the rural vdcs, most households
supplemented their agricultural production with salaries and pensions
earned through service in the British, Indian, or Nepali armies; through
private employment in the district center, India, or Kathmandu; and/or by
working others’ fields, portering, or other kinds of day labor. Today, locals
estimate that almost every home has at least one member living full time
outside of the village whose income is critical to sustaining the house-
hold. Migration for wage labor on this scale has grown up largely since
the establishment of democracy in 1990.
The history of women’s development programming in the region
dates to 1983 when dfa organized an evening literacy course for adults.
Although the class was technically open to both men and women, the
organizers found that women—few of whom had attended school as
children—enrolled in the class at a much higher rate. Nonformal adult
education (nfe) was a relatively new concept in Nepal at that point. The
first nfe courses in that area had been introduced just the previous year
in a neighboring vdc. Yet the program rapidly proved to be a popular suc-
cess. In 1983–84, 1,052 people enrolled in twenty-Â�five nfe courses in the
two vdcs.16 Eighty-�seven percent of these participants were female. By
the end of the program in 1986–87, more than 1,600 people had attended
one or more of the literacy classes, and almost half of the participants had
completed the three-�year curriculum. Given that the total population of
adult women (between fifteen and sixty) in Chorigaon in 1983 was about
1,634, this means that roughly two-�thirds of the women in the two vdcs
comprising Chorigaon participated in the nfe program.
A notable feature of these courses was their emancipatory intent. Most
women’s literacy courses offered in Nepal today are six or nine months
that are treated primarily as a lead-�in to income-�generation classes,
microcredit programs, or savings and loan groups. This reflects the cur-
rent dominance of neoliberal ideology in development planning, which
posits the market as the institution best suited to delivering overall social
good and understands women’s empowerment as largely a matter of facili-
tating women’s participation in cash-Â�yielding forms of production and
consumer life (see Feldman 1997; Fernando 1997; Karim 2001; Leve 2001;
Leve and Karim 2001; Rankin 2001, 2004). In contrast, dfa’s program in
Chorigaon was a three-�year course with a participatory goal. According
to the agency’s first formal program evaluation—which was written by
two people who went on to occupy the top two positions in the agency

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…57

for many years—its main intent in teaching literacy and numeracy skills
was to “assist program participants in identifying the problems faced by
their families and communities” and to help them “achieve greater self-Â�
confidence so they can shape their own environment through develop-
ment activities” (Sob and Leslie 1988, 3).
In prioritizing “the idea of self-Â�help and people’s participation in com-
munity development projects,”17 the dfa program reflected fundamen-
tal ideals associated with the community-�based integrated rural develop-
ment (cbird) paradigm which was popular at that time. These ideals were
also reflected in its curriculum, “Naya Goreto” (New Path), an innovative
pedagogical package based on the ideas of the radical Brazilian educator
Paolo Freire as adapted to Nepal by researchers at Tribhuvan University’s
cerid (the Center for Educational Research, Innovation, and Develop-
ment) and the Boston-�based ingo World Education.18 Inspired by the
Freirean ideal of “education as the practice of freedom,”19 “Naya Goreto”
aimed to combine community development, literacy learning, and criti-
cal empowerment in a way that would transform the consciousness of
its participants. Freire believed that traditional educational methods de-
humanize the downtrodden by reinforcing their sense of alienation and
inadequacy (brought on by subjection to the hegemony of the dominant
classes). He designed his pedagogy to help the people he alternately re-
ferred to as “peasants” and as “the oppressed” remake themselves as, liter-
ally, “new men” through a process of “conscientization”—a transformation
whereby learners come to recognize their own value and knowledge and
thus “enter the historical process as responsible Subjects,” build a quali-
tatively “new society,” and become “authentic” and “complete” human
beings (Freire 1970, 18, 140, 65, 29). “Naya Goreto” followed this lead in
that, “in addition to providing information,” the program was designed to
inspire a critical dialogue that would “help participants develop problem-Â�
solving skills, self-�confidence, and a realization of their potential both as
individuals and as members of a community.”20
The dfa program also followed Freire in rejecting what he identified
as the “banking” method of learning, where authoritative teachers “de-
posit” chunks of knowledge into passive student recipients. Instead, he—
and they—advocated a “keyword” approach in which participants learned
phonetic letters in the context of specific words—such as “work” (kām),
“water” (pāni) and “liquor” (raksi)—which “would cause [student] par-
ticipants to examine their own practices and consider changing them.” As

58â•… Lauren Leve

each keyword was introduced, class participants were encouraged to dis-
cuss the ways in which these terms or practices were issues in their own
lives using comic-Â�strip stories about rural women’s everyday dilemmas
and illustrations of people engaged in keyword-�related activities. The aim
of the discussions was to promote collective reflection and critical analy-
sis of themes such as poverty, economic class and caste, environmental
degradation, gender bias and inequality, bribery, and corruption.21
As noted, the program ran for three years consecutively. It met two
hours per night five nights a week for six to eight months during the dry
season. It took place in the evening so that women could finish their work
before they came. Classes were held under trees, in public buildings, or
in lean-�to huts constructed for that purpose. Each facilitator, as nfe in-
structors were called, was given a packet of supplemental materials, a
blackboard, and a kerosene lamp as teaching equipment. Participants re-
ceived textbooks, a notebook, and one pencil each, in return for providing
twenty-�five paisa a month for kerosene and a five-�rupee registration fee.22
The first person to arrive any evening was expected to sweep out the space
and/or cover it with fresh straw.
Despite a 30 percent dropout rate as a result of illness, marriage, or
death, the program was highly successful. Five years after the completion
of the course, 70 percent were still able to read and write their names.23
At the end of the program, participants formed savings and loan groups,
opened shops, and took up formal positions as Community Health Vol-
unteers. A few joined local development committees, and 41 percent re-
ported that they felt more confident speaking in public and/or asserting
themselves. About a dozen girls joined the public school system in class
four. Now having passed the eighth, ninth, or tenth class or studying at
the university level, they formed the first cohort of educated girls in Chori-
gaon. Their mothers and sisters who studied at Adult Literacy Centers
(alcs) also proved more disposed to send their other daughters to school.
As a result of this, along with government media messages promoting
education, changing aspirations, and brute survival needs,24 most children
of both sexes attend school in Chorigaon today—or at least they did until
the intensification of the conflict, which has shut down, interrupted, and
made parents fearful to send their children to schools.
According to its creators, the Naya Goreto program was intended “to
serve as a catalyst for development by exposing participants to new ideas
and information and by giving them a vision of what was possible.”25 Did

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…59

this catalyze a vision of revolutionary transformation as well? There is rea-
son to believe that perhaps in some cases, it did. When I asked one woman
about why people in Chorigaon supported the insurrection, her answer
was succinct: “The Maoists work for social justice (sāmājik nyāya).” When
I asked her if she remembered when she first began to use that term and/
or the ideals it expresses, she thought for a moment and then replied: “In
the adult literacy course.”
This exchange would appear to suggest that the nfe experience did in-
deed plant seeds that would later help to radicalize its participants. Yet as
the next few sections of the chapter will show, Manchanda’s thesis rests
on specific assumptions about development, empowerment, and revolu-
tionary consciousness that are not quite as suited to the situation as they
may at first seem.

Underdevelopment as a Cause of Violence or Development as a Violent Process?

“Empowerment” at USAID and in Theories of Conscientization
Before weighing in on what actually happened in Gorkha, we need to ex-
amine this and some other questions raised by the failed development
thesis. Scholarly understandings of the relationships between violence
and development have tended to fall into one of two broad perspectives.
The first—which is the dominant line of analysis in mainstream develop-
ment agencies and policy circles—recognizes poverty and poverty-Â�related
despair as a powerful threat to peace and stability. It therefore sees devel-
opment, as a process that works to alleviate that poverty, as decreasing the
chance of violent uprisings. According to this theory, “failed” or “incom-
plete” development is the cause of the conflict in Nepal (and many other
parts of the world), and more, better, and farther-�reaching interventions
hold the promise of relief.
Against this, other scholars have advanced the claim that development
itself is a form of structural violence—a neo-Â�imperial enterprise through
which industrialized Northern countries continue to dominate and ex-
ploit the so-�called Third World (Esteva 1992; Sachs 1992; Cowen and
Shenton 1995; Des Chene 1996; Rahnema and Bawtree 1997). Anthropo-
logical studies along these lines have denounced development as a govern-
mental instrument that serves the interests of transnational corporations
against postcolonial peoples and states (Gupta 1998); charged that devel-
opment discourse creates new, disempowering forms of subjectivity like
“underdeveloped,” “illiterate” and “1.d.c.” (Pigg 1992, 1997; Escobar 1995,

60â•… Lauren Leve

1996; Shrestha 1995); or deemed it an “anti-Â�politics machine” which dis-
guises the deeply political nature of its work beneath a seemingly objec-
tive technical-�managerial discourse (1990). This is, of course, an analysis
that the Maoists share.26
Proponents of each position agree that the solution is to promote free-
dom, but each works with a different idea of what freedom means.
For an example of how the first position plays out in practice, we need
only turn our eyes to Washington, D.C. In its fy2004 congressional bud-
get justification, usaid cited the unequal distribution of development’s
benefits between rural and urban areas as a key reason for agrarian sup-
port for the Maoists and attributed this to a dysfunctional political system
that perverts development delivery:

Poor governance and corruption, [Nepal’s] forbidding terrain and lack

of infrastructure all contribute to its development gains being un-
evenly distributed. . . . The Maoist insurgency . . . has found fertile
ground largely in response to Nepal’s poverty, exclusion, and poor gov-
ernance.27

In response, the agency proposed programs that would increase national

wealth by promoting and rationalizing the hydropower and forest/agri-
cultural products sectors and expanding “good governance” to deepen
democracy. The integrating theme of these goals, as they put it, was “better
governance for equitable growth.”28
A White House paper released at the end of September 2002 specifies
the assumptions with which usaid was operating. It specifically linked
democracy and development to the freedom of the market, and also out-
lined the historic role the United States sought to play in promoting neo-
liberal security:

The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totali-
tarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and
a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy
and free enterprise. In the 21st century, only nations that share a com-
mitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political
and economic freedom everywhere will be able to unleash the poten-
tial of their people and assure their future prosperity. . . . [The United
States seeks] to create a balance of power that favors human freedom:
conditions in which all nations and societies can choose for themselves
the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty. . . . The

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…61

 United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the bene-
fits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope
of democracy, development, free markets and free trade to every cor-
ner of this world.29

In this model, the “political and economic freedom” guaranteed by deâ•‚

mocracy is a critical part of the development effort because it empowers
citizens to choose, participate in, and benefit from free-�market policies,
thereby increasing standards of living and state security. Hence the im-
portance of meeting “failed development” with more development—and
of generous congressional funding for usaid: “By supporting efforts to
resolve the Maoist insurgency and addressing the underlying causes of
poverty, inequality, and poor governance in Nepal, the US is making an
important contribution to fighting terrorism, promoting regional stability,
and lessening the likelihood of a humanitarian crisis.”30 Not surprisingly,
the emerging ethnographic literature on state violence and the coercive
underside of many cultures of democracy does not figure into these calcu-
lations (see Warren 1993; Tambiah 1996; Hansen 1999, 2001; Sluka 2000).
Manchanda, on the other hand, is taking the opposite approach. She
assumes that it is unregulated capitalism itself that is fueling the revolt
and supporting the various forms of violence and exploitation that led up
to it. The program models that tend to emerge from this sort of analysis
are, generally speaking, some variation on the kind of conscientization ap-
proach described earlier. The underlying assumption here is that freedom
is not merely a matter of the multiplication of choice but “the indispens-
able condition for the quest for human completion” (Freire 1997, 29). Like-
wise, justice is not seen as the natural byproduct of “conditions in which
all nations and societies can choose for themselves the rewards and chal-
lenges of political and economic liberty,” as the White House paper cited
above proposed, but as the result of self-�conscious human action to set
things right. In this, at least, Freirean educators and Maoist rebels share
the same, essentially Marxian, assumptions about human nature.
In theory, the two positions couldn’t be more different. In practice,
however, they have had a remarkable tendency to slip into one another,
as the short-Â�lived history of the women’s empowerment unit at usaid
in Nepal reveals. In 1996, usaid-Â�Nepal made women’s empowerment a
major agency goal. As their congressional presentation explained:

The promotion of democracy through women’s empowerment is a

usaid objective in Nepal. For democracy to be effective at the local

62â•… Lauren Leve

 level, women must meet their basic needs and the needs of their fami-
lies. . . . To organize the family through women’s empowerment is to
organize society, and to democratize the family is to democratize so-
ciety. (Congressional Presentation 1998)31

The result was a huge woman-�focused development offensive that en-

rolled over 100,000 women in six- or nine-�month literacy courses in one
year alone. Nearly 43,000 women “were provided legal awareness and ad-
vocacy skills,” and the number of microcredit borrowers tripled between
1995 and 1996, reaching a total of 13,450.32 This combination of literacy,
legal education, and “access to productive resources” was proclaimed
“critical to improving women’s choices.” And education came to be seen
as a route to self-�assertion and economic agency:

[Our] literacy program is showing results beyond the acquisition of

basic literacy and numeracy skills: women take jobs which they could
not get while illiterate, thereby bringing more income into the house-
hold to support their families; they feel more confident to participate in
community advocacy and user groups; and they seek additional train-
ing opportunities, such as legal and business literacy. (Congressional
Presentation 1998)

It seems hard to believe that this neoliberal vision began as a Freirean

ideal. By the mid-Â�1990s “women’s empowerment” had become one of the
most loosely used words in the development lexicon. It had, however,
emerged in the context of a very specific political and theoretical debate.
Like the popular educators who designed Naya Goreto, the first women’s
empowerment activists were inspired by Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy.
They were frustrated, however, by his lack of attention to gender. If con-
scientization was a process by which people “leave behind the status of ob-
jects to assume the status of historical Subjects”—which sounds an awful
lot like some of the more influential feminist theories of the time—Freire
nonetheless never raised the question of gendered power (1997, 141; em-
phasis in original). Although he theorized subaltern subjectivity in terms
of dependence, alienation, and dehumanization, Freire’s model peasant
remained sexually unmarked.
The term “women’s empowerment” was born in the 1970s when femi-
nist popular educators introduced theories of gendered power into the
conscientization framework (Batliwala 1994). The concept became the foâ•‚
cus of an international movement that eventually mainstreamed the ideal

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…63

and is widely considered to have been a success. Yet I’m skeptical that its
earliest advocates would recognize usaid’s literacy-Â�law-Â�and-Â�loan agenda
as a realization of their ideal. (Nor, I suspect, would the liberal feminists
at usaid acknowledge Freire’s revolutionary Marxism as part of their
i�ntent.)
This shift, from the revolutionary empowerment of subaltern subjects
to an instrumental empowerment for capitalist citizenship, signifies a
dramatic shift in the development vision.33 Verónica Schild (2000) has
observed that “the discourse of neoliberal modernization emphasizes an
active relation to the market, expressed on the part of citizens as the au-
tonomous exercise of responsibilities, including economic self-�reliance
and political participation.” The result, she says, is a form of governmental
rationality whereby “citizens are . . . conceived—and produced—as em-
powered clients, who as individuals are viewed as capable of enhancing
their lives through judicious, responsible choices as consumers of services
and other goods.” Because “the cultural contents shaping these neoliberal
political subjects are none other than the liberal norms of the market-
place,” she refers to these subjects as “market citizens” (2000, 276). I be-
lieve this describes usaid’s program well. But from a Freirean perspec-
tive, the reduction of conscientization to consumer consciousness is a
wholesale reversal of their liberatory aim. For these educators, agency is
not realized through choices about what to buy, what to sell, and how to
vote. Empowerment may “begin . . . by changing women’s consciousness,”
but it should “manifest itself as a redistribution of power” (Batliwala 1994,
130). Far from a matter of freeing the market, in this model, justice follows
from freeing the mind from the self-�negating subjectivity that patriarchal
and capitalist exploitation create.
How does this kind of slippage become possible?
One reason is because, despite dramatic differences in understanding
and outlook, neoliberal and conscientization models share a number of
unrecognized assumptions. First, both perceive development as a uni-
linear progression toward a predefined goal whereby developmental sub-
jects become self-�conscious agents, whether they express that through
economic activity and disciplined participation in civil institutions or by
seeking to overturn existing hierarchies and remake society. Second, both
conceive of empowerment as a subjective transformation that will lead
to concrete forms of action that reflect each model’s analysis of “objec-
tive” reality. Third, in each of these models the developmental subject is

64â•… Lauren Leve

imagined as in some way incomplete, whether what is perceived as miss-
ing is access to credit or self-�knowledge and historical agency. Fourth, all
of these ideas rest on the assumption that the human subject is an essen-
tially political or else economic being who is most fully actualized at the
moment of greatest autonomy. And finally, this historical agent (or “de-
veloped” modern citizen, depending on the discourse) is not usually con-
ceived as someone who lives in a gendered body, and thus is implicitly
male—even in explicitly feminist analyses.
Some of these points have been criticized as common problems in post-�
Enlightenment political thought (see Butler 1992; Haraway 1992; Spivak
1988a, 1988b). What I wish to emphasize here is that they unite thinkers
who would otherwise be perceived as politically opposed—and who would
certainly not acknowledge themselves as sharing foundational assump-
tions. Both the neoliberal and concientization models draw on a Hegelian
legacy that looks to the uniform unfolding of an autonomous human
consciousness in the direction of greater rationality, transcendence, and
self-�present Subjectivity. Nor are they alone in these assumptions, which
structure much of the literature on peasant consciousness and rural mobi-
lization.34 In her critique of peasant consciousness in the work of the Rana-
jit Guha (1983) and the early subaltern studies collective, Gayatri Spivak
suggests that “if the question of female subaltern consciousness is a red
herring, the question of subaltern consciousness as such must be judged
a red herring as well” (1988a, 29).
And indeed it should be.
What we will see in the next section are a series of complex rela-
tions between changing expectations and domestic reproduction, self-�
confidence and critical consciousness, and self-�knowledge and gendered
agency in Nepali social life that complicate theories that presume a teleo-
logical structure of evolving political awareness culminating in an unfet-
tered, ungendered, autonomous (almost autochthonous) humanity. The
experiences and opinions reported by nfe graduates demonstrate that
the presumptions about subaltern subjectivity embedded in all of the em-
powerment theories above are critically out of synch with the women I
met in Chorigaon.

Empowerment and Agency in Chorigaon

So how did nfe participation affect consciousness and identity? In inter-
views five and ten years after the conclusion of the program, women re-

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…65

ported effects identical to those of many other literacy course graduates
in Nepal: greater confidence and increased self-�esteem, less shyness inter-
acting with people outside of the family, and an expanded experience of
women’s ability to succeed in traditionally male domains. Overall, par-
ticipants testified to a profound sense of individual and collective trans-
formation. Statements such as “I became accustomed to speaking with-
out feeling shy,” “I’m able to express what I think; I learned to speak and I
learned many other new ideas,” “although we had eyes we were blind be-
fore; our eyes were opened by the alc,” and “we came out into the light
from the darkness in our own homes” may sound dramatic or poetic, but
such responses were exceedingly common (Leve 1993). “Before, if daugh-
ters or daughters-�in-�law went to meetings and spoke, people used to say
that the hens were crowing,” Geeta told me. “But now we’re allowed to
speak in meetings.”
Also, by 2002, almost everyone I spoke with noted that community
opinion had shifted to endorse treating sons and daughters equally.
“After we began to become educated, we came to know that sons and
daughters are the same,” Gyan Kumari told me. “Before this only our
brothers studied, but now I know that women can study too.”
“Boys and girls are naturally equal; it’s society that makes a distinction
between them. They are equally able to do the same work,” Ram Maya said.
As a result of these sentiments, participants attested, both sons and
daughters are expected to go to school today; nor do parents discriminate
in providing food or medical care. “If daughters are educated as much as
sons, then they can also look after their parents,” Kamala affirmed, adding
that she came to know this after joining the literacy class.
Given that the 24.5 percent female literacy rate in Gorkha is slightly
higher than the national average,35 and that people there credit literacy for
women’s intensified involvement in public life, it is not hard to imagine
that dfa’s programs may have “paved the way for women . . . to be drawn
into the armed struggle” (Gautam, Banskota, and Manchanda 2003, 120).
But the social and political subjectivities that women manifest are more
complicated than the theories above would suggest. While powerful de-
velopment discourses have indeed helped to extend modernist forms of
thought throughout Nepal—Stacy Pigg (1992) and Laura Ahearn (2001),
for instance, have both illustrated how practices and values associated
with “bikās” have come to shape rural Nepali consciousness—the subjec-
tivities that development produces are not the only identities that Nepali

66â•… Lauren Leve

women perform.36 To the contrary, the women I spoke with in Chorigaon
conceive of themselves in quintessentially social terms, through relations
that are morally inflected, often entail labor obligations, and are deeply
constitutive of personal identity. In fact, the forms of self-�consciousness
that these “subaltern subjects” express makes me wonder whether the uto-
pian freedom of autonomous subjectivity exists outside of the bourgeois
modernist imagination at all!
Let me start with Nani Maya. Nanu, as her friends call her, is in her late
twenties, the youngest of three brothers and four sisters from a middle-�
income farming family. She is married with two young children, and she
currently lives with her husband, a sign painter, in a crowded quarter of
Kathmandu. Nani Maya was in her early teens when she joined the literacy
course. She’d never been to school, although all of her brothers attended,
and she dreamed of studying even as she spent her days fetching water,
collecting firewood, cutting grass for the buffalo, and herding the goats—
gendered labor on which her household relied. When the adult literacy
center opened, her parents considered it a waste of time; she was allowed
to go only after her brothers intervened and then only after finishing all her
regular work. She remembers that she’d often arrive late to the class, hun-
gry and tired. But she enjoyed studying, and at the end of the course she
won a scholarship from dfa to subsidize her study at the village school.
There, she passed classes four, five, and six in the first division—a major
accomplishment for a village girl.
“Even then,” she recalled: “I could hardly find the time [to study]. I
was fifteen years old and had three hours of class every morning and then
more in the afternoon. I used to have to finish half my [domestic] work
before the class, and the other half afterward. Somehow I convinced my
parents of this schedule. . . . There was no option but to work because . . .
we had lots of animals and some land and my parents couldn’t finish the
work alone.” Despite this, she was committed to studying.
When she reached eighteen, however, her life changed: “There was gos-
sip of my marriage, and this affected me a lot.” In fact, she learned, her
parents had arranged to marry her to a much older, wealthy widower. “I
didn’t want to marry at that time,” she explained. “My plan was not to
marry before [finishing class ten and earning] the S.L.C. (school-�leaving
certificate)”:

But my parents were eager to unburden themselves of me. [They be-

lieve that] parents can only go to heaven after death if their daugh-

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…67

 ters are married. Otherwise there is no chance of paradise. I protested
strongly. I didn’t like that man! He was already married and widowed.
I was a virgin girl, and I wanted the same. “Why should I marry a wid-
ower who isn’t well educated and has no personality?” I asked myself.

Finally she learned that the marriage was imminent. The plan was to bring
her to a temple where the groom would apply vermillion powder (sindhur)
to the part of her hair and then take her home—the most minimal of wed-
ding rites. Her family was hiding this from her so she wouldn’t resist. They
had effectively decided to marry her by force since she refused to accept
the relationship otherwise. In Nanu’s mind, this was a huge betrayal. And
on the night before this was to have taken place, she eloped with a boy she
knew from school. Although his family was poor, he was from the same
caste and otherwise a socially acceptable marriage partner. He had earned
her respect by studying through class ten and passing the difficult s.l.c.
exam. And most importantly, she said, he supported her dream: “My hus-
band loves me. . . . He helped me a lot in my study. He insists on the need
for education. He said if I thought there could be any future with him, he
was ready to accept me. . . . I ran away from my parents’ house for a better
future.”37 When I last met Nanu, we talked at length about the Maoist
situation. She hadn’t been back to the village in three years. The last time
she’d been there, when her husband had returned to see his father on his
deathbed, the armed police had mistaken him for a Maoist, which, under-
standably, terrified her.

I was at home cooking. Suddenly Kanchi came running in. “Why are
you running inside?” I asked. Then I looked up: there was a man with a
gun standing right at the door!
“Is this Dil Kumar’s house?” he asked. Then they searched the house
from top to bottom. They were from the armed police, and they asked,
“Where’s Dil Kumar?” They shouted so loudly. [My] father-Â�in-Â�law had
been sleeping. The Maoist movement had just begun.
I said, “Father-Â�in-Â�law is sick in bed. He [her husband] came from
Kathmandu to see his father who is critically ill. He’s gone with our
baby to play. I’ll call him.” But the police followed right behind me be-
cause they suspected that I might help him run away.
[My husband] was at Kaila Ba’s house. After reaching there, the
police said, “Come on, let’s go. Who are you—whose son? How long
have you been living in Kathmandu? Why did you come here?” [My

68â•… Lauren Leve

 husband] said, “I’ve been in Kathmandu for ten years, and I came here
to take my sick father (for treatment), but in vain.” The police were
furious. When he said he was the only son they said, “You’re lying.”
And when I said I lived in Kathmandu and not in the village, they said,
“You’re lying too!” Then Besar Maila’s son intervened, and they beat
him. Severely. With their boots, like a football. Then after beating every-
one there, they were about to take my husband. He was carrying the
baby, and he said to them, “Give the baby to her,” to me.
Then I said [to the police], “I told you earlier that our father is sick
in bed, and I showed you. You’re lying! Are we lying? Or are you lying?
Whatever you want to do to him, do it to me!” And I came between
them so they couldn’t hit my husband.
By then the old men had gathered. They told the police that [my hus-
band] is not like that [i.e., a Maoist]. “Who gave you such information?
Don’t get angry. He’s not like that; we would have known if he were like
that,” they all said. Then the police left, telling him to come to the police
post at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. But when we went the next
day, none of those armed police were there. They’d already left, beating
some tailors on the way. The assistant subinspector said, “This is the
first time that I’ve heard this name [her husband’s].” We said, “They’ve
already come to our home, and you’re telling us this!”
If they had taken him at that time, they would’ve killed him. It had
only been fifteen days since the teacher, Gunanidhi Sir—such a nice
person—had been killed. Gunanidhi Sir had never gone for any meet-
ing or done anything. . . . A person like that was taken from his bed and
killed near the river. His wife was asked to come the next day with his
clothes. She went to the police post. Then when she asked, “Where is
my husband?” they said, “We don’t know.” When she got back to her
home she came to know from some cowherd boys who saw him lying
dead. He had been shot from behind. After that, she hasn’t received
any support from anywhere. The Maoists didn’t kill him, and the police
deny it. . . .
After all that, when I think of the village, I don’t want to go. . . . If
they’d taken him [her husband] away at that time, they would have
killed him.

Given such an experience, it’s hardly surprising that Nani Maya has lost
faith in the putatively democratic state. Or that she favors the Maoists,
who, with their promises of equality, justice, economic opportunity, and

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…69

honest government, seem to offer something better. After democracy was
declared in 1990, she told me, she’d expected “that there would be good
facilities in the village, that there would be justice, that working people
would be free to do their work, and that there wouldn’t be suppression
(daman) and exploitation (upayog) anymore.” Instead, she’s found, “the
opposite has happened”:

Now the ones with power can do anything. . . . And if anyone is doing
good work others try to drag them down [“pull on their legs”]. . . .
There was an idea that people would become free (swatantra) follow-
ing democracy but no such event has occurred.38
If the king could run the government properly then these problems
could be resolved. Or if the Maoists run the government . . . then people
who eat by doing their duty (kartavya)—there would be no problem of
food and clothing for those who do their duty—the government would
take care of them. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting
poorer. The poor are dying on every side. But if the conflict could be
resolved it wouldn’t have to be like this.

This feeling, that democracy has made poor people’s lives more tenuous
rather than increasing their security, was widely shared and widely con-
demned. The phrase I’ve translated as “people who eat by doing their duty”
expresses the understanding that social reproduction is hard work in rural
Nepal. Nanu’s meaning is that the people who have suffered the most
under democracy are those for whom eking out a living requires painful
labor (as opposed to those who live “having fun,” as we will see below). If
such people do as they must—as they are obliged to do in order to eat—
she feels they should at least be able to feed and clothe their families. Her
word choice suggests a morally grounded critique of a democracy that
further impoverishes people who struggle and suffer to satisfy their most
basic needs (and sends their children to die on both sides of the conflict)
while “the ones with power can do anything.”
Geeta, from a nearby village, expressed similar ideas: “After multiparty
democracy was established, I thought, let there be development (bikās) in
the country. Let everyone get equal opportunity. But instead, development
works have stopped. Instead of building, they have destroyed . . . buildings,
hospitals, bridges, drinking water, electricity, and roads. So rather than de-
velopment, destruction has increased!”
At another point in the conversation, she linked these expectations to
values that she traced to the literacy course:

70â•… Lauren Leve

 After studying, women started to learn many things, that we too
have rights and that women have been dominated by men. . . . [When
democracy came,] I had hoped for equality. But what sort of develop-
ment do we have now? The development is only in killings!

Perhaps because of experiences like Nani Maya’s, most women told me

they blamed the government more than the Maoists for the violence that
had so completely transformed their lives. In part, this may have reflected
a greater fear of the Maoists, who had eyes and ears in the villages in a way
that the security forces did not, such that criticism whispered in one’s
own kitchen could bring retaliation in the middle of the night.39 How-
ever, I think it also reflects their experiences of state violence—which has
only increased since King Gyanendra inherited the throne in June 2001
and released the army, intensifying the war—and a widespread sense that
the government had betrayed them. When asked what could be done to
bring about peace, close to half the women interviewed expressed their
desire that the government would agree to the Maoists’ Forty Point De-
mands. These include inheritance rights for women; abolishing exploita-
tion based on caste and ethnicity; special protections for orphans, disabled
persons, and the elderly; and the provision of employment opportunities
for all, in addition to forgiving rural agricultural debt, redistributing land
“to the tiller,” and other more familiar Marxist demands (Karki and Sed-
don 2003b). Indeed, not a single person suggested that the government
should pursue a military victory. Rather, about 40 percent of interview-
ees said in exactly—or very close to—these very words: “the government
(sarkār) must fulfill the wishes āvasyak or māg) of the people ( janatā).”
Jamuna Devi was particularly adamant on this theme: “People’s oppres-
sion and their struggles need to be recognized. . . . Poor people should be
on top and the ruling rich people should be lower. Only when there is jus-
tice for the oppressed will the people have trust (bishvās) [in the state].
The government must fulfill the Maoists’ demands.”
Despite this clear support for the Maoist political and economic
agenda, her thoughts about gender varied considerably from the rebel
line. She gave a dowry (daijau) at her elder daughter’s marriage, she said,
so that her daughter would be appreciated and not “have to tolerate harsh
words in her home.” But “I felt very bad while giving it,” she confessed. “I
gave him my daughter, and I also gave property. Then I have no daughter
to [share the] labor and no property either, and I’m left with nothing [“as
if naked”], with both my daughter and my property gone!”

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…71

 At the same time that she lamented the practice of giving dowry, how-
ever, Jamuna was firm in her insistence on the menstrual taboos that bar
women from touching men, preparing food, or entering the house dur-
ing that time. “I obey this rule very strictly because this is our women’s
custom. I will never abandon this tradition,” she said. When I pointed out
that the rebels are said to reject these observances and suggested that the
practices may put women at risk—for instance, a local woman had almost
died after a tiger mauled her while she was sleeping outdoors in front of
her home—Jamuna responded by listing all the things that had changed:

In the past, we used to eat and wear whatever we were given, but nowa-
days girls want to eat good food and wear good clothes. . . . A change
has come from knowing how to read and write. Husbands, mothers-�
in-Â�law, parents are also human beings. We came to know that we didn’t
need to treat them like gods40 only after the literacy class. . . . [Similarly,
we now know] daughters may be able to study high and stand indepen-
dently (swatantra) on their own feet. . . . But this is our women’s cus-
tom, and I won’t give it up.

There is clearly something about this ritual for Jamuna that indexes an
essential part of her feminine identity. I will return to this below. For now,
suffice it to note that even the most adamant supporters of economic jus-
tice don’t necessarily wish to do away with practices associated with gen-
der identity, especially differences that they don’t see as exploitative, but
that mark the genders as distinct.
Let me conclude this section by introducing Bina, one of dfa’s most
dramatic success stories. Unschooled until she joined the literacy course
as a young teenager, she is now married (to a policeman), with a son and
a daughter, as well as holding a paying job of her own. She’s been work-
ing practically since she left school. Before taking her current position at
a police academy in Kathmandu, she worked for the government’s com-
munity health program in her village, as an adult literacy instructor there,
and, for two years, at the district hospital. In the village, she was active in
community development efforts (president of her women’s group, mem-
ber of the forest committee and a drinking water project group) and rec-
ognized as a local leader. “Although there were people who had passed
the S.L.C. in that place, they used to see me as someone who can speak,
and whenever there was any problem in that area they would call me,” she
explained. “They’d tell me that such and such a fight has taken place, and
then I had to go and resolve it.”

72â•… Lauren Leve

 As the wife of a policeman and someone employed by a police academy
herself, Bina regrets that she can’t return to the village nowadays:

When there was no conflict, I used to go to the village once a month. I

love the village. I miss it a lot. I have so much to do there. . . . I’m living
here [in the city] only because I have to. Otherwise I’d prefer to be there.

But although she fears for her life, she is sympathetic to the insurrection:

In our village, there are nine people in the police and the army. The
Maoists organized a mass meeting in the village, and they read out these
nine names. “These people shouldn’t serve in the police and army,” they
said. “Ask them to leave. Instead, tell us how much salary they need;
we will provide it.” I came to know that they said that. “Otherwise, we
know where they are and we will kill them.”
What can we do? It’s difficult. We have to educate our children.
If we’d been well educated, we wouldn’t be facing so much trouble
(chintā), would we? Who wouldn’t want to live having fun (mojmajjā)?
No one wants to face such pain (dukkha), do they? . . . At night when
we sleep in our room, if someone knocks on the door, we feel they’ve
come to kill us. That’s the kind of fear we live with. . . .
What they [the Maoists] are doing is good. They’re doing it for us.
It’s very good to say that rich and poor will be the same. We’re scared
because they will kill us because of our jobs, and it shouldn’t be like
that. We are doing these jobs because we have to. Otherwise, though,
they’re not bad. Actually, if police/army recruits die and if Maoists die,
it’s the same—all are sons and daughters of Nepal. But they aren’t fight-
ing for personal benefit (afno sukha, phaida). They’re fighting hoping
for something for the future of the country. They’re fighting without
any salary, but we’re fighting for our personal benefit. In a way, we’re
selfish (svārthi). Because if we don’t have a job, we won’t be able to feed
our kids, so we’ve become involved. But they don’t get a salary. They’re
fighting knowing that they may die today or tomorrow. We’re fighting
for our own self-Â�interest, and they’re fighting for the country.

In these comments, Bina introduces two key oppositions that structure

her own and many other women’s thought: self-Â�interest versus being-Â�for-Â�
others, and pain and trouble (dukkha, chintā) versus ease and fun (sukha,
mojmajjā).
Kathryn March finds this second pattern among Tamang women in an
area she calls Stupahill. One of the most characteristic aspects of Tamang

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…73

self-Â�representation, she writes, is that “life stories are told as hanging in
the balance between dukka and sukha”:

Dukka is suffering: it is the physical hurt of illness, hunger, cold, or in-

jury; it is the weight of knowing the fears, worries, wrongs, and obliga-
tions of life; and it is the sorrow, sadness, melancholy, or grief at being
unable to forget hurt and hardship. Sukha is the opposite: it is the ease
and comfort of health, food, warmth, clothing, and companionship;
it is the feeling of uncomplicated pleasure; it is the purest as a happi-
ness unaware even of its own good fortune. Every woman I interviewed
located her life overall, and the events in her own narrative, in relation
to dukka and sukha. (2002, 36)

Obviously anyone who’s expected to wake every day before the cock
crows, gather grass for the buffalo and fodder for the hearth, and come
home and make tea before anyone else is out of bed is likely to agree that
pleasure and ease are preferable to work.41 But whereas the theories of
empowerment that I analyzed above pit consciousness against uncon-
sciousness, agency against alienation, “subjectivity” against “subalternity,”
and personal choice against cultural constraint, Gorkhali women conceive
the freedom and independence (swatantra) that they aspire to in other
terms. Based on my interviews, few of Chorigaon’s neoliterate women
would wish to live as “new [wo]men” in an altogether “new society” (as
Freire proposed) or to be completely autonomous agents (with a world of
choices at their fingertips). Instead, they ask for ease, security, equality of
opportunity (including access to education and employment), good food
and clothing, some degree of respect for their personal desires—and, as
much as possible, some fun.42 In fact, while the specific rituals that Jamuna
embraces as the embodied practices of womanhood (“our women’s cus-
tom”) are weakening, the idea that people become themselves through
gendered physical and emotional engagements—that (social) practices
make (social) people—is not. While they would happily accept less work
and more fun, and might very well be content to have been born as a boy,
most of the women I know in Chorigaon would not choose to be dis-
engendered—that is, socially disembedded—individuals at all.

Gendered Personhood, Generic Humanity, and Women’s

Suffering as Subjectivizing Force
Talal Asad’s thoughts on the origins of secular personhood are helpful in
making sense of all of this. Beginning from the reflection that “modern

74â•… Lauren Leve

projects do not hang together as an integrated totality,” but that “they
do account for distinctive sensibilities, aesthetics [and] moralities,” Asad
suggests that “what is distinctive about modernity as a historical epoch
includes modernity as a political economic project” which “mediates
people’s identities, helps shape their sensibilities and guarantees their ex-
periences” (2003, 14; emphasis in original).
What, precisely, might these identities, sensibilities, and experiences
be? Here, Asad looks to the problem of the subject. Noting the historical
shifts in conceptual grammar and material life that have made it possible
for secular forms of self and personhood to emerge, he observes that mod-
ernist thought presumes an “essential freedom” or “natural sovereignty”
in the human subject and that it sees interests and desires as arising from
this private internal space.
Characteristically, Asad links these ideas to power—in this case, theories
that posit power as external to the subject—and to a post-Â�Enlightenment
“historical project whose aim is the increasing triumph of individual au-
tonomy” (2003, 71). He argues on this basis that the movement toward
“freedom from all coercive control” is rather, as Schild (2000) has al-
ready suggested, just another form of subjectification: “The paradox in-
adequately appreciated here is that the self to be liberated from external
control must be subjected to the control of a liberating self already and
always free, aware, and in control of its own desires” (Asad 2003, 73).
Empowerment then “becomes a metaphysical quality defining human
agency, its objective as well as its precondition” (79). Finally, he concludes
that cultural theory—and here I would include development models as
well—“tends to reduce [human subjectivity] to the . . . idea of a conscious
agent-�subject having both the capacity and the desire to move in a singular
historical direction: that of increasing self-�empowerment and decreasing
pain” (2003, 79).
These comments go some distance toward explaining the theoretical
assumptions that we encountered above. However, in reality, Asad argues,
pain is not simply a biologically rooted experience that humans naturally
and necessarily wish to overcome. To the contrary, it is also shaped by
and rooted in particular social contexts, some of which can make it pro-
foundly meaningful:

What a subject experiences and how . . . are themselves modes of living a

relationship. The ability to live such relationships over time transforms
pain from a passive experience into an active one and thus defines one

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…75

 of the ways of living sanely in the world. It does not follow, of course,
that one cannot or should not seek to reform the social relations one
inhabits, still less that pain is intrinsically a valuable thing. [But] the
progressive model of agency diverts attention away from our trying
to understand how this is done in different traditions, because of the
assumption that the agent always seeks to overcome pain conceived as
object and state of passivity. (2003, 84, emphasis in original)

In other words, “as a social relationship, pain is more than something un-
pleasant and external that impinges on someone. It is part of what creates
the conditions of action and experience” (2003, 85, italics mine). And in-
deed in some cases, I would add, of self-�realization.
Among women in Chorigaon, as throughout Nepal, certain types of
pain and suffering are unambiguously condemned—particularly suffering
caused by other people’s irresponsibility, selfishness, thoughtlessness, or
greed. But in other situations, painful struggle is seen as a normal, even
normative, aspect of a woman’s life; indeed, it is through certain types of
suffering that the adult feminine subjectivity is produced.
For Nepali women, marriage is a socially, morally, and materially sub-
jectifying event, an often dreaded but critical juncture at which pain and
power assert themselves in girls’ lives. Lynn Bennett records that her high-Â�
caste Hindu informants spoke of it as their dharma, a women’s sacred
duty (1983, 174–75).43 And many ethnographers have observed that this
forcible separation from the comfort of their natal homes in order to join
a household of strangers in the least autonomous and most onerous do-
mestic role is the defining experience of Nepali womanhood (Des Chene
1998; McHugh 2001; Desjarlais 2003). Not surprisingly under the circum-
stances, the event is paradigmatically described as a transition from sukha
to suffering, from freedom to domination, indulgence to deprivation, easier
tasks to harder work. In practice, of course, it is not always this simple,
and many women spoke of miserable childhoods and/or happy married
lives. But even in a Hindu-�Buddhist religio-�cultural setting, where a gen-
eralized experience of suffering is posited as the last word on human life,
it is taken for granted that women’s lives are especially filled with dukkha
due to this dislocation and the pain of childbirth. This idea is not limited
by region or ethnic group: the notion that women suffer more than men
is pervasive throughout Nepal.
An important consequence of this is that women come to actualize
themselves in the process of living these constraints. Suffering being com-

76â•… Lauren Leve

mon to all, it is the specifics of each woman’s experience—her chance
to study or lack thereof, the hunger she survived, the husband she was
given, the children that she lost—that define her social persona and make
her life unique.44 Furthermore, it’s through the particular ways that each
woman manages the dukkha she is dealt that individuals exercise agency.
As Robert Desjarlais notes in his analysis of a Kisang Omu’s, a Yolmo
woman’s, life history, the choices that a women makes throughout her
life will reflect on her, her siblings, her forebears, and her descendants so
there is tremendous pressure to act in culturally “skillful” ways that indi-
cate moral knowledge as well as individual creativity.
“Our lives are like links in a chain,” Kisang told Desjarlais (2003, 136).
After marriage, after women “grow up,” “we need to eat. So I needed to
tend the potatoes. I needed to do the work. Without work, we cannot eat.
What to do? Sorrow means that, it turns out” (114). This statement ex-
presses exactly what Nani Maya means by “people who eat by doing their
duty” and links this labor to other kinds of productive suffering. Appear-
ing inside an extended discussion of her marriage and the pain of moving
from her father’s home to a faraway place, these words reflect on the ways
that social, moral, and material realities come together in the construc-
tion of female subjectivity. Despite her unhappiness at discovering that
her father had arranged her marriage, Kisang emphasized that she didn’t
shame her family by refusing or running away. And in this way, she says,
she became herself: “What to do then? My elders sent me [in marriage].
Such is the fate of the daughters. . . . In that way, I became like this. Never-
theless, it became nice” (131, emphasis added).
We can see similar patterns and sensibilities in the narratives of the
women from Chorigaon. I have already suggested that Nani Maya eloped
only after she judged her natal family to have betrayed their responsibili-
ties to her by arranging to give her to a much older man in order to access
his resources for their own benefit rather than pairing her with an appro-
priate partner of her own age. I would add that despite her unorthodox
love marriage, she takes her role as a daughter-�in-�law as a matter of pride,
for which reason she stayed on in the village to help her aging mother-�
in-�law with the heavy work of carrying water, collecting firewood, and
cutting grass long after her husband had left to find wage work in the
city. When she tells her life story, she relates it as a narrative of suffering
wherein she was wronged by her parents, her brothers, and the society’s
expectations for—and exploitation of—girls and women. But in her tell-

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…77

ing, she has always responded properly and responsibly, the way a good
girl/woman should.
The sacrifices associated with marriage and adulthood prompted social
and ethical negotiations for Bina too:

In the hills, a daughter has to get married after she grows up. She has
to go to another home. . . . I was fifteen/sixteen when I got married. . . .
I may have forced [my parents] to let me study, but finally I was com-
pelled myself.
In our home, the tradition is that you get married before menstrua-
tion. . . . If you’re married before menstruation, it’s called kanyadān
(the gift of a virgin), and they say that [kanyadān is both a religious
obligation and a meritorious act]. . . . [I passed class seven living at my
sister’s home, helping with her children and going to school] and I had
already begun my menstrual period. Then my younger brother, father,
and mother discussed it. I said, “I will marry only after passing my
S.L.C.” But my older brother said, “No, you get married. I’ll make them
pledge to allow you to stay here for two more years and complete your
studies. But you get married now.”

She rejected this idea:

It’s an impossible thing to study after getting married. You have to work
in the morning and at night after becoming a daughter-�in-�law. When
will you study? But my older brother forced me. “You have to marry,”
he said. . . . “If you won’t marry now, then we won’t send you to school.”
“Do what you like!” they said.
The boy who had come to ask for me was doing his ba. . . . “The boy
doesn’t drink or gamble and you have to marry him,” was what my par-
ents said. My older brother said, “If you don’t marry that boy then I’ll
never tell you to get married. Go wherever you want, and do whatever
you like!” After he said that, I didn’t stay with him. I came to Kath-
mandu to stay with my younger brother. . . . [But even in Kathmandu],
people kept coming to ask for me. My third sister had come to know
about her marriage only three or four days after it had all been decided.
. . . At that time I had said if you give me like that I’ll never marry,
which is why my parents consulted me. Actually, I’m the only one who’s
studied to class seven/eight in my family—my younger brother only
studied to class three/four. . . . My parents said, “She is educated and
not like the other sisters. If she commits suicide, what will we do?” So

78â•… Lauren Leve

 they asked for my permission because they feared I might commit sui-
cide. But I said no.

Despite this, she acknowledges, she ultimately had to submit:

But after I came to Kathmandu, I got married anyway. He is my brother’s

wife’s niece’s son. People kept coming to my brother and asking for his
sister’s hand. Then my brother said, “Everyone is coming asking for
you. You have to marry one.” Maybe my time had come. I couldn’t say
no. I got married in Kathmandu, and after I’d lived here for a year and
I had my daughter in my womb, I went back to the village. And life in
the village was fun (majjā).

From sukha to dukkha to majjā (and now, again, dukkha), these events
illustrate Bina’s initial resistance to marriage and the life changes it would
bring as well as her eventual acceptance of what she now acknowledges
was inevitable (“maybe my time had come”).
One way to look at this story is to focus on the relations and identities
that come into play. At all points in the narrative, Bina is expected to get
married and expected to marry someone her family proposed. From the
religious logic of kanyadān and the role daughters play in fulfilling their
parents’ ritual obligations to her older brother’s declaration that he would
no longer feel compelled to feed, house, and support her if she persisted
in resisting the family will (“If you don’t marry that boy then I’ll never tell
you to get married. Go wherever you want, and do whatever you like!”), it
is clear that her relatives saw her marriage as a collective concern and not
as a matter of (her) individual will. Given her education, her parents made
some accommodation to her exceptional status (and, perhaps, force of
will). But no one assumed that her life was hers to contract as she wished;
ultimately, her only real option for escaping familial power was the last
resort of suicide.45
In evaluating this version of events, however, we must also take care
to read between the lines. For while Bina frames her story in terms of
parental pressure and personal resistance/accommodation—which is the
expected, respectable way for women to narrate the events leading up to
marriage in Nepal46—in fact, the family negotiated a compromise. Bina
married within the bounds of normative convention, and she returned to
the village to live with her mother-�in-�law. But she effectively selected her
husband herself. Moreover, when she chose her husband, she also chose
her mother-�in-�law, the person whose support or disapproval would most

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…79

immediately affect her happiness or suffering for the next years of her life.
When she says that she married her “brother’s wife’s niece’s son,” she in-
dicates two things: one, that he was from an appropriate marriage pool
and acceptable to her family, and two, that she knew, or had reliable ways
of getting information about, his mother. If she’d married into a different
household, they might have demanded that she limit her activities and
confine herself to the fields and her home—in which case her life in the vil-
lage would surely have been a lot less fun! Having accepted that marrying
before completing her education was simply unavoidable, she ultimately
conformed. But she also found a solution that would be bearable for her,
allowing her to do what she liked to do and actualize herself in a way she
enjoyed while still being a respectable wife and daughter-�in-�law:

When I was working at the Community Health Program, I went for

a fifteen-Â�day training. If I’d been a daughter-Â�in-Â�law in another house-
hold then people would have gossiped. I was the only daughter-�in-�law
from the area going there. But even when others used to say things, [my
mother-�in-�law] had no such feeling. In the village, it happens that there
are people who were jealous that I was working. But if anyone said any-
thing, she would say, “Well what’s wrong? My son’s okay with it, and I’m
okay with it, so why are you concerned about it?” She was very helpful.
. . . Boys and girls would come to see me to talk about community af-
fairs, and she would come to the field to call me and stay there while I
met them at the house. She never thought, “What’s this? My daughter-Â�
in-Â�law is sitting and talking with other boys! . . .” If she hadn’t been like
that, I wouldn’t have come here. . . . After attending the adult literacy
class . . . I’ve done it all.

Bina’s words sound like a resounding endorsement of the empowerment

effects of the literacy course. Yet although she showed remarkable skill in
negotiating a life for herself that is not too restrictive, her choices were
made in the face of powerful constraints. What would it mean to say that
Bina was empowered by her education? What would it mean to say that
she was not? These stories illustrate how certain kinds of suffering are
part and parcel of achieving particular forms of subjectivity.47 To refuse
this, or to defy it, is to exclude oneself from normal identity categories
and, depending on the case, to court social sanction. In other words, it’s
not to act like a woman. And this is objectionable not primarily because
defiance is condemned per se, but because social reproduction hangs on
women’s physical and emotional work. The dukkha—and dharma (reli-

80â•… Lauren Leve

gious duty)—of carrying water, cutting grass, cultivating crops, and so on
is inescapably tied to the dukkha and dharma of social relations. This does
not mean that people won’t seek to minimize unpleasant obligations and
maximize fun whenever possible—given, of course, that, as March’s in-
formant, Jyomo, put it, “if the work doesn’t get done, no one eats” (2002,
133). Nor does it mean that women categorically lack agency to negotiate
important conditions of their lives and their work. In fact, there are nu-
merous cultural mechanisms that give individuals what we might think of
as wiggling room48—as Bina’s flight from one brother’s house to another’s
shows (notably, this show of resistance would also have offered her older
brother a way of refusing an otherwise respectable offer without offending
the family from which it came). Social and material labor are both neces-
sary if families are to reproduce themselves and individuals are to eat, and
both are inescapably intertwined with the suffering that women are, in
most cases, expected to bear. The alternative is not considered empower-
ment, but selfish individualism.49

Conclusion: Rethinking Empowerment and Political Consciousness

On superficial reading, the testimonies I’ve gathered here do little to
undercut the “failed development” thesis; in fact, they might seem to sup-
port it. When the women I interviewed talked about development (bikās),
they certainly did not see it as a form of violence. Rather, they associated
violence with its absence. This was striking because they were almost cer-
tainly familiar with Maoist arguments that did indeed frame development
as a form of violent imperialism. It was even more striking because almost
all of them were skeptical—if not downright cynical—about what most de-
velopment agencies represent as an identified political ideal—Â�democracy.
When I asked women what they hoped to see happen in their commu-
nities in upcoming years, the number two answer—after “peace”—was
development. Although people mentioned specific complaints like bro-
ken water taps and smoke-�outlet stoves that, once installed, turned out
to be inadequate for regular cooking needs (and off the record, I learned
a lot about local resentments about what were perceived as uneven dis-
tributions of the opportunities for income and upward mobility that out-
side projects brought), almost everyone expressed the desire to see roads,
bridges, electricity, schools, and hospitals and more income-�generating
activities come to their area.50 At least in the language game that we played
together, no one challenged the modernization ideal.51
On some level, all of this is simply obvious. Just as one doesn’t need

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…81

elaborate social theory to explain why women who work twelve-�hour
days might wish to lead an easier life, it doesn’t take much imagination
to understand why farmers in an inaccessible rural district might want
their children to have access to a modern hospital. Who wouldn’t? The
failed development paradigm, however, is an attempt to understand why
revolutionary movements receive popular support. Or more particularly,
to understand why rural women, even those who do not consider them-
selves Maoists and who make it clear they hate the violence and every-
thing that has come with it, nonetheless blame politicians (“democracy”)
for the fact that the violence is happening, and not the Maoists them-
selves. It’s here—at the point where the failed development paradigm
is no longer simply stating the obvious—that I would argue it is genu-
inely dangerous, because it brings with it a whole host of tacit assump-
tions about what people are like and what they ought to want from life
that have very little to do with these women’s actual lives or what they
find important in them. In fact, I would argue that almost everyone
vying to influence or understand these women—foreign academics, ngo
workers, and government counterinsurgency advisors alike—share the
same flawed assumptions.
So why do subaltern subjects rebel? Perhaps some of the Maoist ap-
peal is related to the dialectic of pleasure and suffering, and its intersec-
tion with the moral economy that I have described. In an argument that
reflects a Gramscian turn to engagement with culture and popular con-
sciousness, James Scott has proposed that peasants revolt when their
sense of justice is violated and that this is typically when their ability to re-
produce themselves—what he proposes they perceive as an implicit “right
to subsistence” (1976)—is threatened. The argument is powerful, and it is
also notable because it avoids some of the problems of similar Marxian-�
inspired analyses: Scott neither rejects local knowledge as “false con-
sciousness” nor falls into a teleological logic that assumes a progressive
model of political development in which subaltern consciousness comes
increasingly to match the analysts’ own (usually class-Â�based) theory:

The concept of false consciousness overlooks the very real possibility

that the actor’s “problem” is not simply one of misperception. It over-
looks the possibility that he may, in fact, have his own durable stan-
dards of equity and exploitation—standards that lead him to judgments
about his situation which are quite different from those of an outside
observer equipped with deductive theory. To put it bluntly, the actor

82â•… Lauren Leve

 may have his own moral economy. If this is the case, the failure of his
views to accord with theory is not due to his inability to see things
clearly, but to his values. Of course, one may choose to call these values
a form of false consciousness as well. But, to the extent that they are
rooted in the actor’s existential needs, to the extent that they are re-
sistant to efforts at “reeducation,” to the extent that they continue to
define the situation for him, it is they and not the theory which serves
as reliable guides to his sentiments and behavior. (1976, 160)

In insisting that rebellions may be less matters of consciousness and more

matters of morality, and that subsistence and politics meet in the realm
of values, Scott’s thesis reaches directly to the heart of why the Gorkhali
women I worked with give the Maoists their support. Substitute “she”
for “he” here, and you have a lot of my own argument. However, I don’t
think the difference is insignificant. I am not simply—or even particu-
larly—offering a critique of gender-Â�blindness in the failed development
hypothesis. Rather, I’m trying to understand how theories of development,
empowerment, and rural resistance reproduce their own ideological foun-
dations by representing the modernist ideal of the autonomous self who
seeks absolute freedom from the sacrifices and suffering associated with
social constraints as the essence of human subjectivity. Gender specificity
forces us to confront the more general problem of how we understand
and theorize people.
Following the formal declaration of the end of the war and the signing
of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in November 2006,52 it is more
important than ever to try to get that understanding right. From all of
these stories, it’s easy to see why the Maoists have received such strong
rural support. With very few dissenters, the women of Chorigaon accepted
the Maoists’ claim to be fighting to bring happiness and ease to people like
themselves, and they contrasted this to the pain they had suffered at the
hands of the state, including both the monarchy and any number of multi-
party democratic governments. But why do some people leave the village
to join the armed struggle while others, who may be equally sympathetic
to the rebellion, stay at home?
There are doubtlessly multiple answers to this question, which is too
large to take on fully here, but there may be some clues in what we have
seen so far. Saubhagya Shah has proposed that one effect of the recent de-
velopment rhetoric of participation is that it has created the “paradoxical
subject position of agents without an agency” (2002, 145). Similarly, Judith

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…83

Pettigrew suggests that “participation in the Maoists enables village youth
to participate in a new type of modernity”:

Young villagers see themselves and are seen as marginal to the “good
and proper life” (McHugh 2001) offered by town living and enjoyed by
those with the money to re-�locate. By taking up the Maoist option, they
no longer have to look to the town and “foreign” to be “at the heart of
the action.” Membership in the Maoists re-Â�configures perceptions of a
consumerist world that excludes them. (2003, 321)

What is apparent in both of these observations is that identification with

the Maoists—in contrast to just sympathizing with them—entails at
least some kind of shift in subjectivity. But even here, whatever decisions
people make, or perhaps I should say, whatever commitments they decide
to undertake, come from thinking of themselves as people who are con-
stituted through relations with others and who value the social outcomes
that their sacrifices help create. Recall that Bina framed the difference
between the combatants on the two sides of the war in terms of selfish-
ness versus being-�for-�others, and that she praised the rebels as virtuous
and brave.
At the same time, selflessness and bravery may not be all that’s going
on here. Another way to look at this might be to acknowledge that leaving
one’s home to join the Maoist cadres in the forests is stepping into a new
kind of social identity, which is not a universal goal. Indeed, people who
actually do decide to become guerrillas, and hence, new kinds of sub-
jects, accept a break with social traditions that may be easier for some
kinds of people to make than others. This would help to explain why so
many adolescents—both boys and girls—left their homes for the rebel
army in Chorigaon, as elsewhere in Nepal. It would also help to explain
why schools have been such effective recruiting sites—education being
probably the single most powerful vehicle for social change in rural Nepal
and one that changes its subjects in ways that demand new kinds of rela-
tions, as Bina’s parents’ recognition that, unlike her sister, she would not
marry a man of their choice indicates.53 In fact, if one is thinking specifi-
cally of the perspective of teenage girls—which my calculations suggest
that at least half of the rebel recruits from Chorigaon are, or were, when
they ran away—one might note that the experience of going off to a Mao-
ist training camp might not actually be as radical a break as one might
think: after all, they are fully expected, at that age, to undergo a major life

84â•… Lauren Leve

change that will involve leaving their natal home for a place where they
will live under others’ orders, endure hardships and suffering, and, at the
same time, become more complete people as a result. From the point of
view of the would-�be girl soldier, the main difference may be that the Mao-
ist option involves a higher degree of physical danger, but also, perhaps,
greater opportunities for fun.
If the peace process continues to go forward, a more pressing question
than why they left may well become, what will happen to these girls when
it’s time to return? When the Maoist army decommissions them, will they
be able to return to their villages and rejoin social life? Of the ten or so
young women from Chorigaon proper who joined the Maoist army before
2004, at least one is dead and the whereabouts of most others are largely
unknown.54 Only one had returned home to the village before the peace
agreement was signed.55 In that situation, her marriage was immediately
arranged to the son of a local family who had migrated to Kathmandu,
although she was only sixteen. When I met her in the city, I saw that
she acted like any young daughter-�in-�law and her mother-�in-�law seemed
content. However, this is an unusual case because this girl changed her
mind even before completing basic training and, in the end, spent only
a few weeks away. It remains to be seen whether women who have spent
years with the Maoists will be willing to return to the roles they left be-
hind, and how their natal families and potential affines will treat this part
of their history. Hisala Yami, wife of the Maoist leader Baburam Bhatta-
rai and former head of the Women’s Front, has been quoted as doubting
that women, once radicalized, can ever return to their pre-�Maoist homes:
“Sons will be welcomed back with open arms, but for the daughters, can
there be a return? When they become guerrillas, the women set them-
selves free from patriarchal bonds. How can they go back? That is why the
women are more committed” (Gautam, Banskota, and Machanda 2003,
109).
As Nepal shifts from waging war to building peace, this will be just one
of the many difficult issues that Gorkhali women and their families will
face. And they will doubtless do so against a backdrop of ngos, “experts,”
academics, and other well-�wishers seeking to assist them in the process
of reconciliation and to ensure that women’s voices are heard in the tran-
sition. Indeed, this is practically guaranteed by the Comprehensive Peace
Agreement itself, which commits the interim government to ending gen-
der discrimination (3.5) and establishing a program of development that

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…85

will facilitate “the socio-Â�economic development of the country and also
assist in ensuring the country’s economic prosperity in a short period of
time” (3.12). What this means is that programs that target Nepali women
will continue, and that there will be a continued need for theories about
who they are and how best to serve them. This chapter, however, is not
meant to provide simple answers. Instead, what I’ve tried to do is to draw
some connections between empowerment programs that rest on certain
ideals, Gorkhali women’s notorious radicalization, and a sense of what
was important to them and what sort of people they think themselves
to be. And I’ve tried to take that seriously enough to consider what it
might mean to reexamine our own theoretical assumptions in that light.
What happens in Chorigaon—and throughout Nepal—in the next few
years will have much to teach people who are concerned with empower-
ment—women’s or otherwise. But understanding it may require interro-
gating deeply held assumptions about agency, gender, development, and
revolutionary consciousness.

Notes
1. Despite the fact that the government had been presented with a forty-�point list
of demands two weeks earlier, which it had neither acknowledged nor responded
to. For more information on the political history of the cpn (Maoist) or the start
of the People’s War, see Karki and Seddon (2003a) and other contributions to the
same volume.
2. See Kernot and Gurung (2003). This is a conservative estimate. A study carried
out a year later by the Community Study and Welfare Centre (cswc), an ngo
advocating for the rights of internally displaced persons (idps), estimates that
somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000 people have been displaced from their
villages.
3. Recent anthropological and historical works alone include Hutt (2004), Karki
and Seddon (2003b), Onesto (2005), Thapa (2003), Gellner (2003). Not to men-
tion a virtual industry of reports commissioned by security concerns, aid organi-
zations, and ngos.
4. De Sales notes that in the two districts of Rolpa and Rukum combined there isn’t
a single hospital or any industry (2003, 342). Ironically, a $US 50 million, fifteen-�
year project in the Rapti Zone had concluded just a month and a half before the
formal onset of the insurrection. On decreasing agricultural yield and increas-
ing deprivation between 1960 and 1990, see MacFarlane (2001); see also Seddon
(2001).
5. See, for instance, Parvati (2003), Pettigrew and Schneiderman (2004), Shakya
(2003), Shova, Gautam and Shakya (1999), Shobha, Gautam (2001), Manchanda
(1999), Onesto (2005), Maycock (2003).

86â•… Lauren Leve

 6. S. Sharma (2000, 35–36) made a similar argument about usaid programs in the
Rapti Zone (Gellner 2002, 21). Karki and Seddon mention this possibility as well
(Karki and Seddon 2003a, 19).
7. See note 40.
8. Nepali villages comprise dense and overlapping social networks which offer
those who live there various ways of positioning themselves at different times;
indeed, managing different identities in different contexts is one of the skills
that villagers use to get by. As Radachowsky puts it, perhaps somewhat overcon-
fidently, “it is possible to live in the context of the ‘People’s War’ but one must
wear two or three faces. One for the Maoists. One for the State security forces.
And a real face for people they trust” (Radachowsky 2003).
9. This, like all personal and institutional names in this paper, is a pseudonym I have
created to protect the privacy of the people involved.
10. The “unification”—as this process is usually called—took place over the course of
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and brought together more than
one hundred independent polities by war, marriage, or alliance/annexation. That
Nepali British soldiers are called “Gurkhas” to this day reflects the fact that it was
the king of Gorkha who gave the British permission to recruit within his domain,
which was known at that time not as “Nepal” but as “the entire territories of the
king from Gorkha.” “Gurkha” is a mispronunciation of this place name. See Burg-
hart (1984).
11. In 2001, Gorkha had a total population of 288,134 people. Although Gurungs
are numerically dominant in the district, the area I’m calling Chorigaon had a
relatively diverse ethnic/caste composition of Gurung, Magar, Newar, Brahmin-�
Chhetri, Baramu, and occupational groups. There is no one economically domi-
nant caste in the area.
12. At the time of the 2001 census, there were 801 households with a total popula-
tion of 4,234 people. See http://www.thlib.org/places/culturalgeography/nepal
/census/output.php (accessed 6/20/13).
13. A local Maoist told Li Onesto, a visiting journalist, that: “We went at night and
seized equipment and money. This organization gives money for education and
does social work, but they direct people away from the real revolutionary solu-
tion and promote Christianity.” I feel that I must state for the record here that
dfa is not a Christian organization and, despite extensive interaction with both
the local and national level staff, I have never seen any evidence of religious evan-
gelism by dfa or its employees. “Hope of the Hopeless in Gorkha,” http://rwor
.org/a/v21/1040–049/1042/nepa122.htm.
14. Field Office Team (1983, 8).
15. Field Office Team, 28.
16. Sob and Leslie (1988, 9).
17. Sob and Leslie, 3.
18. It was released by Nepal’s Ministry of Education in 1984 and immediately adopted
by dfa.

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…87

19. As opposed to “education as the practice of domination” (Freire 1997, 62).
20. World Education (1989, 1).
21. World Education (1989). In addition to consciousness-�raising activities, the cur-
riculum also included concrete instruction in dfa’s community development
priorities such as family planning, livestock raising, planting fodder trees in land-
slide areas, how to prepare oral rehydration solution, and how to construct pit
latrines and smoke-�outlet stoves.
22. The second year, the monthly fee was raised to fifty paisa, and five rupees
were collected for the books, raising the total cost for a year of class to thir-
teen rupees. The third year the monthly fee went up to one rupee and the book
fee to ten rupees, bringing the total cost to twenty-�one rupees (Sob and Leslie
1988, 12–13).
23. See Leve (1993).
24. For instance, the increased need for someone in the family to have a nonagricul-
tural job; plus literate sons are believed to want literate wives.
25. World Education (1989, 2).
26. These are not the only two possibilities, of course. There’s also a third approach
(Grillo and Stirrat 1997; Leve 2001; Li 1991; Pigg 1993) that looks at development
largely through its ironies and contradictions—noting, for example, that even
neoliberal programs which explicitly aim to depoliticize populations, or to legiti-
mate oppressive regimes, almost never succeed in doing so, or that even those
sincerely intended to alleviate misery or to empower often end up inspiring or
prolonging violent conflict. For instance, the massive growth of microcredit pro-
grams that provide women with gender-�based access to capital resources has
been documented as having actually increased violence against women in Ban-
gladesh (Feldman 1997; Karim 2001; Rahman 1999). This paper might be said to
be an example of this third approach.
27. U.S. Agency for International Development (usaid), “Budget Justification to
the Congress fy 2004,” http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pdace110.pdf, accessed
6/20/2013.
28. http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pdace110.pdf.
29. Prelude to “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” re-
leased by the president’s office, September 2002.
30. http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pdace110.pdf.
31. http://www.aid/gov/pubs/cp98/ane/countries/np.htm, accessed March 21, 2005.
No longer available.
32. http://www.aid/gov/pubs/cp98/ane/countries/np.htm, accessed March 21, 2005.
No longer available.
33. Others have also commented on the transformation of the empowerment model
from one based on the conscientization paradigm to one reflecting neoliberal
norms. See, for example, Feldman (1997), Fernando (1997), Kabeer (1994), Karim
(2001), Leve (2001), Tamang (2002). Katherine Rankin has also analyzed this shift
through the lens of microcredit, which she blasts as a governmental strategy that

88â•… Lauren Leve

 is “all the more pernicious in its approbation of feminist languages . . . to alterna-
tive (and fundamentally conservative) ends” (2001, 30).
34. This is too large an assertion to be demonstrable here, but see, for instance,
Spivak (1988a, 1988b) on Guha and subaltern studies, or Laclau and Mouffe (1985)
on Marx’s theoretical legacies.
35. It was 0.04 percent higher in 1988, to be precise (Nepal South Asian Center,
1998).
36. See Butler (1990, 1993) for a theory of gender as performative action.
37. See Ahearn (2001) for a sensitive ethnographic study of changing marriage prac-
tices and the impact of literacy and schooling on individual aspirations and social
and subjective identities in a nearby district.
38. Nanu’s disillusionment with democracy was widely shared. “Democracy has
done nothing but kill . . . people,” Ram Maya lamented. Similarly, Sobita felt
“it’s due to democracy that we have no peace. . . . In my thinking the multiparty
system has not fulfilled anyone’s desires or expectations. . . . We thought there
would be development, but now the works have either been stopped, destroyed,
or burned down. Democracy has invited violence and killings, it seems.”
39. To be sure, I did meet a few people who were critical of the Maoists (including
the very aggrieved father of a teenage girl who had run away to join the People’s
Army). However, I didn’t hear any reports of Maoist violence against villagers
other than early “punishments” (humiliation, maiming) meted out to “class ene-
mies,” who, by 2002, had long fled the district. In contrast, I heard many com-
plaints of police and military brutalities. As noted, this may have reflected a
greater awareness of the proximity of Maoist cadres in the village itself. However,
it is also likely that people who were most critical of the Maoists had left over the
years and those who remained were genuinely sympathetic or else had learned
to keep silent. On a related note, it’s clear that people in the village were uncom-
fortable speaking directly about the Maoists in interviews in a way that people
I interviewed in Kathmandu were not. They tended to refer to the rebels only
obliquely or indirectly (for example, “he’s not like that, we would have known”)
and, in this, made use of speech patterns that were similar to the ones that they
used to refer to their husbands and other figures deserving certain kinds of
formal respect—for instance, a rural woman will almost never use her husband’s
name, and even referring to someone as “my husband” can be regarded as ex-
cessively bold. In Nani Maya’s testimony, for instance, where I have inserted “my
husband,” she said only “he,” leaving the listener to infer whom she meant. One
way of interpreting this may be that they were uncomfortable talking about such
sensitive material with me or others who were writing it down, which is surely
true to some degree, no matter how much they said otherwise. Yet I don’t think
this is all. Since honorific speech denotes distance as well as respect, I understand
these practices as also reflecting their fear of either speaking too transparently or
seeming to suggest intimacy, since speech could bring trouble, either from the
rebels or, especially, from the security forces if it led them to think you had in-

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…89

 formation that they might want. It is also true that many kinds of information
are communicated much less explicitly in Nepal than in the United States and,
even before the war, Nepalis were skilled at interpreting indirect speech and
silences.
40. This is an allusion to the common belief that a woman should regard her husband
as if he were a god and to the widespread rural practice of paying formal respect
to husbands and mothers-�in-�law by bowing to their feet daily.
41. As Sita described the start of an average day in the village for a daughter-�in-�law.
42. “Development” (bikās) might also be placed on this list. If so—again based on
what they told me—it would include water taps, electricity, bridges and roads,
and peace.
43. I heard this many times in Chorigaon as well, and the classification always
pointed to its inevitability as well as recognizing that it meant suffering.
44. See also March (2002).
45. Much of this discussion echoes analyses that feminist theorists and anthropolo-
gists working with women in South Asia have been saying for decades. See, for
example, Des Chene (1998), M. Roy (1992), Kumar (1994), Skinner, Pach, and
Holland (1998), McHugh (2001), March (2002), Chodorow (1989), Enslin (1998).
This also parallels a more general debate about the relative individuality versus
interdependence of Hindu South Asian ideas of the person as a whole (Appadurai
1986; Daniel 1987; Dumont 1970; Marriott 1989; Marriott and Inden 1977; Mines
1994).
46. It is expected that a bride will cry at her wedding and refuse to leave with the
groom. Not to do so would be considered surprising, and to express enthusiasm
for the marriage, shameless.
47. Although parents say it hurts them to send their daughters away knowing the
hardship that is likely in store, the suffering that women experience in their new
homes is accepted as an inevitable part of the next stage of their lives—that is,
growing up and being a woman.
48. Veena Das has illustrated the difference between formal kinship rules and what
she calls “practical kinship” and shown how the flexibility of kinship in practice
offers individuals and communities options—sometimes necessary for survival—
that often do not “officially” exist (1995).
49. In a project that closely parallels my own, Saba Mahmood has explored how
liberal assumptions about freedom and autonomy have become naturalized in
feminist scholarship. She uses the case of Muslim women in Egypt who self-�
consciously undertake to cultivate illiberal, seemingly disempowering, sensi-
bilities to challenge feminist presumptions that self-�realization is inimical to
any kind of subjugation and that freedom consists in the ability to pursue one’s
own interests, which belong to an independent subject who exists prior to sub-
jectifying power. While Mahmood is concerned with embodied practice rather
than political consciousness, and the revolution she examines is conducted with
ethics, not guns, we come to similar conclusions about the role of certain types

90â•… Lauren Leve

 of power in constituting how women come to know themselves and be known
to others in any given situation, and about the importance of this for thinking
about self-Â�realization or agency: “The women I worked with did not regard trying
to emulate authorized models of behavior as an external social imposition that
constrained individual freedom. Rather, they treated socially authorized forms
of performance as the potentialities—the ground if you will—through which the
self is realized” (2005, 31).
50. There are at least three possible explanations for this: (1) they were genuinely that
invested in development as an ideal; (2) they associated me with dfa, and they
were being polite; (3) despite reservations about the enterprise as a whole, they
hoped that I could bring dfa back into the area and provide projects that would
reinvigorate the local economy. I suspect that the truth contains elements of all
three.
51. One might also argue that these women did in fact challenge development ideals
in a host of practical ways, such as taking their teenage daughters out of school
to get married or redeploying microcredit loans for unauthorized purposes (see
Rankin n.d.). But if people were aware of these actions as acts of resistance, they
certainly didn’t speak of them as such to me and, even if it were pointed out to
them, I’m skeptical that they would see it in that way.
52. In April 2006, King Gyanendra reinstated the elected parliament he had dis-
solved when he staged a palace coup in February 2005, ending fourteen months
of direct rule. Among the first things the reinstated parliament did was strip the
king of his power and privileges, including control of the army, and consent to
the long-�standing Maoist demand for a constituent assembly which would de-
cide the fate of the monarchy and write a new constitution. Four months later, the
prime minister and the Maoist supremo issued identical requests to the United
Nations for peacekeepers to monitor the ceasefire and help negotiate the Maoist
disarmament. On November 21, they signed a Comprehensive Peace Agreement
that brought the Maoists officially into the interim government and declared the
end of the ten-Â�year People’s War.
53. And indeed, schools in Chorigaon have paid a high price for their influence.
While many of the local teachers did have moderate to adamant Maoist sym-
pathies, their allegiances were hardly uniform. Nevertheless, in addition to the
teacher Nani Maya mentioned, who was taken from his home at night and killed
by the armed police early in the war, two others were arrested and held for over
a month before being released. Another much-�loved teacher (who was driven
underground early in the war) was killed in the village on a holiday (Tihar) when
he secretly returned to visit his mother and wife. And the first Maoist martyr in
the area was a student who was shot by the police just fourteen days after the start
of the war while trying to prevent the arrest of a teacher. And all this in addition
to regular school closings and harassment by the security forces. While Maoist
abductions of teachers and schoolchildren for forced “education” and/or induc-
tion has been widely reported in other parts of Nepal, I did not hear of this hap-

Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepalâ•…91

 pening in Chorigaon, although people there acknowledged that Maoists often
visited the schools and staged different types of “programs.”
54. The mother of one girl told me that she knew her daughter was alive only because
the Maoists had not yet come to tell her she was dead.
55. One local boy had a similar tale, having left for the jungle only to be fetched by
his mother, who was a friend of the regional commander and not willing to risk
the death of her only son. After bringing him back, that family moved to the dis-
trict center and eventually to Kathmandu.

92â•… Lauren Leve

╉CHAPTER 3 Aradhana Sharma

The State and Women’s Empowerment in India

Paradoxes and Politics

Introduction
I faced an interesting conundrum as I began research on the
Mahila Samakhya program or ms (as it is commonly called), a
Government of India–sponsored rural women’s empowerment
initiative. The source of my puzzlement was the shifting manner
in which program staff introduced the program in different situa-
tions. For instance, at a meeting with Block Office1 administrators
in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Meena Rani, a program representative,
introduced ms as “a [program] of the Human Resource Devel-
opment Ministry of the Government of India . . . that attempts
to empower women, raise their awareness and make them self-�
reliant.”2 However, just a few days prior to this meeting, Meena
Rani had presented ms as a nongovernmental organization (ngo)
to a group of village women she was attempting to recruit as pro-
gram participants. When these women asked her what benefits
they would receive from the program, Meena Rani responded that
they would only get information, knowledge, and support; ms was
a sanstha (ngo), and not a sarkari (government) program that
distributed things to participants.
I had observed other field staff 3 resorting to a similar mobile
positioning of ms, at times as an ngo and at other times as a
government program, and wondered whether staff members were
simply unclear about ms’s identity. When I voiced my puzzlement
to Sunita Pathak, a program administrator, she explained that
“[ms] is partly governmental, and it is also nongovernmental. . . . The na-
tional level [program in New Delhi] is strictly governmental. . . . [But] from
the state level onward, [ms] is an autonomous organization.” In the devel-
opment world ms would be considered a Government Organized Non-
governmental Organization or gongo, a seemingly contradictory para-�
statal entity. Pathak’s elucidation of the program’s hybrid nature cleared
up some of my confusion, but it led me to question why the program was
structured as a gongo and why its personnel identified the program in a
shifting either/or (ngo/go) manner rather than as a gongo in front of
government and rural audiences.
In this essay, I take up these questions and use the ms program’s hybrid
organizational form and empowerment activities to point to some of the
ways in which governance, the state, and women’s political activism are
being transformed in neoliberal India. The current regime of neoliberal
governmentality, as scholars building on Foucauldian insights have ar-
gued, is characterized by the rise of novel mechanisms of self-�governance
(like empowerment), new institutions of rule (like ngos and gongos),
and the increased entanglement of such institutions with state bodies in
the project of governance.4 Grassroots empowerment, along with partici-
pation and state–civil society partnerships, have emerged as key words
under neoliberalism and are being promoted by various actors, including
the United Nations, the World Bank, ngos, and states, as ideal strategies
of development and governance (Sharma 2008).
How does one position the ms program and make sense of its workings
in this larger transnational neoliberal context? Does the program’s com-
bination of certain critical aspects of neoliberal governance, such as em-
powerment and state–civil society collaboration, make ms a typical neo-
liberal intervention? I contend that it does not. Indeed, the MS program’s
alternative and layered borrowings from feminist, leftist, and radical
pedagogy-�based (Freire 1970) empowerment frameworks and its empha-
sis on women’s collective, anti-Â�oppression-Â�focused political work make
it difficult to qualify it as a model neoliberal initiative, writ large. What I
hope to show is how ms articulates with the globally dominant neoliberal
mantra and what this tells us about the reconfiguration of governance,
the state, and subaltern and feminist struggles in postliberalization India.
I begin this essay by discussing the rationale behind the ms program’s
gongo form. I then analyze how this gongo form materializes in the
work identities and lives of its personnel, describing the constraints and
opportunities that ms’s hybrid structure brings up. While the program’s

94â•… Aradhana Sharma

linkage with the state puts restrictions on the mobilization work its rep-
resentatives do, its crossbred gongo form and ngo affiliation also afford
some maneuverability. I argue that ms functionaries’ shifting usage of the
two aspects of the program’s identity—its government and nongovern-
mental labels—is a strategy that allows them to sometimes subvert state
discipline and repression, and to expand the meanings and practices of
empowerment.
I analyze both the discursive and material effects of the program per-
sonnel’s tactical moves and unravel the paradoxes that arise when em-
powerment is implemented as a category of governance: it can simul-
taneously bureaucratize women’s lives and unleash unexpected forms
of empowerment. These uneven consequences of the ms program’s
gongo nature raise broader questions about feminist partnerships with
state agencies in postliberal India. ms began as an experiment that gave
women’s movement activists a testing ground for working with, rather
than against, the state and implementing large-�scale projects for equality
and justice (Jandhyala 2001). I conclude this essay by exploring the poten-
tial of feminist-�cum-�state collaborations under neoliberalism. My inten-
tion is to not make easy judgments about whether feminist alliances with
state agencies are good or bad (Ferguson 1990) or whether the effects of
empowerment programs undertaken by such alliances are uniformly lib-
eratory or conformist. Rather, I take my cue from many of my informants
and from Foucault to argue that the governmentalization of empower-
ment is “dangerous” in that it is laden with risks and unexpected possibili-
ties (Foucault 1982, 231; Sharma 2008). The tale I tell, therefore, is not one
about the unequivocally depoliticizing effects of empowerment; rather, I
tease out the forms and modalities of subaltern and feminist politics that
are enabled by the governmentalization of empowerment in the neoliberal
age and signal their limits (see also Chatterjee 2004).

Why a GONGO?
In 1989 the Government of India initiated the Mahila Samakhya program
with Dutch funding.5 ms was patterned after the Women’s Development
Programme, or wdp, then operating in Rajasthan, which had empower-
ment as its explicit goal. Transnational feminist scholarship and activism
in the field of development identified empowerment as an ideal strategy
for gender-�equitable and just development (Sen and Grown 1987; Young
1993, 127–46; Kabeer 1994). Women’s movement activists in India bor-
rowed from such feminist thinking and other radical frameworks to de-

The State and Women’s Empowerment in Indiaâ•…95

sign ms; a senior civil servant, Anil Bordia, facilitated this process (Sharma
2008). The program views social hierarchies and women’s lack of aware-
ness about their rights and about government programs as obstacles to
their development. ms does not distribute material resources; rather, it
mobilizes marginalized rural women through collective empowerment or
“conscientization” strategies (Freire 1970), whereby they reflect on their
oppressions, take action to address their problems, and come into their
own as agents of change (Government of India 1997).
ms is considered innovative not only because of its nonmaterial em-
powerment focus but also for its crossbred gongo structure. Why this
crossbred form, and why did women’s movement activists, who heretofore
had had an uneasy relationship with state agencies, agree to partner with
the government on an empowerment initiative?
When I posed this question to activists, some explained their willing-
ness to work with the state as a consequence of the shifting political ter-
rain in the 1980s. Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency in
1975, and the resultant suspension of civil rights, led to a deep suspicion
of the state and the nurturing of autonomous activist spaces. However,
Rajiv Gandhi’s attempts to innovate government in the mid-Â�1980s, and
his promise to give greater priority to women’s issues, played an impor-
tant role in repositioning the state as a possible, if risky, arena for creative
activist work.6
Feminist involvement in state development projects during the 1980s
was also shaped by a realization that ngo efforts and autonomous organi-
zational strategies were limited in their reach and results. “[Our thinking
was that] we need to . . . make more impact on mainstream structures.
We cannot [work] in isolation. So the question of partnerships, linkages,
networks [arose in] . . . the 1980s,” explained Versha Rai, a member of the
core ms team. When the opportunity to collaborate with the government
on designing and implementing a national-Â�level, women’s empowerment
program—Mahila Samakhya—presented itself, some activists saw it as a
chance to take their feminist ideas of gender equality, justice, and social
change “to scale”—that is, to reach out to large groups of disenfranchised
women, to use state resources to facilitate meaningful transformation, to
mainstream gender within state institutions, and to perhaps reconfigure
these institutions themselves (Jandhyala 2001).
In addition to noting the benefits of the state’s wider reach and greater
resources, many of my informants also saw state involvement in grass-
roots development efforts as its duty toward its most marginalized citi-

96â•… Aradhana Sharma

zens, which ought not to be privatized. Furthermore, a few felt that the
program’s association with the Government of India gave ms authority
and legitimacy in bureaucratic circles. “You write ‘Government of India,’
and everybody knows that you are a government program. [It] helps [with]
credibility,” explained Sunita Pathak, a civil servant who worked with ms.
The advantages of state participation in a women’s empowerment ini-
tiative, however, were tempered by drawbacks. “The main problem is that
a state, given its very nature . . . , says that if program A has three compo-
nents, program A will have three components forever,” claimed one bu-
reaucrat, as he discussed the rigidity of the typical bureaucratic approach,
which discouraged flexibility and innovation. Other disadvantages that
my informants brought up included target-�driven and top-�down devel-
opment strategies, red tape, political expediency, inefficiency, and cor-
ruption.
Some activists I spoke with raised more serious problems associated
with government involvement in feminist and grassroots empowerment.
“To be able to question issues is not something that the government and
the state would like,” explained Kaveri Mani. “It has a class bias. It has
an urban bias. It has an elitist mode. So why should it . . . initiate a pro-
gram which is going to question its own role and interest!” Nina Singh,
a civil servant, added: “A government program . . . does not integrate the
element of struggle that lies at the heart of empowerment. . . . That is the
biggest constraint—that struggle is not understood in a government lexi-
con. [Bureaucrats] reduce everything to a safe thing called ‘development.’ ”
The government, hence, could not be trusted as the sole agent for women’s
empowerment given the inequalities it expressed and promoted, and its
potential to co-�opt and depoliticize struggle.
ms planners therefore desired a quasi-�nongovernmental identity for
ms. An ngo-�like structure, they felt, would mitigate the problems with
state involvement and bring in benefits, such as grassroots-�level account-
ability and legitimacy, a bottom-�up orientation, participatory and decen-
tralized ways of working, flexibility, and a motivated workforce. In Kaveri
Mani’s words, “While women’s groups have the advantages of being
small . . . , of being close to the people, . . . [and] of having a committed
staff, the advantage of the state was its outreach . . . and large scale. And
so there was this feeling that it is possible to marry the two.”7
Mahila Samakhya’s gongo structure represents this experimental
“marriage” or partnership. While the national program office is part of
the Department of Education of the Ministry of Human Resource Devel-

The State and Women’s Empowerment in Indiaâ•…97

opment and is headed by a bureaucrat, at the level of each participating
state, ms is implemented through nongovernmental “ms Societies.” The
staff at the state, district, and block levels of the program is drawn from
the ngo sector, and its advisory bodies are comprised of both ex officio
and nongovernmental members, with the latter having at least 51 percent
representation.
The ms program’s crossbred structure, thus, was the result of its plan-
ners’ desire to combine the positive aspects of state and ngo approaches
to women’s development and to preserve partial independence for the
program. Because some activists were wary about collaborating with
state agencies and concerned about the possible co-�optation of feminist
agendas of empowerment by the state, they created a semi-�autonomous
gongo. But what does this gongo form mean in practice? How does it
manifest itself in the daily work lives of ms staff members, and does it, in
fact, afford them relative autonomy from official dictates?

MS as a Moving Target
The program’s hybrid organization raised two key conundrums for its
workforce. First, they had to define their work identities. As gongo
workers, were they government employees or ngo employees? The latter
received less remuneration but had more flexibility in their work, whereas
the former earned more but had to work within governmental dictates.
Second, ms representatives had to carefully manage their state and non-
state identities in front of different audiences with varied imaginations of
and expectations for state and nonstate actors. While the program’s hy-
brid identity raised these dilemmas for its workforce, it also provided a
partial resolution, as I illustrate below. Program employees mobilely posi-
tioned ms and themselves, using both go and ngo labels to negotiate
the very contradictions that the mixed gongo form and state involve-
ment form threw in their path, and generated unexpectedly empower-
ing results. I also discuss what these program practices reveal about the
discursive nature of the state and about the paradoxical effects of state-�
sponsored women’s empowerment.
ms personnel rarely, if ever, identified the program as a gongo in
work-�related situations, preferring instead to switch between its govern-
mental and nongovernmental labels. Prabha Kishore, a mid-�level ms em-
ployee, explained that “ms . . . wears two hats—one is a governmental hat
and the other is a nongovernmental hat. We have made very good use of
both these hats.” She told me that she kept two letterheads. “When we

98â•… Aradhana Sharma

write to ngos, we use the . . . letterhead that states that Mahila Samakhya
is a voluntary organization registered under the 1860 Societies Act and
gives our registration number. We open [the letter] with ‘Dear Colleague
or Dear Friend, Namaste,’ ” she said in a sweet voice. “[But] when we need
to put pressure . . . [we use] the letterhead bearing the words, ‘Ministry
of Human Resource Development.’ ” Kishore enunciated the last phrase
slowly, emphasizing each word. “This letterhead evokes the reaction,” she
lowered her voice and stated fearfully, “‘Oh God, this is a government pro-
gram!’ We even stamp our seal on these letters and sign them—we write
them exactly like government letters are written.”
To express authority, as Kishore described, ms staff members used the
style, language, and voice of the state. I observed them don the govern-
mental garb when they needed to garner the support of state administra-
tors who might be hostile toward ngos and women’s empowerment. They
also worked the bureaucratic hierarchy to their advantage by emphasizing
to state, district, and block officials that ms was a program of the high-
est, national-Â�level government body—the Government of India—which
therefore needed to be treated with seriousness and respect.8
Program representatives also took on governmental personas in front
of rural audiences when they wanted to perform authority. For instance,
Leela Vati, a fieldworker, used the state tag to intimidate her clients. She
ordered participants in some ms villages, from where the program was
being phased out, to return the few things (like rugs and water pails) that
their village collectives had received from the ms program. She did not
have any explicit mandate from her superiors for doing so. ms participants
in Bilaspur village told me that Leela Vati had threatened them when they
refused to comply—“If you don’t return the things, the government jeep
[used by the program] will come tomorrow, forcibly take everything, and
dishonor you in front of everyone!” She even took the village collective
leader’s signature on a blank sheet of paper. Bilaspur’s women alleged that
Leela Vati could easily avoid being implicated in any wrongdoing by writ-
ing a note on that piece of paper stating that the village women had vol-
untarily returned the things. Leela Vati thus effectively used statist sym-
bols and practices, such as a jeep and written documentation (Gupta and
Sharma 2006), to enact “official” authority, and played on the women’s fear
of the coercive state-�as-�taker.
When it was not authority but legitimacy that ms representatives de-
sired or when they needed to justify the program’s lack of resources, they
wore the ngo hat. For instance, when introducing ms to potential pro-

The State and Women’s Empowerment in Indiaâ•…99

gram participants, they often identified themselves as ngo workers who
were interested in building meaningful relationships with villagers, clearly
distinguishing their unselfish and committed work ethic from that of state
employees. ngo identification also helped when potential clients asked
what tangible resources they would receive from ms. Program represen-
tatives were well aware of the popular image of the state-�as-�giver among
rural subalterns who expected government development programs to
provide for their material needs.9 Positioning ms as a resource-�poor ngo
in such situations helped staff members to fend off clients’ demands for
concrete entitlements. Moreover, it helped explain the temporariness of
the program and justify its phase-�out. For example, when program par-
ticipants in Seelampur block, where formal ms structures were being dis-
mantled, charged Danu Bai, an ms fieldworker, with leaving them in the
lurch, she responded that ms was a time-�bound ngo project that had to
end and not a government program “that [would] go on forever.”
ms functionaries’ shifting representation of the program in different
contexts and in front of diverse audiences both catered to and shaped
their interlocutors’ ideas about the state and ngos. People’s imaginations
of these entities are based on their social locations, on previous inter-
actions with bureaucracies and ngos, and on public cultural representa-
tions (Gupta 1995). For example, the subaltern actors I met often used the
term “mai-Â�baap” (mother-Â�father) to describe the state and its functionar-
ies; for them the “ideal” state, like good parents, was supposed to take care
of their survival needs.10 In practice, however, the local officials they en-
countered tended to be dishonest and uncaring. For rural subalterns, the
predominantly authoritative face of the state-�as-�taker, which took away
information, through census practices, and even fertility, compromised
the legitimacy attached to the ideal parental state-�as-�caretaker. ms repre-
sentatives had to navigate through such sedimented understandings of the
state when pitching the program to differently positioned audiences. They
played the apparent breach between the “G” and “ng” parts of the pro-
gram’s gongo identity, thereby constructing ngos as legitimate, time-Â�
bounded entities with no resources, and the state as an authoritative and
perpetual entity flush with resources but with questionable legitimacy.
Thus, by mobilely positioning the program, ms workers discursively en-
trenched the boundary between state and nonstate spheres.
Even though they wore different hats in different situations as a pro-
grammatic strategy, most ms functionaries allied themselves with the just
and legitimate ngo world. For example, Seema Batra, an employee, told

100â•… Aradhana Sharma

me that “[many] people who work for ms do not treat it like government
service. . . . The salaries [we] get . . . are not enough for survival. So the
people who work in ms do so only because they have a certain ‘devotion’
toward their work. You don’t see that in government departments [where]
people come only for the sake of their salaries.” Indian public cultural dis-
courses are rife with condemnations of the “nine to five” mentality, lack
of motivation, and low productivity of government workers, and ms em-
ployees’ efforts to dissociate themselves from this negativity partook of the
widely prevalent critique of the state. Their careful self-�positioning as ngo
workers reproduced an image of the state as an entity that fosters sloth
and apathy, and employs inefficient people who treat their work merely
as a job. They implicitly constructed the ngo world as a distinct haven of
creativity, meaningful and hard work, enthusiasm, and innovation.
The self-�identification of ms personnel with the ngo sector was ma-
terially reflected in their earnings: ms employees did not receive the
higher compensation and benefits associated with government jobs
(Sharma 2008). Yet, like state employees, they were prohibited from lead-
ing or participating in antistate demonstrations. Ironically, most issues
that ms clients took up in their quest for empowerment, such as basic
needs, police matters, laws, land titles, or access to information, involved
dealing with and sometimes agitating against specific state bureaucra-
cies. But women working for ms, positioned by the government in such
instances as quasi-Â�state “gongo” employees, were forbidden from taking
part in the antistate protests of poor women they had mobilized. Seema
Singh, an ms functionary, described this catch-�22:

All the issues that we take up are, in some way, connected to the gov-
ernment. So if we come within the ambit of the government and suc-
cumb to governmental pressure, we will not be able to take up any
issues. For example, the government issues licenses for thekas [liquor
shops]. In our district we took up a big fight on this issue. In one vil-
lage the police beat up women with wooden sticks as they were trying
to bust the local theka. Many women had broken bones, but we did not
back off and surrender to the government. A few days later, the theka
closed down. . . . If we had caved in to governmental pressure, we would
have never been able to take up this fight.

Singh told me that the presence of a government-�licensed liquor store in

the local market had increased incidents of harassment and domestic vio-
lence against women and girls, and her office took up this fight. “We got

The State and Women’s Empowerment in Indiaâ•…101

a written notice [from the government] that we could not participate in
any aandolan [protest],” she explained. “[But] we devised ways of partici-
pating; we strategized. Can’t participate? Hah! We spearheaded a big anti-Â�
alcohol campaign and shouted so many slogans against the government.
During the protest, when government officials asked us who we were, we
simply pretended to be village women!” Singh’s team members filed prop-
erly worded leave applications at the ms office, took the day off, and pro-
tested as ordinary citizens. They circumvented state discipline and vio-
lence, and accomplished their empowerment-�focused goals by identifying
as local residents and carefully following written bureaucratic procedures.
Sunita Mathur, another ms staff person, demonstrated a similar sub-
versive use of statist proceduralism. She helped women belonging to the
Kol tribe in Ganna village to obtain a section of the village commons for
their survival needs. This piece of land was considered prime property be-
cause it bordered a canal and a major road. Upper-�caste men in the village,
upset over losing this valuable land, retaliated by razing Kol huts. When
Sunita Mathur heard about this, she trained the Kol women in formal,
official grievance methods. She dictated to them the text of a written com-
plaint detailing the incident. They were to bypass the block-�level admin-
istration and hand in two copies of the complaint directly to the Sub-�
District Magistrate (sdm), a higher, district-�level bureaucrat. They also
had to ensure that the sdm signed and stamped “received” on both copies,
and keep one copy for their records. The Kol women, under Mathur’s
guidance, used these standard governmental procedures and managed to
retain the disputed land.
Despite its successful application in this instance, ms functionaries’
use of bureaucratic proceduralism has contradictory implications for
women’s empowerment. On the one hand, it governmentalizes women’s
everyday lives and multiplies statist languages throughout society. It privi-
leges a formalized mode of appeal that speaks to the state in its own lan-
guage and requires special knowledge of bureaucratic methods; it can,
therefore, delegitimize other idioms and modalities of protest. The use
of such techniques can also instate problematic hierarchies between ms
functionaries and participants, particularly when the former, who have
more formal literacy and are better schooled in the ways of the state, use
bureaucratic means to demand compliance from the very women they are
meant to empower (as in Leela Vati’s example above). These hierarchies
can, in turn, work against the equality-�oriented empowerment agenda of
the ms program. On the other hand, however, encountering officials, gain-

102â•… Aradhana Sharma

ing information about how bureaucracies work, and learning statist meth-
ods can also enable subaltern women to demand accountability and en-
titlements from state agencies. These methods also benefit the program’s
field staff, whose daily empowerment work can be dangerous. Their use
of proceduralism, paper pushing, and creative positioning of themselves
and the program allow them to navigate repression and violence by state
and other powerful actors, as I now illustrate.
In the village of Naudia, Sunita Mathur’s team assisted lower-Â�caste
women in fighting upper-�caste male control over land. With its help,
Naudia’s ms clients called a meeting of the entire village to discuss land-Â�
related problems. At Mathur’s request, Naudia’s headman logged a meet-
ing announcement in the panchayat (village council) register and cir-
culated it among the residents. Upper-�caste men were incensed by this
notice and threatened to attack ms staff members and participants for
daring to take them on. They also misinformed the local Senior Superin-
tendent of Police, or ssp, that ms had mobilized a large group of people
who were planning to gherao (surround or besiege) the police station in
protest. On the appointed day, the forces of five police stations encircled
the meeting participants. The sdm and ssp summoned Sunita Mathur to a
spot some distance away from the gathering. She, however, was concerned
about her safety and refused to meet the officials alone. So some village
women accompanied her to the designated spot, acting as chaperones and
witnesses to the exchange that ensued. Here is how Mathur described it:

The Circle Officer [a police officer] asked us a lot of questions—as a

harassment tactic. He pointed to the ms jeep and asked me whose
vehicle that was. I just shrugged my shoulders. “Where did you get
this vehicle?” he questioned. The jeep had Government of India writ-
ten on it. I avoided answering the question directly and simply stated
that we got it from whoever gave it to us. . . . He asked me for my
name. I said, “You can write it down—my name is Sunita and I work for
Mahila Samakhya.” “Is this a government program?” he asked. “Well,
if the board on the jeep says Government of India, then maybe [it is] a
government program. I, however, am not from the government,” I an-
swered. Then he told me that he . . . had received information that we
were going to surround the local police station. “You have put a Gov-
ernment of India board on your vehicle and you dare to work against
the Government of India! You are going against the administration!” he
accused. “We are not doing anything against the administration,” I re-

The State and Women’s Empowerment in Indiaâ•…103

 plied, “and this meeting has not been called by ms. Here is the meeting
announcement written by the village chief.” I showed him the village
council register with the recorded announcement. “The issue . . . was
put forward by village women. ms staff members are not involved in
this. Just like you are here to provide security, we . . . are here [as] rep-
resentatives of a women’s group to support the village women’s cause.”

The Circle Officer flaunted his official status to intimidate ms women. His
performance contributed to the construction of the state as a vertically au-
thoritative and masculinist superstructure that secures the existing social
order (Mitchell 1999; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Sharma 2008). Police
functionaries and bureaucrats were present in Naudia to protect the inter-
ests of landowning upper-�caste men, to defend state institutions from
being challenged by subaltern women, and to secure their own positions
as powerful state representatives. Their visceral display of prestige and
authority enacted the prerogative dimension of state power, which rests
on the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence (Brown 1995). The officials’
use of the language of “security” to threaten ms women also reveals how
violence underwrites governmental concerns of care and protection of
society (Dean 2001; Sunder Rajan 2003), and here it was being deployed to
secure the welfare of some members of society over others. Sunita Mathur
had to avoid getting implicated for instigating what the local administra-
tion and police saw as an antigovernment agitation and endangering the
social order. Her vagueness about the ms program’s nature and affiliation,
self-�identification as an ngo activist, and use of a meeting announcement
written by the village headman were some of the tactics she used to cir-
cumvent harassment and imminent harm from state functionaries and
powerful landowners. “I felt that if I really had been a government repre-
sentative, then I would not have been able to accomplish anything [or] . . .
do anything against the government,” declared Sunita. “You see, the local
mafia is supported by the administration. And we have to fight against
the mafia because otherwise the issues of land and violence will never get
solved and economic self-�reliance will never happen. . . . That is why I have
strategically decided not to use the government label.”
Sunita Mathur used the word “mafia” to describe the powerful nexus
between the landowning elite, local government functionaries, and orga-
nized corruption and crime. Upper-�caste landowners get village commons
titled in their own names with the help of local officials. These men rou-
tinely threaten low-�caste women who dare to challenge them and hire

104â•… Aradhana Sharma

goons to beat or rape them, or tear down their houses. The police and local
administrators, who are in cahoots with the landowners, do not prevent
land encroachment and violence; nor do they assist low-�caste women in
bringing cases against upper-�caste men.
The Naudia incident vividly illustrates how deeply enmeshed state ad-
ministrators are in the issues that concern subaltern women. The struggles
that ms women take up in their empowerment efforts are directed at local
structures of authority that include, and exceed, the state. This view from
the bottom illustrates the difficulty of drawing a clear line between state
and nonstate arenas and actors on the ground. The embeddedness of offi-
cials in local power dynamics reveals that the state is sometimes under-
stood not so much as a spatially distinct entity but as a critical node in a
network of power relations, through which other social inequalities, like
those of class, caste, and gender, are channeled and reproduced. In this
view, power and authority are messy and not neatly contained within the
conventional boundaries of the state. The struggles of ms participants are
not always directed against a clearly demarcated or abstract state, but
against locally entrenched webs of power in which state representatives
are key players. This blurring gives officials all the more reason to re-�create
the local state’s distinctness, verticality, and legitimacy as the defender of
law and protector of order, when needed, through exhibitions of power
and prestige. Subaltern struggles for justice and entitlements thus shed
light on both the evanescent “now here, now gone” nature of the bound-
ary between the state and nonstate realms and the pressing need to draw
it as a way to maintain the status quo. These mobilizations may also end
up producing images of a spatially separate translocal state writ large—a
just state consisting of higher up state- or national-�level officials who can
be called upon to discipline lower-�level functionaries and intervene on
behalf of the marginalized.
Mathur’s story underscores the serious dilemmas associated with the
ms program’s linkage with the government as part of its gongo form.
To work toward their goal of just social change, field-�level functionaries
need to tackle local gender-�, class-�, and caste-�based mafias that involve
state representatives and also navigate official dictates and violence. This is
dangerous work, which often requires them to dissociate themselves from
the government label. In Seema Singh’s words, “the police belong to the
government, the courts belong to the government. . . . When we take up
a fight, we have to fight at all these levels. If we start believing that we are

The State and Women’s Empowerment in Indiaâ•…105

working for a government project and that we are government workers,
then how will we fight . . . [other] government people?”
Mathur’s and Singh’s decision to avoid using the state label should not
be read as disengagement with state structures; rather, it is an innova-
tive strategy used by ms field employees to confront official agencies and
challenge hierarchies without endangering their or their clients’ safety. By
consciously distancing themselves from the government, mobilely posi-
tioning the program, and using bureaucratic procedures, ms employees
are sometimes able to steer clear of state violence and facilitate empower-
ing struggles.
How successful they are at negotiating governmental repression, how-
ever, is not a straightforward matter. If anything, the incidents narrated
above exemplify the gendered, classist, caste-�ist nature of state power
described to me by Kaveri Mani and Nina Singh. They show how disci-
plinary and repressive forms of power work in tandem and how “the state”
can operate as a “vehicle of massive domination” (Brown 1995, 174) even
in the absence of any singular intention to that effect. They also unravel
the illiberal underside of neoliberal governmentality (Dean 2001; Hin-
dess 2004) that helps to reinforce the state’s hypermasculinity (Sharma
2008). The state’s prerogative power is used to uphold social hierarchies,
to protect the institution of private property and the interests of proper-
tied classes, to enact violence upon subaltern women and deny them jus-
tice, and, finally, to entrench the superiority and authority of state actors
and institutions. ms workers encounter this patriarchal illiberality in their
empowerment work with their clients, and this is where the program’s
gongo nature both poses obstacles and also allows maneuverability.

Conclusion
In this essay I used ethnographic vignettes drawn from the Mahila
Samakhya program to analyze how neoliberalism is altering governance
and women’s political struggles in India today. The ms program’s organi-
zation as a state-�ngo partnership, empowerment goal, and paradoxical
effects provide a critical peek into the transformations that are underway.
My aim was not to position ms as a neoliberal initiative but to examine
how it gets entangled in the wider neoliberal project of privatizing the
state and governmentalizing society through empowerment, despite its
commitment to radical pedagogy and feminist goals.11
My analysis raises the thorny issue of how to think about feminist activ-
ism vis-Â�à-Â�vis the state in postliberalization India. If the state, as Mary John

106â•… Aradhana Sharma

(1999, 108) has argued, is the “most constitutive site of contestation” for
Indian feminists, how does one make sense of novel forms of collabora-
tion, however uncomfortable, between feminists and state agents at this
particular moment? My point in raising this question is neither to un-
equivocally dismiss these partnerships as bad nor to unreflexively advo-
cate for feminist avoidance of state structures. Indeed, the evidence I have
presented illustrates how deeply state projects and actors touch subaltern
women’s lives and how these women’s struggles are anything but disen-
tangled with the state. The poverty-�inducing and disempowering gen-
dered consequences of liberalization programs in India and elsewhere
also caution against a simplistic feminist dismissal of the state (Agnihotri
and Mazumdar 1995; Menon-�Sen 2001; Nagar and Raju 2003; Sparr 1994).
Subaltern women, “caught in the travails of a rapidly changing society,”
suggests Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (2003, 91), “are desperately in need of the
services . . . that only the state can provide in the [quantity] and at the cost
that can answer to such a massive (and as yet unrecognized and unmet)
demand.” The important concern, then, is not whether feminists should
engage the state, but how. In other words, how do Indian feminists sustain
their critical engagement with the postcolonial state, honed over many
years of activist work, while partnering with it? Indeed, it is with deep
skepticism and self-Â�reflexivity that some women’s movements activists
choose to participate in the MS program, as I have detailed above. What
motivates their work is the desire to explore the possibility of whether, as
Meera Srinivasan put it, “a [women’s empowerment] program sponsored
by the state [can] sow the seeds of some change . . .” And this requires
us to delve into the effects of feminist-�state collaborations in alternative
projects of social change in the neoliberal age.
My work on the ms program illustrates the paradoxical and dangerous
consequences, at once risky and enabling, of innovative partnerships in
the field of women’s empowerment. ms faces the threat of a bureaucratic
straitjacketing and governmentalization of grassroots empowerment. In
addition to its meanings as an alternative tactic for consciousness-�raising,
a spontaneous mobilization strategy, or a loosely defined blueprint for
radical action against oppression, empowerment now exemplifies neo-
liberal ideals of personal capacity building and self-�governance (Sharma
2008). Currently, empowerment is a mainstream, transnational develop-
ment strategy widely used by ngos and states alike. This translates into
a problematic bureaucratization, hierarchization, and professionalization
of empowerment as an expert intervention, which can work against the

The State and Women’s Empowerment in Indiaâ•…107

very spirit of equality and justice that empowerment is supposed to con-
note.12
The ms program’s institutional structure and practices show how it be-
comes implicated in the spread of bureaucratic power throughout society.
Even though its carefully worked out gongo structure was an attempt,
on the part of its designers, to forestall a governmental takeover of ms
and of a feminist empowerment agenda, in practice, statist procedural-
ism has become a part of the program’s fabric. Staffers use bureaucratic
techniques as a subversive tactic to circumvent official repression and
also train program clients in these methods. They occasionally use these
techniques to discipline program participants as well, thus illustrating the
dangerous slippage between tactics of resistance and strategies of domina-
tion. Governmental methods are mired in the logic of disciplinary power
(Brown 1995; Foucault 1995); their proliferation through the program can
institute hierarchies that might be counterproductive to its goal of em-
powerment.
The mainstreaming of empowerment as a category of governance also
carries the risk of an official subversion of its radical possibilities. As Anil
Bordia, the senior civil servant credited with getting ms under way, re-
marked, “the state, by definition, can only be . . . status-Â�quoist. [In] every
program [like ms], there are seeds of destruction—because the people
who control the resources, who have all the say, would not . . . easily allow
these things to happen. . . . The problem is [that these programs] are work-
ing in a very simmering or overt manner against a system that is rallied
totally against [them].” In addition to the hurdles posed by people who
monopolize state resources and who may not look kindly upon forms of
empowerment that threaten their own positions of power, the bureaucra-
tization and governmentalization of women’s empowerment also imposes
limits on its definition and use as an anti-�oppression tactic. Quoting Anil
Bordia again:

By and large it will be true to say that empowered women would almost
always take up causes which are humane, which are in conformity with
law, and which are forward-�looking. I would not say the same for all
sections of society because the cpi-Â�m l people and the People’s War
Group [radical leftist organizations] are also empowered in a sense,
but they do not always take a stand which is within the framework of
law. But in the case of women, I . . . know of no case where empowered
women have . . . taken the law in their own hands or have acted con-

108â•… Aradhana Sharma

 trary to . . . government policy; in fact, that is a good test of what policy
should be.

Bordia’s distinction between the implicitly illegitimate and violent em-

powerment struggles undertaken by radical leftist groups and the desir-
able activism of subaltern women reveals how state-�sponsored empower-
ment initiatives can potentially serve as vehicles for turning women into
law-�abiding, disciplined, and responsibilized citizen-�subjects (Cruikshank
1999) who use available civil-�society mechanisms to fight for their rights.
Marginalized women operate in the relatively unregulated, negotiational
domain of subaltern political society, which, as Partha Chatterjee (2004)
suggests, is not constrained by the legal norms of elite civil society. Their
tutelage under state-�initiated empowerment programs can be seen, per-
haps cynically, as an aspect of the state’s modernizing, pedagogic project
that aims to turn subaltern women into proper denizens of civil society.
Might this signal a formalization of political society dynamics and a de-
radicalization of its methods and goals? Some scholars have indeed used
these potentially disempowering effects of governmentalization to argue
against state participation in grassroots empowerment (Moser 1993) and
for a careful feminist distancing from state programs (Brown 1995).13 I
offer a different reading.
My illustration of the blurring of the boundary between state and non-
state spheres under neoliberalism renders problematic easy conclusions
about whether states should get involved in empowerment and whether
feminists should collaborate with state institutions. The governmentaliza-
tion of empowerment is not simply a reflection of direct state involvement
but is also an instance of the suffusion of society at large with neoliberal
practices of self-�government. If we are to rethink the state conceptually
so that we see state and nonstate entities as part of a complex apparatus
of governance, then we need to examine the workings and effects of em-
powerment programs undertaken by all kinds of institutions, including
gongos and ngos. ngo-�initiated empowerment programs, after all, do
not operate in a hermetically sealed context that is unaffected by bureau-
cratic practices, state representatives, or international funding-�agency
agendas. Using the lens of governmentality also complicates the feminist
debate on disentanglement with state structures. Sealing oneself off from
governmental processes that permeate the entire social field may not be
possible; rather, it may be more useful for activists to assume tactical posi-
tions within regimes of government.

The State and Women’s Empowerment in Indiaâ•…109

 Another way to approach these issues is to ask what kinds of subjects
are being produced by the governmentalization of empowerment. Do
women’s “expanding relationships [to state institutions and processes]
produce only active political subjects, or do they also produce regulated,
subordinated, and disciplined state subjects?” asks Wendy Brown (1995,
173). My analysis of the ms program substantiates Partha Chatterjee’s
claim that governmental programs do not just produce bureaucratized
and passive state subjects (2004). In postcolonial contexts these programs
are generative in that they fashion active, sometimes dissident, political
actors and provide the ground for political society mobilizations where
marginalized subjects make claims on the state, tussle over entitlements,
and contest social and state hierarchies through the very governmental,
regulative categories made available to them. Governmentalization does
not depoliticize so much as it spawns openings for subaltern political
struggles that take novel or dangerous forms and that cannot be subsumed
within the rubric of the new form of politics promoted by international
development agencies, which centers on enabling civil society actors to
make the state function efficiently and transparently.
My ethnography of the ms program demonstrates the interplay be-
tween depoliticization and repoliticization under neoliberalism; it points
to the surprising forms of empowerment that end up happening despite
constraints. ms staff and clients develop a critical awareness of structural
inequalities that both implicate and exceed state bodies; they take on local
mafias and connect them with gender, class, and caste hierarchies; and
they learn statist languages and practices and use them to demand ac-
countability from powerful institutions and people. These processes can
be seen as empowering in that they help women formulate tactics for chal-
lenging local relations of domination in which state actors are embedded.
These tactics allow women to negotiate a broader, if contingent, notion
of empowerment that is not so much about changing women’s individual
gendered situations, narrowly construed, but about understanding and
confronting multiple and overlapping structural inequalities, which shape
individual and collective realities. Empowerment here is about taking up
fights for issues that extend well beyond the scope of “women’s” rights in-
sofar as they focus on mechanical ideas of equality. Despite the fact that
certain officials and local elites may not endorse this kind of women’s em-
powerment, such processes, once initiated, may not be easily reined in.
Empowerment, thus, is a moving target whose meaning is constantly re-

110â•… Aradhana Sharma

defined through women’s struggles. It has an ambiguous and open-Â�ended
quality that manifests itself in multiple and conflicted ways in women’s
lives. A governmentalization of empowerment, therefore, may not only
imply a potential formalization of subaltern political society. It might also
open the door for a fundamental rethinking of elite civil society and state
institutions and norms, and allow for the emergence of new kinds of dis-
sident citizens. When poor, low-�caste, rural women struggle against vio-
lence or upper-�caste control over land, or when they demand basic needs
as entitlements, they try to make the state do what it is supposed to do—
that is, guarantee their rights and survival. Subaltern women’s struggles
delineate the difference between the corrupted state “as is” and the ideal
state “as it ought to be.” The issues that women take up in their fights for
justice and survival and how they implicate state officials in these issues
should, as Anil Bordia hinted, serve as markers for how official policies,
practices, and institutions must be altered if the promises of grassroots
empowerment, substantive democracy, and justice are to be realized. How
women construct the state, criticize officials and hold them accountable,
and demand entitlements-�as-�rights point to alternative visions of state
institutions and responsibilities, and of citizenship (Sharma 2008). Gov-
ernmental programs, perhaps unintentionally, make it possible for women
to recognize that justice-�based transformation requires not only challeng-
ing social inequalities, but also reimagining the state and their relation-
ship to it.
Empowerment, as a quasi-�state-�implemented project of governance,
when examined through the lens of neoliberal governmentality, is a
double-�edged sword that is both promising and precarious. Feminist col-
laborations with state institutions on women’s empowerment programs
are clearly opening interesting vistas for challenge and change. But the
dangerous underside of such projects, which ms women confront every
day, means that one cannot be complacent about their liberatory poten-
tial. The context of neoliberalism in which projects like ms operate taints
the language of empowerment with risks. Empowerment has layered his-
tories and multiple avatars: a radical strategy for political conscientiza-
tion, a leftist tactic for class-�based politics, a feminist strategy for aware-
ness raising and gender equality, and now a governmental strategy for
development. Critical analyses of how these contentious meanings con-
verge and clash in different contexts and how they are entangled with the
dominant neoliberal ideology are crucial for scholars and activists alike

The State and Women’s Empowerment in Indiaâ•…111

(Sharma 2008). The outcomes of these intersections are neither given nor
unproblematic, and they point to the need for exerting constant vigilance
when engaging the politics of empowerment.

Notes
1. A block is a subdivision of a district consisting of approximately a hundred vil-
lages. It is administered by a Block Development Officer (bdo), head of the local
Block Office.
2. I follow local name conventions, omitting last names where none were used. I
have changed the names of all my informants except Anil Bordia.
3. Field staff include block- and district-�level ms functionaries.
4. Foucault (1991) used the concept of governmentality to explain a shift in the aim
and modes of governance to a form of biopower that is centrally concerned with
the welfare, care, and security of the population living in a particular territory.
He drew attention to the entire ensemble of practices and institutions, includ-
ing but not limited to state agencies, by which the conduct of a population is di-
rected toward particular ends (Dean 1999). Building on Foucault, the scholarship
on neoliberal governmentality examines the practices and institutions of gover-
nance under neoliberalism. For example, see Barry, Osborne, and Rose (1996),
Burchell 1996, Rose 1996b, Cruikshank 1999, Ferguson and Gupta 2002, Hindess
2004, and Sharma 2008.
5. ms operates in nine Indian states.
6. For a discussion of how the Indian political context of the 1970s and 1980s im-
pacted feminist activism, see Gandhi and Shah (1992), Philipose (2001), and
Agnihotri and Mazumdar (1995).
7. In the original, longer version of this essay, I argued that these discussions about
the program’s gongo structure discursively define and engender the state
(Sharma 2006). Extending anthropological and feminist analyses of the state, I
show how everyday development planning, in conversation with neoliberal ideas,
construct the state as a distinct, vertically encompassing, and ambiguously gen-
dered entity. Anthropological analyses of the state include Das and Poole (2004),
Gupta (1995), Hansen and Stepputat (2001), Scott (1998), Sharma and Gupta
(2006), and Steinmetz (1999); feminist critiques of the state include Alexander
(1997), Brown (1995, 166–196), Fraser (1989, 144–60), MacKinnon (1989), Mathur
(1999), N. Menon (1996), R. Menon and Bhasin (1993), Sharma (2008), and Sun-
der Rajan (2003).
8. Many local officials I encountered were either unaware of the program’s exis-
tence or considered it insignificant. My informants explained that this was be-
cause ms had a small budget and did not distribute resources to its clients, unlike
other large-�scale development programs. The relative lack of significance given
to a resource-�poor, nonredistributive program that targets and employs women
speaks to the gendered ideologies that shape state practices.
9. The image of the state-�as-�giver is the historical result of postindependence popu-

112â•… Aradhana Sharma

 lism, wherein government representatives promised development for the entire
nation, including food, clothing, and housing for the poor. Rural subalterns use
this discourse to demand that the state fulfill its promise and ensure their entitle-
ments (Sharma 2008).
10. This popular construction of the state as “mother-Â�father,” which alludes to the
caretaking and protective roles of “good” parents, troubles any easy gendering of
the state as patriarch writ large (Sharma 2008).
11. I have previously argued that the neoliberal degovernmentalization and de-
welfarization of the state in India is partial (Sharma 2008). The Indian state can-
not completely privatize key governmental functions like development, which
legitimize its very existence. However, empowerment programs implemented by
semi- and nongovernmental bodies allow the state to reconcile its developmen-
talist and neoliberalizing faces: they enable the state to continue performing its
developmentalist duties by responsibilizing other social actors to self-�develop.
12. ms representatives attempt to address education and class hierarchies among
themselves and between staff members and program participants, which have
resulted from the bureaucratization and professionalization of empowerment
(see Nagar and Raju 2003).
13. See Jandhyala (2001) for a critical discussion of these debates in India.

The State and Women’s Empowerment in Indiaâ•…113

╉Part iI╅ Postcolonial Neoliberalisms and the NGO Form

P
art II builds on some of the lines suggested by the authors
in the previous section to argue that the outcomes of ngo
activities are not to be understood solely through the con-
text of the organizations’ agendas, but rather through the
question of their transnational form and its circulation. These
essays address ngos in relation to wider societal and geopoliti-
cal formations. They suggest that ngos may play a part in repro-
ducing social divisions such as class and gender precisely because
these divisions are enabled by the transnational and neoliberal
context of the ngo form and the way it circulates.
Julie Hemment analyzes Russian women’s ngos after social-
ism. She finds that these ngos focus on the issue of violence
against women in particular because they are funded by interna-
tional donors who identify this issue as a global project. Although
Russian women working in ngos give the appearance of accept-
ing this transnational agenda as their own, they also express quite
divergent needs and regard critically the imposition of a global
project. In the process of setting up a “crisis center,” as Hemment
shows, the women seek to strategically negotiate their own needs
through the demands of international organizations. Hemment
is particularly attentive to how the women express their distinct
perspectives and criticisms, even as they comply with imposed
agendas. Hemment’s research reveals how women engage in new
struggles as they both become the subjects of international inter-
ventions and remain the subjects of national and regional insti-
tutions.
 Kathleen O’Reilly’s research in India explores the contradictions be-
tween ngos’ mission to empower women and the lack of parity among the
organizations’ own male and female staff members. She reveals the gen-
dered contestations taking place inside ngos. These internal negotiations
stand in contrast to the unified discourses around women’s participation
that appear in ngo planning documents and international development
agendas. O’Reilly’s analysis of an ngo working on a water project in north
India makes clear that internal conflicts are not simply impediments to
be overcome, but “micropolitical processes” through which women are
opening up new spaces for themselves. She presents a vivid and detailed
analysis of how the European donors’ concern with gender parity is taken
over by women ngo staff members eager to take advantage of these possi-
bilities, who seek to insert themselves into the ngo’s agenda. What is clear
is that donors may have the ability to seek changes in local hierarchies, but
their efforts are transformed as they encounter those hierarchies. Thus,
donor-�beneficiary power relations; issues of transparency and account-
ability; and notions of legitimacy, authenticity, and grassroots activism
are not straightforward or universal but become reconfigured in different
contexts through the workings of ngos.
LeeRay Costa, in her essay on conferences of ngos in Thailand, sug-
gests that it is not just the North-�South divide but also rural-�urban and
class divisions that emerge in the ngo sector. Her research shows how
rural women leaders contest the cosmopolitanism of their urban counter-
parts, as well as the ways kinship networks operating within ngos repro-
duce local hierarchies. The transnational form of the ngo is understood
here as a constraint that prevents rural and subaltern women from enter-
ing the ngo, which is constructed as an elite, cosmopolitan space. Yet the
circulation of the ngo form also makes subaltern women more aware of
their exclusion and motivates them to resist it.
The final essay of this section is Lamia Karim’s analysis of the much-Â�
vaunted and widely replicated microcredit regime in Bangladesh. Karim’s
research reveals that one of its major elements has been to treat women
as if they are neoliberal entrepreneurs within a framework of capitalism
when, in fact, women are enmeshed in sets of gendered marital and com-
munal relationships. While women appear to be the “beneficiaries” of
microcredit loans, in fact, their male relatives often control the money,
while women remain vulnerable to exploitation by microcredit lenders.
Karim’s essay, furthermore, problematizes the production of knowledge
through development frameworks and neoliberal assumptions.

116â•… Part II
 These essays all raise questions about the global construction and dis-
semination of the empowerment project of many ngos. They provide
critical insights by analyzing these projects within the frameworks of par-
ticular and divergent articulations of local institutions as they become en-
meshed with the neoliberal logics that are altering constructions of gender
and states transnationally.

Part IIâ•…117
╉CHAPTER 4 Julie Hemment

Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belonging

Defining Violence against Women in Russia

In May 1998 activists from crisis centers all over Russia gathered
in Moscow for a conference to discuss the formalization of their
thus far loose network into a national association. The confer-
ence was a veritable gala. I was stunned to see almost all of my
Moscow-Â�based women’s movement acquaintances, as well as rep-
resentatives of the main international foundations and agencies
(the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the American
Bar Association, the British Embassy, Amnesty International).
Everybody who was anybody in the field of women’s community
activism and development was there.
At the conference, the theme of universalism sounded loud.
The first speakers—mostly representatives of international agen-
cies—emphasized cross-Â�cultural commonality. One of the first to
the podium was a British woman, a representative of an expatri-
ate club and a long-�time benefactor of antiviolence campaigns.
As she put it, “violence against women is not a Russian problem
but an international problem, affecting women of all religious and
national backgrounds. We are all vulnerable to violence from men;
most of us in this room will have experienced violence at some
stage in their lives.” She offered words of encouragement to the
new network—“my point is that we were where you are now.” Her
remarks were intended to bring the women in the room together.
They were met, however, with weary frustration by some attend-
ees. Nadya, an activist of a Moscow-�based group with whom I was
well acquainted, muttered, “I always switch off when foreigners
speak”; another woman groaned, “men are people too.”1 Dissent such as
this erupted at the margins (in the coffee breaks, in the corridors, in whis-
pered asides). However, this remark and these objections remained un-
heard.
This vignette highlights some of the key tensions of transnational
women’s activism that this chapter explores: the divisiveness of West-
ern aid, the ambiguous role of nongovernmental organizations (ngos),
and the local costs of belonging in transnational or global campaigns. The
campaign against violence against women is one of the most prominent
campaigns of the Russian women’s movement. It is one that almost all
the main women’s organizations participate in, in some form or another
(indeed, I was attending the Moscow conference as both researcher and
advocate, representing the women’s group I worked with to set up a crisis
center). However, the ubiquity of the issue in Russia testifies less to local
perceptions of needs than to the success of transnational campaigns and
the work of international donor agencies. Beyond limited, elite circles, the
work of crisis centers is not understood.
This raises thorny questions about women’s activism and social move-
ments in contemporary conditions of globalization. The effectiveness of
the global women’s movement surely rests on its ability to heed local con-
cerns. However, I argue that the campaigns and the logic of grants and
funding that drive them impede this process. The framing of violence
against women not only screens out local constructions of events, but it
deflects attention from other issues of social justice, notably the material
forces that oppress women. This is a troubling outcome for a movement
that intends to challenge the global inequities that contribute to women’s
marginalization. It suggests that we need to be more attentive to the con-
text within which feminist initiatives are nested. Examining my own par-
ticipation in the campaigns as a Western scholar and activist, I argue that
we need to interrogate our use of Western feminist models and concepts
in order to be responsive to local knowledge and to achieve truly demo-
cratic transnational engagements.
Russia offers an interesting vantage point from which to interrogate
these processes. Russian women activists are relative newcomers to the
international stage; barring a few early connections during the Soviet
period, they first entered into dialogue with Western feminists following
the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.2 As walls and boundaries were dis-
mantled and democratization got under way, feminist scholars and activ-

120â•… Julie Hemment

ists rushed to join in solidarity with Russian women; a mass of horizontal
relationships formed under the rubric of sister city schemes, academic
exchanges, and, later, ngo activity. This context helps to explain the tone
of the British speaker’s remarks. The excitement that was generated by
the democratic “revolutions” in the Eastern bloc gave rise to a dizzying
sense of possibility and a climate of liberal triumphalism that legitimated
this stance and these kinds of interventions.3 However—contrary to what
she supposed, we were not where they are now. Russian women’s activ-
ism is shaped by a distinct history and a distinct set of gender alignments.
What is more, activism around women’s issues emerged not only in the
context of the euphoria over democratic change but in the context of in-
tense economic dislocation, too.4 Women’s groups formed in response
to the devastation wrought by “shock therapy,” the market-Â�oriented eco-
nomic reforms implemented in the early 1990s by democratic Russian
politicians under the tutelage of US and Western European economists.
These structural adjustment policies led to the dismantling of the social
security system and sharp cutbacks in the healthcare system, affecting
women disproportionately. This informs their perceptions of needs and
definitions of problems.
The best way to scrutinize and evaluate the effectiveness of transna-
tional campaigns is to examine their local manifestations; this “place-Â�
based ethnography” does just that (Escobar 2008:1). Drawing on nineteen
months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 1997 and 2001, I
examine the new crisis centers from the two vantage points that my re-
search afforded me—high-Â�profile foundation-Â�sponsored events and inter-
actions with provincial women’s groups. Presenting insights gained in the
context of an action research project that I undertook with one group,
this chapter highlights local contestation about the campaigns, exploring
the competing conceptions of the “crisis” facing Russian women that the
campaigns have displaced. In highlighting these alternative constructions,
it examines the extent to which activists have been able to translate the
issue of gendered violence and to root it in their concerns.

Whence the Transnational Campaigns?

Before considering these local understandings and concerns, I will first
subject the campaigns themselves to scrutiny. The presumed transpar-
ency of the issue in international development circles is interesting in
itself. Since the 1990s, the campaign against violence against women has

Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belongingâ•…121

had broad resonance across locations. It is assumed to address a universal
problem, the content of which is assumed and taken for granted, as my
opening vignette suggests.
By the late 1990s, violence against women was not only a feminist issue
that concerned women’s groups; it had become an international develop-
ment issue. It had won broad acceptance at the United Nations and is still
prioritized by international foundations that work with women’s commu-
nity groups. The campaigns are determinedly transnational. The formula-
tion (or framing, to use the language of recent social movements theory)
of violence against women is deliberately inclusive, pitched in such terms
as to encompass diverse social practices—from spousal abuse to female
genital mutilation. How was this achieved?
Gendered violence has long been a concern of local women’s move-
ments. In the United States and Western Europe, the battered women’s
movement was a prominent component of second-�wave organizing. The
first women’s crisis centers were survivor-Â�led grassroots organizations.
The provision of shelters—secret safe houses where women victims of
domestic abuse could take temporary refuge—was central to these early
campaigns. Elsewhere, women’s groups organized around local manifes-
tations of violence—in India around campaigns against dowry deaths, in
Latin America against the state-�sanctioned violence perpetrated by au-
thoritarian regimes.
Until the late 1980s, gendered violence was a feminist issue and was not
regarded with much seriousness at the international level. In the late 1980s
and early 1990s this changed when, due to the efforts of activists of the
international women’s movement, the framing of violence against women
went global.5 In their influential account of the development of transna-
tional advocacy networks (networks of activists that coalesce and oper-
ate across national frontiers), Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink (1998)
explain how the issue achieved such currency. Violence against women
emerged in the 1980s as a framing that had the power to unite women
from North and South. Until that point, attempts to unify in global cam-
paigns had been largely unsuccessful. Women’s activists of North and
South had been deeply divided and unable to achieve a common agenda.
While Northern (or “first world”) feminists had been preoccupied with
issues of gender discrimination and equality, Southern (or “third world”)
women were more concerned with issues of social justice and develop-
ment, which affected both men and women, albeit in different ways. Vio-
lence against women was a framing that could encompass a broad range

122â•… Julie Hemment

of practices and hence bring about dialogue between women from differ-
ent locations.
Its success at the international level was largely due to the innova-
tion of linking women’s rights to human rights, bringing together two
powerful constituencies for the first time—human rights activists and
feminists. Feminist activists first pushed the issue to international promi-
nence at the 1993 Vienna un human rights conference. Their strategizing
coincided with international concern about the systemic use of rape in
war in Bosnia, and it was effective. In 1994, the UN High Commission on
Human Rights appointed the first special rapporteur on violence against
women, and rape in warfare was recognized as a crime against humanity
by the Hague Tribunal.
The un Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, 1995, was
a pivotal moment for the success of the framing. Combating violence
against women emerged as a central policy agenda both of the interna-
tional women’s movement and of international development. The cam-
paigns have galvanized support across diverse constituencies, among
politicians and donors. In the late 1980s major US foundations decided
to make violence against women a funding priority, channeling funds to
ngos that address the issue.6 As one American male coordinator of a
crisis center training I attended explained to his Russian trainees, “[in the
United States] we’ve found that domestic violence is an easy theme to go
to the public with. People give readily. We’re at the point where it’s politi-
cally correct to support this type of organization.”
Clearly there is much to celebrate here. Indeed, many feminist schol-
ars regard the prominence of the campaigns as an unqualified success. The
campaigns have been analyzed in terms of the increased influence and
effectiveness of transnational social movements (tsms), or transnational
advocacy networks (tans).7 Such accounts are in keeping with celebratory
accounts of ngos and civil society; here, tsms represent the positive, lib-
eratory side of globalization. However, there are alternative, less sanguine
ways to view this.
While it is true that transnational campaigns such as these unite
women’s groups across different locations, they do so at a cost. The an-
thropologist Aihwa Ong provides a critical reading of the “strategic sister-
hood” that is the basis of this and other North-Â�South alliances in the post-Â�
Beijing conference era. She presents it as an alliance driven by the desire of
Northern women that ignores geopolitical inequalities and that is insensi-
tive to non-�first-�world cultural values. She argues that transnational cam-

Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belongingâ•…123

paigns are based on a distinctly individualist formulation of “rights” that
is Western specific.8 The skepticism among activists that I detected in my
research points toward similar frustrations in the postsocialist context.
Building on this and other critiques, I wish to introduce a note of cau-
tion in my account of the campaigns. First, I suggest that the very suc-
cess of the framing can also be regarded as its weakness. Although the
framing certainly yields cross-�cultural clarity, it does so at a cost. At the
transnational level, it works insofar as it is a catchall. However, this catch-
all quality screens out crucial nuances in the ways people define violence
against women in different local contexts. In this chapter, I will go on to
argue that in postsocialist “democratizing” contexts, as in “developing”
ones, the framing deflects attention from issues of redistributive justice.
Second, it is important to consider the political economic context of
the campaigns. The issue achieved prominence at a time of crucial shifts
in global development agendas. The rise of ngos and the success of the
campaigns took place at a time when a neoliberal vision of development
has achieved hegemony. This has introduced “a new kind of relationship
between the state and civil society and advanced a distinctive definition
of the political domain and its participants—based on a minimalist con-
ception of both the state and democracy” (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar
1998, 1). Concerns about these processes have been raised by both schol-
ars and activists, in Southern or “developing” contexts as well as the post-
socialist one.9 Support for ngos is provided within this new rubric and
comes with strings attached; ngos that accept donor support are required
to take on the responsibilities of the retreating state, picking up the slack
for the radical free market.10 What is more, the sudden influx of grants and
funding brings about dramatic changes in organizing. Ironically, “ngo-Â�
ization” has demobilized social movements. It has contributed to the for-
mation of new hierarchies and allowed former elites to flourish. In many
cases it also signals the triumph of Washington- or Geneva-�based agendas
over local concerns.11
The gendered violence campaigns do not operate outside this politi-
cal economic context. Indeed, the forces that enable them, the logic that
drives them, and their effects demonstrate their complicity. Concern
about violence against women originated in the second-�wave political
slogan “the personal is political,” which challenged the inviolability of the
home and politicized it. However, the radical critique of patriarchy and
gender-�based economic inequality that was fundamental to the battered
women’s movement in the United States and Western Europe has fallen

124â•… Julie Hemment

out of the transnational campaigns. In a grotesque inversion, the cam-
paigns reprivatize the problem of domestic violence by focusing on inter-
personal relations between spouses to the exclusion of structural factors
outside, specifically the economic upheavals that most women believe
pose the greatest threat to themselves and their families.12 In a disturbing
way, the work of the campaigns thus overlaps with the privatizing intent of
neoliberalism. Indeed, this helps to explain the success of the issue among
donors in the West. It is easier to garner support and international outrage
around issues concerning sex and that position women as victims than
around issues of social justice (Snitow 1999).

Accounting for the Rise of Crisis Centers in Russia:

Foundations, Funding, and Feminists
For complex reasons, violence against women is not an issue that local
groups were likely to have raised by themselves. The issue was discursively
created by the meeting of Western feminists and Russian women activ-
ists in the early 1990s. These feminist-�oriented Russian women set up the
first crisis centers, first in Moscow and St. Petersburg, then in provincial
cities. In the decade of their existence—a decade of rapid and tumultuous
transformations in Russia—the crisis center network has undergone sig-
nificant change. Donor support has been a key factor in its development,
and feminist-�oriented Russian activists have played a crucial role as bro-
kers of ideas.
Since their arrival in Russia in the early 1990s, donor agencies have
channeled a proportionally small but ideologically significant portion
of civil society aid to women’s groups. They met with a diverse range of
women’s organizations. While some set up during the mid-Â�1980s, when
Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s liberalizing reforms permitted the formation of
independent groups for the first time, most were founded in the early to
mid-�1990s in response to the dislocations of the market I have described.
While some had their roots in official Soviet-Â�era women’s organizations
(zhensovety), others regarded themselves as determinedly independent
from the former regime. A small but prominent minority identified as
feminist. These groups of highly educated women were mostly clustered
in institutes and universities. Familiar with Western academic literature,
they brought insights from Western feminism to bear on Soviet gender
relations and on the effects of political and economic reform. They were
also committed to practice and spearheaded attempts to bring about
unity among women’s groups, organizing two The Independent Russian

Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belongingâ•…125

Women’s Movement forums in 1991 and 1992. This latter group found
itself particularly well positioned to take advantage of the new opportu-
nities of democratization aid. Members’ knowledge of foreign languages,
experience of travel, and familiarity with liberal democratic and West-
ern feminist concepts made for easy dialogue with the representatives of
donor agencies. The crisis centers they founded, often in collaboration
with Western feminist activists, were greeted enthusiastically by interna-
tional donor agencies and were among the first women’s projects to re-
ceive support.
However, while these initiatives won a great deal of international at-
tention, they were less successful at home. The Independent Russian
Women’s Movement was marginal in Russia and did not have broad sup-
port. On the contrary, most men and women regarded women’s groups
with suspicion and hostility, particularly those that identified as “femi-
nist.”13 For complex reasons, there is no commonly shared perception of
gender discrimination in Russia or other former socialist states. As many
scholars have noted, the commonly held notion is that the socialist state
“spoiled” both men and women, emasculating men and making women
too aggressive and assertive, denying them natural expression of differ-
ence and self-�realization (samorealizatsiia).14 Men and women perceived
themselves to be equally victimized by the state. As Peggy Watson puts it,
“under state socialism, society was excluded as a whole, and citizens, far
from feeling excluded relative to each other, were held together in a form
of political unity” (1997, 25).
I found that among feminist-Â�oriented women’s projects, crisis centers
were regarded with particular incomprehension and skepticism. Indeed,
even some women activists involved in the campaigns admitted that they
did not think gendered violence was the most pressing issue facing Russian
women and expressed concern that so many resources were put into it.
There was plenty of conflict in the private realm in the USSR. How-
ever, women with violent spouses were unlikely to recognize their ex-
perience in terms of gendered violence. Crisis centers are premised on a
set of property relations that are bourgeois and on an alignment of pub-
lic and private that is liberal democratic. They presume that women are
both economically dependent on men and stuck in the private sphere. This
was not true for Soviet women, who were brought into the workforce and
guaranteed formal equality by the socialist “paternalist” or “parent” state
(Verdery 1996, 63). Soviet-�era property arrangements also complicate the
picture. The nationalization of all property meant that there was no ide-

126â•… Julie Hemment

ology of private ownership to give Soviet citizens the illusion of domes-
tic inviolability. Many Soviet citizens lived in the notorious communal
apartments, sharing kitchen and bathroom facilities with their neighbors.
What is more, few married couples lived autonomously as nuclear fami-
lies. Chronic housing shortages meant that many people lived with ex-
tended family, grandparents, in-�laws, and siblings. For all these reasons,
domestic conflict most commonly expressed itself in the form of tension
over rights to living space, interpersonal strife, or alcoholism. Although
patterns are certainly changing with the introduction of a free market,
lack of housing remains the most chronic problem. Indeed, this helps to
explain why women’s shelters have not taken off in Russia.15
A further obstacle to crisis centers has been the fact that during state
socialism the private sphere was constituted as a kind of “refuge” for both
men and women. It was considered to be a site of authenticity against
the morally compromised public sphere, and its integrity was jealously
guarded by women and men alike (Verdery 1996). In the late 1990s, the
private sphere remains a (reconstituted) refuge for most Russian people, a
site of precious and sustaining networks that offset the violence and chaos
that is perceived to be “outside” (mafia, crime, corruption, poverty). De-
spite the fact that levels of familial violence appear to have increased in
the post-�Soviet period, most women do not consider it the most pressing
problem.16 Furthermore, as many crisis center workers acknowledge, Rus-
sian women who have experienced sexual or domestic violence are com-
monly mistrustful of attempts from outside to intervene.
Until 1995, crisis centers were marginal offshoots of the Independent
Russian Women’s Movement, and although they were celebrated in inter-
national circles, their work was little understood at home. Despite this
lack of fit, in the mid-�1990s, the antiviolence campaigns in Russia under-
went a qualitative shift. As “violence against women” became an interna-
tional development issue, more funds were allocated to it and crisis cen-
ters moved from being small, rather peripheral offshoots of the women’s
movement to become third-�sector heavyweights, a central plank of the
independent women’s movement and a showpiece of foundation-Â�n go re-
lations.17
The transnational campaigns brought a key resource to Russian
women’s groups—a model around which to organize. This model is ac-
companied by skills and methods that can be transferred and taught. For
activists, the crisis center model offers a blueprint and a framework. Neat,
easy to learn, it has become a kind of do-�it-�yourself ngo kit. Foundation

Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belongingâ•…127

support has financed the production of easy-Â�to-Â�use materials—brochures,
posters, and handbooks, including one titled “How to Create a Women’s
Crisis Center.”18 The Moscow-Â�based network offers trainings, assisted by
foundation support. These teach not only crisis counseling and nondirec-
tive listening skills (the hallmark skills of crisis centers), but also manage-
ment, ngo development, and public relations.
Russian crisis centers have adopted what they call the “international
model” and work to a specific set of standards. Through telephone hotlines
and individual consultations, they provide free and confidential legal and
psychological counseling to female victims of sexual or domestic violence.
Counselors undergo eighty hours of training, run by staff of the most ex-
perienced centers with input from feminist psychologists, scholars, and
lawyers.
What does all this mean to Russian activists? While I insist on the need
to situate my study of Russian crisis centers within this “broader politi-
cal geography” (Gal and Kligman 2000a, 4), I do not mean to suggest that
the global blocks out the local, or to describe the flow of ideas as unidirec-
tional. Recent scholarship of globalization has argued persuasively against
this kind of determinism, and feminist scholars are prominent in the dis-
cussion.19 Russian women activists draw on international aid and West-
ern models as resources, translating them as necessary. In the process,
projects and campaigns are transformed, not imported statically. How
do these circulating discourses arrive, what are the processes of “trans-
lation” they undergo (Tsing 1997), and with what do they interact as they
are “glocalized”?
In the course of my research during 1995–97, I found that the notion of
crisis center did have a kind of local resonance. Once again, the violence
against women framing caught on because of its catchall quality. Here,
however, the keyword was not violence (nasilie) but crisis (krizis). One of
the things that struck me in the course of my research was the ubiquity of
the notion of crisis center (krizisnyi tsentr). I came across many women
(out of the loop of trainings and unfamiliar with the international model)
who expressed their intent to set one up, or described their work (uncon-
nected with sexual or domestic violence) to be “something like a crisis
center.” I came to relate this rhetorical persistence to the fact that the
whole of Russian society is perceived to be in crisis—with good cause. In
addition to the perception of social and economic breakdown, the Russian
crisis is also perceived to be a psychic condition—there is a great deal of
talk about the neuroticization of society.

128â•… Julie Hemment

The Perspective from the Provinces:
Competing Crises and the Displacement of the Economic
Zhenskii Svet (Women’s Light) is a small, university-Â�based women’s
group, dedicated to women’s education and consciousness-Â�raising. It was
founded in the provincial city of Tver’ in 1991, long before the arrival of
Western foundations, in the first wave of independent organizing in Rus-
sia. Its founder was Larisa, a professor of history who had written her
dissertation on the Western women’s movement, one of Russia’s few self-Â�
identified feminists.20 One of the reasons I originally made contact with
this group was because it claimed to have a crisis center.21 However, I ar-
rived to find that this was not so. While the notion of crisis center did exist
within the group, it had not quite taken root. The idea had first been intro-
duced to the group in 1992 by some visiting German feminists; however,
the project collapsed when the Germans failed to secure funding, and
local interest had since waned. When I asked group members about this,
they told me that sexual and domestic violence was something they had
not really thought much about. It was a terrible thing, but they did not feel
any real connection to it. They also insisted that women would not come
together around this issue, because it was too private. They could not see
how such a project could work in Tver.’
However, the idea of a crisis center had remained in the group, in dif-
fuse forms. Katia was the custodian of one of these crisis center plans. An
unemployed woman in her fifties, she attended Zhenskii Svet regularly. I
met frequently with her in the course of my stay in Tver’ in 1997. Katia ex-
plained that she was not concerned with dealing with the women victims
of sexual violence. She intended her crisis center, or “anticrisis center”
(anti-�krizisnyi tsentr) as she preferred to call it, to be a service to assist
women who encountered economic discrimination (ekonomicheskaia dis-
kriminatsiia), or (gendered) discrimination in the workplace. This was a
new term to refer to a new phenomenon, since the Soviet regime had had
an ideological commitment to both full employment and gender equality.
She understood that in the United States and Western European coun-
tries, a crisis center was a service for the victims of sexual and domes-
tic violence but argued that in Russia such a conception did not make
sense. She insisted that although sexual violence was indisputably a ter-
rible thing, it was a much less widespread problem than economic vio-
lence and discrimination, which touched almost every woman’s life.
As I pieced her story together, I came to regard it as a classic survivor’s

Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belongingâ•…129

narrative. She had encountered “discrimination” in her own life and now
wanted to set up a service to assist women in similar situations. Two years
ago, before I met her, Katia was pressured to quit her job as a sociological
analyst at the Federal Employment Service when initially generous state
funding was cut back. Forced to make layoffs, her boss began to exert pres-
sure (davlenie) on some members of the staff to leave. To leave, as it were,
of their own volition (in order to avoid paying unemployment benefits).
Although both men and women staffed the office, he targeted the women
in the group. Katia experienced this as a profound shock, a profound
“crisis,” as did her female colleagues, who went through the same process.
She told me that it was the first time she and her coworkers had had to
face the idea of unemployment. She was shocked at the callous disregard
of her rights. She was shocked at how her boss, a former military officer,
she emphasized, had “pressed” her to leave. Agitated by the memory, she
told me that the pressure was so intense that one woman had been “on
the verge of a heart attack.” Katia’s account evoked the profoundly desta-
bilizing social dislocation she and her colleagues had experienced at this
time. Unemployment was not merely distressing to her on account of the
financial burden it placed but because it was an attack on her dignity, on
her very identity, her sense of self. It also cast a blow to her worldview. She
was shaken by the fact that a person of education and high social standing
(an officer) had behaved in this way.
In many ways, Katia’s story is paradigmatic of women’s early nongov-
ernmental organizing in Russia. Regardless of how they described them-
selves, of the educational levels of their members, or of their location or
ideological hue, in the early 1990s women’s groups were engaged in a com-
mon purpose. They were survival mechanisms, set up for and by women
who were hard hit by social and economic reform. Involvement in this ac-
tivity goes beyond a concern with the gendered effects of the market and
is frequently driven by a generalized perception of material, moral, and
psychological crisis. In their different ways, these organizations have taken
on the challenge of creating new forms of social solidarity and together-
ness following the collapse of the Soviet collective.
Although Katia’s conception of crisis center emphasizes structural fac-
tors—economic violence attributable to the market and shock therapy and
their gendered effects—hers is neither a straightforwardly “feminist” nor
anticapitalist construction. Indeed, she did not address her sense of dis-
crimination toward men as a group or toward the institutions whose poli-

130â•… Julie Hemment

cies contributed to it (the International Monetary Fund or Russian gov-
ernment). Instead, she addressed herself to the absent, retreating Soviet
state. She had been able to find a state agency that had overturned the de-
cision. Although she had not been awarded material compensation, she
had received symbolic recognition of the injustice of her dismissal. She
intended her crisis center to be a project that would provide similar assis-
tance to local women.
Katia’s case perhaps looks idiosyncratic. In many ways, she represents a
prior understanding of crisis center, one that preceded the arrival of foun-
dation support. However, I found echoes of her understandings elsewhere.
Between 1995 and 1997, before the action research project in Tver,’ I visited
crisis centers in St. Petersburg and several provincial cities. These visits
provided alternative insights and left me with quite different impressions
of the antiviolence campaigns than those I received in Moscow. Despite
the fact that they formally adopt the crisis center model (the “interna-
tional standard”), many of these centers had much broader programs in
response to local needs. As the director of one provincial crisis center said
to me over coffee, “we go to these Moscow-Â�based seminars, workshops,
and conferences, but our agendas are still driven by local concerns.” Be-
cause these centers are raising the issue of violence against women for
the first time, only a relatively small proportion of clients call to discuss
it. All the counselors I spoke to confirmed that when they first set up, a
wide range of people called their hotlines. Men called as well as women,
and, strikingly, a lot of retired people—in sum, those who felt marginal-
ized and vulnerable. I was told that people called to speak about diverse
issues—unemployment, unpaid wages, loneliness, alcoholism, loss of chil-
dren to the military service, as well as domestic or sexual violence. As one
Petersburg-Â�based activist put it, “there is great confusion now, the old sys-
tem is broken down, but it’s not clear what is emerging. People are con-
fused, and there is a great demand for information. They don’t know what
to ask for, who to speak to, how to name their problems.” Centers have
responded to this in different ways; some speak to all callers, others only
to women victims of violence. One center in Sergiev-�Posad abandoned its
women-�only focus for a few years in response to local incomprehension.
Counselors in all the centers I visited informed me that women who
do call to speak about gendered violence frequently relate it to a range of
other materially based issues, such as unemployment, impoverishment,
and cramped living space. In response to this, counselors focus on the

Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belongingâ•…131

woman in a broader social context, particularly on the family. Activists in
provincial cities, where they may provide the only women-�oriented ser-
vices, conclude that it makes no sense to specialize too narrowly. They say
it is impossible to separate the problem of domestic or sexual violence
from other issues women face. In general, counselors afford a high pri-
ority to clients’ material problems. In one St. Petersburg center, survivor
support groups place great emphasis on practical steps women can take,
sometimes resulting in members of a group going into business together.
These constructions could work to inform the work of the transnational
feminist movement; these critiques could be the basis for dialogue. The
effectiveness of the global women’s movement surely rests on its ability to
heed local concerns. As Ellen Dorsey puts it, we need to “carefully tread
the line between building common strategies and reflecting the actual
concerns and dynamism of the movement on the ground,” lest the move-
ment be discredited (1997, 355). However, there are some serious systemic
impediments. First, the logic of grants and funding encourages groups to
adopt the themes and terminologies prioritized by donors, making issues
that fall outside this rubric unnarratable. Second, ngo staff and donor
representatives are frequently not disposed to listen to these commen-
taries.22 For both these reasons, crisis centers experience great pressure
to conform to the “international model.”
Furthermore, I found that the rubric of the crisis center and the tech-
nologies that accompanied it brought about significant changes in the
ways both staff and their clients formulated the problems facing women,
making the articulation of critiques and counterstrategies still less likely. In
Russia, technologies and methods that are designed to empower women—
such as nondirective active listening—ironically work against this insofar
as they dissuade clients and counselors from articulating their material
concerns. Techniques of nondirective active listening require callers to
come to their own solutions. Crisis centers provide information and con-
sultations (on legal issues and social services) but encourage clients to take
part in the defense of their rights and make their own decisions. While
most centers offer free legal advice, their main message is frequently what
not to expect from the state. The director of one center told me: “Their first
question is always ‘what will the state do for me [as a battered woman]
if I get divorced?’ I explain that they have little realistic chance of getting
help.” In survivor support groups, she works to make women aware of
these material and political issues, to recognize that the state is not going
to help them and that the only way forward is to help themselves.

132â•… Julie Hemment

Tver’ and Zhenskii Svet: Adopting the Western Model
This dynamic became clear to me in the course of my interactions with
Zhenskii Svet. The action research process that I undertook with members
of Zhenskii Svet brought the two models of crisis center I have outlined
into competition.23 Katia’s “anticrisis center” for unemployed women was
pitched against a “crisis center” for women victims of domestic and sexual
violence that accepted the framing of violence against women backed by
the transnational campaigns. The latter won out. It won not because it
best expressed members’ idea of the most important problem facing local
women in Tver’ but because it was considered most likely to succeed. In
crucial ways, as facilitator of the seminar and as a Western outsider with
resources to bring to the project, I was the arbiter.24 The latter model had
two advantages. First, it had broad legitimacy among two key constitu-
encies—Western donor agencies and actors of the local administration.
Second, it was organizationally viable. Both characteristics were conse-
quences of international donor involvement and the success of transna-
tional feminist campaigns.
Through the action research project, I was able to lend my energies to
the group as it negotiated the contradictory nongovernmental field. In this
context, my status as a Western outsider and my familiarity with donor
priorities became valuable resources that group members were able to
deploy. In the course of my fieldwork, I had amassed a great deal of infor-
mation about women’s crisis centers and realized that the network offered
great possibilities for provincial women’s groups. I shared this informa-
tion with members of Zhenskii Svet.
Some of the women began to see the founding of a crisis center as a way
to strengthen and institutionalize some of the more socially oriented pro-
grams offered by Zhenskii Svet. They saw it as a potential base from which
already existing projects could be run and as a place where young women
could gain work experience. A key player in this project was Tamara, a
doctor and one of the newest and most enthusiastic participants of the
group. An assertive, practical woman in her mid-�thirties, she had recently
moved to Tver’ from Siberia with her family when her engineer husband
lost his job. She worked part time at one of the local hospitals, renting
office space with another doctor, drawing a meager salary, and offering
free seminars in women’s health through Zhenskii Svet.
When I met her, she was looking for a niche, a place to which she could
bring her considerable energies and which would allow her independence.

Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belongingâ•…133

“I’m not afraid of hard work,” she told me. “The main thing is that I am
committed to what I do.” She dreamed of being able to bring about a
unity between what she called her hobby (issues of women’s health, the
women’s movement) and her career. The idea of setting up a crisis center
appealed to Tamara because it most closely approximated the “concrete
social project” she wanted to be involved in. Her own economic vulnera-
bility meant that she was attuned to the plight of women in the city, and
she wanted to do something practical to meet their needs. Furthermore,
she was persuaded by the issue of gendered violence. As a doctor, she had
noticed that many of her women patients had bruises under their clothes.
“It was obvious that some of them had violent spouses, but there was no
way to talk to them about it,” she said.
In summer 1998, with the endorsement of other members of Zhenskii
Svet, Tamara and I embarked on a preparatory project to set up a crisis
center for women in Tver.’ Our aims were to learn more about existing ser-
vices and to locate sources of financial and material support. We met with
members of the local administration and staff of the local social security
services, and we traveled to Moscow and several provincial cities to visit
and learn from other crisis centers. It was a successful strategy. The Tver’
project coincided with a specific moment of expansion in the network of
crisis centers. It was seeking to reregister itself as a national association
and was eager to find more collaborators throughout the Russian Federa-
tion. To this end, its sponsors provided start-�up funds for new centers and
were glad to make the acquaintance of a provincial woman activist, well
versed in the tenets of the international women’s movement. At the same
time, in Tver’ local conditions were ripe. Since the mid-Â�1990s, “women’s
issues” have had political currency in Russia. Throughout the regions of
the Russian Federation, officials are now mandated to undertake steps to
provide services for women. In this way, “crisis center” has entered the
lexicon of government officials and social services personnel and is on
the books. We won the support of two key political figures in the city—the
mayor (who was preparing for reelection) and the president’s representa-
tive to the oblast’ (a woman journalist with an insecure political base who
had begun to dabble in the “women’s movement” in order to generate
support for herself in the city). They were only too happy to make the ac-
quaintance of a community group willing to undertake such an endeavor.
The center was set up in fall 1998. Tamara pulled together a group of
interested women who were prepared to start work on a voluntary basis
and led seminars based on the training she had received in Moscow. At

134â•… Julie Hemment

the outset of the project, she acknowledged that she saw setting up a crisis
center as a pragmatic move. If it took off, it would make a good umbrella
project under which already existing projects could continue to run and
new ones could be devised. She saw it as a pilot project through which
she could discover what local women perceived their real problems to be.
As I have followed the crisis center over the last four years, I have been
able to trace the shifting perceptions of its staff and volunteers. In the first
months of its existence, gendered violence was very much on the periph-
ery of the project. The first clients who came to the center were either
already personally acquainted in some way with staff members or were
chance passers-�by. These women did not talk about domestic violence
but discussed instead a variety of other, mostly materially based prob-
lems. When I asked them about their plans for the near future, Tamara and
other staff and volunteers talked of setting up a variety of other projects
within the center to meet local women’s needs—a “work therapy” club
(designed to help local women go into business together and consider eco-
nomic strategies), a social club, and seminars in cosmetology and women’s
health. Tamara confided that in some ways she regretted focusing so di-
rectly on sexual and domestic violence. She told me: “Women who really
experience this will rarely come forward to talk about it—I uncover it in
conversations, it lies buried, it is very often a source of grief, but in focus-
ing on it, we scare women away.”
She gave a very different account when we met in Boston in February
2000, while she was attending a training course for Russian professionals
working on domestic violence. She exhibited increasing self-�confidence,
both in her own position and in the validity of the crisis center narrative.
She told me that much had changed since a telephone had been installed
in August 1999. This enabled the center to finally open a hotline for women
(telefon doveriia), and as soon as the service was advertised the center had
been inundated with calls. There was a great appetite in the city for tele-
phone hotlines and (particularly) for free psychological counseling. The
hotline is open from 9 to 6 every day except weekends. Tamara told me
that they receive between fifty and seventy calls per month, of which be-
tween six and fifteen pertain to domestic violence.
I asked her to tell me about the issues clients raised. She told me that
many come to discuss problems in their relationships (vzaimootnoshenie)
with the people they live with—alcoholism or conflicts over living space
upon divorce. I asked her how many of these people had experienced do-
mestic violence. She paused to consider and told me that in each case

Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belongingâ•…135

there is an element of domestic violence. However, this was loosely de-
fined. One woman came to speak of problems with her mother, another
about difficult relations with her sister. The rest came to discuss issues
with their spouses. She told me that she was surprised that women are
willing to come forward and to talk about their problems, however they
define them, and that she was surprised too that people do speak about
forms of domestic violence. “The need is real,” she told me.
She had devised an interesting strategy to overcome the problem of
women’s reluctance to speak of “domestic violence.” Center staff have
two distinct modes of representing their work. They advertise the hot-
line as a generalized service, as a hotline for women (telefon doveriia dlia
zhenshchin), “so we don’t scare women away.” Since fall 1999, the cen-
ter has run a couple of support groups, which staff advertise as a “sup-
port group for women” (gruppa podderzhki dlia zhenshchin), not speci-
fying spousal abuse. When speaking to clients, they avoid terminology
that might alienate women; they do not use the term violence (nasilie) or
violent behavior (nasil’stvennoe povedenie) but speak instead of control-
ling behavior (kontroliruiushchee povedenie). Likewise, they do not refer to
the violator (nasil’nik) but the offender (obidchik). They discuss the myths
(mify) and prejudices (predubezhdeniia) surrounding rape and domestic
violence. Meanwhile, they use the language of the campaigns and speak of
domestic violence, or violence against women, in their outreach and edu-
cational work, for example when speaking to the media, when lobbying
the mayor, and when giving lectures to students at the university or the
police academy, or to lawyers.
Tamara attributes the success of the project to the framing of violence
against women. As she put it, “it was important for us to define a specific
area of activity in order to achieve this. If we had chosen to deal with vio-
lence more broadly, or with economic issues, or with alcoholism as some
people suggested, we wouldn’t have been able to do it.” She told me that
the main achievement of the last six months is that the center now has a
name, an image (imadzh) in the city. She has been able to overcome local
skepticism precisely due to the international support that the project has
won. The symbolic aspect of this support was as important as the ma-
terial; she had used it as a bargaining chip in negotiations with local power
brokers, and it had won her the grudging support of those who were very
skeptical about the issue.
As is clear from her latest account, what appears to have changed most

136â•… Julie Hemment

markedly is Tamara’s own sense of conviction. Women come with similar
problems as previously. However, she is more convinced of the efficacy of
her project and more tightly socialized into the campaigns. I tried to push
Tamara to reflect on this. What did these shifts in orientation mean to
her? I gained no sense that she was torn by these changes. Rather, she was
clearly proud about her work and its success. “We’ve come a long way,”
she told me. “There used to be no language for this kind of thing. Now the
authorities have been forced to recognize the problem.”
Our most recent conversations reveal a greater degree of ambivalence.
When I last returned in summer 2001, I found Tamara preoccupied with
new questions. Although eloquent about the importance of the work she
does, she was alive to its contradictions and eager to discuss the ambiva-
lence of collaboration with donor agencies. Together with Natasha, a crisis
center colleague from a neighboring city, we discussed these issues. In
the course of our conversation it became clear that the two women were
dissatisfied with and baffled by foundation policies and felt unheard by
foundation representatives. Although they felt that they were doing useful
work, they were frustrated that so much time was taken up by bureau-
cratic activities. What is more, they felt constrained. Grants permit and
exclude specific activities, down to the themes of trainings. Natasha ex-
plained that her center had recently been visited by agency evaluators,
and it was absolutely clear to her that they were not interested in the con-
tent of the center’s activities: “They just need pretty numbers, they don’t
need to hear my thoughts (razmyshlenie) about our work.” Furthermore,
they were concerned that donors were moving away from supporting the
theme of nasilie (violence). The new theme, she continued, was torgovlia
liud’mi (trafficking). Tamara nodded, saying: “We have to be like chame-
leons to please the foundations. Even if you don’t want to take it [traffick-
ing] on, you have to!”
Finally, they had begun to feel a sense of futility about the work they
had been encouraged into. They had successfully raised an issue that both
felt was real and important, but at the same time, they were aware that it
was nested within a host of other concerns. As with the other crisis centers
I came across, they found that their clients came to discuss a wide variety
of issues. Although they were frequently able to locate (or “uncover”) an
element of domestic violence in clients’ accounts (whether it be verbal
or psychological abuse, economic pressure, or actual physical violence
carried out by spouses or male relatives), clients most pressingly made

Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belongingâ•…137

reference to material problems that affected both them and their families.
Their work with women uncovered issues that they felt powerless to ad-
dress—problems connected with unemployment, unpaid wages, the crisis
of living space. “All we can offer is psychological support. It doesn’t resolve
the main issues,” Tamara lamented. “We can’t solve the material prob-
lems.” Natasha agreed, saying: “The global attention to solving women’s
problems must be the business of the government! Housing, the police,
the law—it’s too much on our shoulders!”

Conclusions
In this account so far, I have tried to convey the local meanings that
get screened out by the international renditions of the violence against
women campaigns. So what lessons for the transnational women’s move-
ment can we draw from this specific case?
While it is important to celebrate the success of the crisis center net-
work in terms of the economic and political opportunities it provides local
women, we also need to critically interrogate the success of the campaigns
and to be aware of their discursive effects. Within contemporary condi-
tions of globalization, transnational gender politics operates as a mode of
power that constitutes some women and some issues as deserving, exclud-
ing others (Mindry 2001). Indeed, understanding these effects helps us in-
terpret the skepticism of some of the women involved in the campaigns,
such as Nadya, whose comments I began with.
Skepticism about these campaigns testifies to the fact that many
people experience these campaigns and similar ones as primitivizing. In
the 1990s, “violence against women” has become an international devel-
opment issue, a marker to gauge the “civilization” of states. According to
this yardstick, despite the collapse of the political, military, and concep-
tual boundaries of the Cold War, Russia remains as far away from the West
as ever. In fact, ironically, rather than drawing closer, in the 1990s it has
slipped backward (from Soviet gender equality to a place of “uncivilized”
gender relations). I believe that it was precisely this discursive effect that
many of my interlocutors objected to. Furthermore, the framing used by
the international campaigns has the ideological effect of obscuring the
fact that violence against women is structurally endemic within liberal
democratic capitalist regimes. It is not so much the case that liberal demo-
cratic “civil” society is not violent but that the system allows for the exis-
tence (and occasionally encourages the provision) of services to mop it up.

138â•… Julie Hemment

Making gender and violence a marker of development obscures a fact that
both crisis counsellors and their clients know very well—that all forms of
violence, including gendered violence, have been exacerbated by struc-
tural adjustment, the very liberalizing project that was supposed to bring
civility to Russia. No wonder those engaged in the ideological work of
these campaigns feel ambivalent about them.
The discursive prominence of terms such as crisis center and violence
and their prioritization exemplifies some troubling aspects of Western de-
mocratization aid. The prominence of the issue of violence against women
can be read as part of a broader trend, marking a discursive privatization
of the social dislocation accompanying transition and a depoliticization
of the economic. Stopping up the gaps of the radical free market, services
such as crisis centers act as mediators, educating Russian people into the
new order. The individualizing, economizing discourses that these centers
put out (“self-Â�help,” “self-Â�reliance”) educate people out of politics, out of
expecting anything from the crumbling and retreating state. The winning
out of the “international model” marks an abandonment of attempts to
tackle structural problems, as my examples from Tver’ reveal. Interest-
ingly, both Tamara’s and Katia’s crisis center projects foreground issues
of individual change and development, rather than structural issues, and
there is little critical discussion of the path of democratization and de-
velopment. One of the last things Tamara said to me was that women
needed to be educated out of the “myth” that domestic violence has ma-
terial roots. Here, she was making the feminist argument that domes-
tic violence could not be justified as a response to economic hardship.
Still, in her ready adoption of this framing, I see her as still taking on
the old socialist state and its discredited, materialist ideologies, perhaps
not fully aware of the implications of the new ideology that is taking its
place. Meanwhile, over time the element of structural critique dropped
out of Katia’s “anticrisis center” plan. Whereas formerly she had at least
implicitly addressed the state and the illegality of economic discrimina-
tion and dismissals, she began to speak only in terms of psychological sup-
port. Her new project description was “to afford psychological support to
women who are suffering the consequences of loss of work.”25
However, this is not the full story. My Tver’ case study shows how the
model of crisis center has been appropriated and embraced and deployed
for various different ends. The women of Zhenskii Svet, like many other
activists, made a pragmatic, strategic decision to set up a crisis center.

Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belongingâ•…139

They were to some extent coerced into the framing, yet they have been
able to reappropriate it in key ways. The crisis center meets group needs
and objectives that preceded the arrival of Western funding. It has be-
come an important discursive site where social dislocation and confusion
are explored and made sense of; where needs can be defined and named,
and survival strategies formulated. Like other ngos, it is a dynamic site
in which people negotiate the past and the present. No less significantly,
it serves as an effective niche, a foothold for those who work there, and it
contributes to the creation of new forms of solidarity and togetherness.
What’s more, crisis centers bring nongovernmental women’s activists into
dialogue with state agencies, contributing to important realignments be-
tween spheres.
I regard my colleagues’ appropriation of the model as an ambivalent
thing—it is part co-Â�optation, part self-Â�justification, and part testimony
to a new formulation of gendered violence. Work conducted in the cen-
ter both embraces and exceeds the gendered violence narrative. In their
commentaries I see the germ of a critique and the potential formulation
of a collective, or at least less individualistic response to gendered violence
that could be useful to us all.

Notes
This essay is based on nineteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in
Moscow, Tver,’ and Pskov between 1995 and 2001; I dedicate it with gratitude to
Valentina Uspenskaia and Oktiabrina Cheremovskaia. I am grateful to the Cornell
Graduate School, the Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Cornell Uni-
versity Peace Studies Program for financial support. I would like to thank Elizabeth
Armstrong, Nanette Funk, Davydd Greenwood, Nancy Ries and particularly Michele
Rivkin-�Fish for their thoughtful and critical engagement with earlier drafts and for
their encouragement of these ideas. I would also like to thank the editors of Signs for
their support and for granting permission to reprint this material.
1. Following anthropological conventions, I make use of pseudonyms to protect the
identity of the women activists I worked with in my research.
2. The official Soviet Women’s Committee delegations had connections with some
Western feminist activists during the Soviet period. Further, Western feminist
texts circulated clandestinely via samizdat during the 1970s and 1980s, and there
were limited connections between individual dissidents and Western feminist
activists.
3. See, for example, Wedel (1998), Berdahl (1999), Borneman (1992), and Verdery
(1996) for critical discussions of this topic.
4. Recent feminist scholarship has drawn attention to the gendered effects of de-
mocratization and transition, pointing to the ways it has marked the demotion of

140â•… Julie Hemment

 women as a group in Russia and other postsocialist countries (see, for example,
Bridger, Kay, and Pinnick 1996; Verdery 1996; Watson 1997; Gal and Kligman
2000a).
5. The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against
Women (cedaw), which was adopted in 1979 and entered into force in 1981,
makes no mention of violence, rape, abuse, or battery. However, by mid-�1995 vio-
lence against women had become a “common advocacy position” of the women’s
movement and the human rights movement (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 166).
6. The Ford Foundation played a significant role in determining patterns of funding
and led the way in funding campaigns against violence against women. While in
1988 major US foundations awarded eleven grants totaling $241,000, in 1993 they
made sixty-�eight grants totaling $3,247,800 (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 182).
7. See Keck and Sikkink 1998. Sperling, Ferree, and Risman (2001) provide a nu-
anced account of Russian women’s activism in the context of the development of
the transnational women’s movement, bringing the lens of new social movement
theory to bear on the changes of the last decade. Their study documents the first
phase of Western donor support to Russian women’s groups in the early to mid-Â�
1990s.
8. Drawing on data from China, Indonesia, and Malaysia, Ong gives examples of
alternative strategies (1996). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has made a similar cri-
tique of the Beijing conference and its colonialist characteristics (1996).
9. See, for example, Feldman (1997), Lang (1997), Alvarez (1998), Kamat (2002),
Paley (2001).
10. Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar introduce the concept of “apsas” to describe the
new service-�oriented ngos that are encouraged into being by international foun-
dations and donor agencies. They regard them as Band-�Aids, palliatives, hope-
lessly compromised by the role they play in filling up the gaps of the free market
(1998, 22).
11. For discussions of how this has influenced women’s movements, see, for example,
Alvarez (1998), Lang (1997); for a consideration of these issues in the formerly
socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, see
Abramson (1999), Richter (1999), Snitow (1999), Sperling (2000).
12. I am grateful to Michele Rivkin-�Fish for suggesting this formulation.
13. Another explanation for this skepticism is that women’s organizing was enforced
and managed from above by the Soviet state, in a network of official women’s
departments and councils. Furthermore, feminism was discredited by Bolshevik
and Soviet leaders, who labeled it a Western reformist phenomenon (Noonan
1996, 77).
14. For discussions of state socialist gender arrangements and the corresponding ab-
sence of a sense of gender discrimination, see Verdery (1996), Watson (1997), Gal
and Kligman (2000a).
15. I met many crisis center activists who were eager to establish shelters. However,
they acknowledged that local conditions did not permit it. First, there was the dif-

Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belongingâ•…141

 ficulty of obtaining premises from local authorities. Second, it was unclear where
to relocate women once they had been admitted. If in Western Europe and the
United States the shelter is a temporary refuge, a stopgap for women and their
families before they find their feet, in Russia people have quite literally nowhere
to move on to.
16. According to data published in 1995, 14,400 cases of rape were recorded in the
Russian Federation in 1993. In the same year, 14,500 women were reported to
have been murdered by their husbands or male partners (Attwood 1997, 99).
17. Foundation representatives I spoke with frequently cited the crisis center net-
work as one of the most successful women’s ngo projects.
18. The Canadian Embassy funded the publication of the book. According to one of
its Russian authors, five thousand copies were distributed to nascent crisis cen-
ters and women’s ngos (Zabelina 1996).
19. See, for example, Gibson-�Graham (1996), Grewal and Kaplan (1994).
20. Its feminist and democratic orientation made the group unusual. However, it
can be considered exemplary of the early clubs and groups founded in academic
circles by women familiar with feminist texts and the Western women’s move-
ment.
21. I first learned about the group in 1995 from the Network of East-�West Women
electronic listserv. New women’s groups, which had just been hooked up on
the Internet, announced and introduced themselves and listed their interests.
Groups tended to make broad declarations rather than itemize existing services.
This was very much of the times, before the standardization associated with
ngos had become widespread.
22. I found that many North American or Western European feminists dismissed
discussions of economic factors as a rationalization for male-�perpetrated vio-
lence. The standard response was the assertion that rich men also beat their
wives. While of course this is true and important, in this context it is extraor-
dinarily dismissive of local concerns and shows little awareness of the extent of
economic dislocation in Russia and its devastating effects on the lives of women
and their families.
23. In brief, participatory action research (par) is a social change methodology, in-
volving the participation of a community group in problem posing and solving
(Maguire 1987). For helpful discussions of par, see, for example, Fals Borda and
Rahman (1991), Maguire (1996), D. Greenwood and Levin (1998).
24. I reflect on my role and the implications of my involvement in this project else-
where. See Hemment (2000 and 2004).
25. During my last trip to the city, in 2001, I learned that Katia had been appointed di-
rector of a newly founded, government-�funded Center for Women and �Families.

142â•… Julie Hemment

╉CHAPTER 5 Kathleen O’Reilly

Resolving a Gendered Paradox

Women’s Participation and the NGO Boom in North India

Introduction
Within gendered participatory approaches to development is a
gendered paradox: ngos are charged to bring women into the
social and economic lives of their communities, yet they cannot
accept their own women employees as full participants. Women’s
participation has grown popular due to gender mainstreaming
trends in international development, but that has not necessarily
led ngos to embrace women’s participation ideals in general
or to reflect on their own internal practices. Instead, the rise of
women’s participation has produced an ongoing struggle among
ngo staff and between staff and their constituents over meanings
of women’s participation and the spatial changes necessary to en-
able women’s participation. In this chapter, I combine geographic
theories of power and space with recent insights into participa-
tory development in order to illuminate how feminist struggles
among ngo staff over meanings of women’s participation created
opportunities for women fieldworkers’ participation inside the or-
ganization. Instead of evaluating the success or failure of women’s
participation based on definitions of women’s participation found
in ngo documents, my analysis focuses on the results of dialogic
exchanges (for example, conversations, heated arguments) over
women’s participation during project implementation. I trace the
spaces where dialogic exchanges occurred and the spatial out-
comes of dialogic exchanges in order to argue that dialogues have
a practical impact on ngos by creating space for social change.
 One emphasis in recent scholarship on ngos concerns itself with
the ability of ngos to provide alternatives to development (see, for ex-
ample, Bebbington, Hickey and Mitlin 2008). ngos have been criticized
for allowing their alternative agendas to be compromised or co-�opted, an
outcome of their especially difficult position between dependency on state
support and/or financing from international donors (Townsend, Porter,
and Mawdsley 2002; Dolhinow 2005) and a simultaneous dependency
on their client base (Walker, Jones, Roberts, and Froehling 2007; O’Reilly
2010). Development agendas may be resisted, incorporated and/or ma-
nipulated to fit with individual plans, both those of fieldworkers (Springer
2001; O’Reilly 2006b) and clients (Everett 1997; Bebbington 2000). The
gendered paradox of participation that ngos both contribute to and at-
tempt to resolve is generated at the confluence of donor demands and the
social context within which they are embedded (Agarwal 2001; O’Reilly
2006a). Investigation of the gendered paradox requires exploration into
these organizations as central sites where discourses of participation are
negotiated. The planning documents of ngos give the impression that
inside organizations discourses for women’s participation are unified and
uncontested. However, during fieldwork with a drinking water supply
project in northern Rajasthan, India, I experienced discourses of women’s
participation as changing and multiple, and its associated practices as
fragmented and fragile (see also Mosse 2005). Women’s participation was
an evolving set of contradictory meanings and practices.
In this chapter, I argue that dialogic exchanges between ngo staff over
women’s participation extended its meanings, thereby creating additional
spaces for women’s voices and concerns. As struggles unfolded over what
topics and activities women’s participation would contain and would not,
and over the value of women’s participation to the development project
and the implementing ngo, the profile and relevance of women’s partici-
pation was enhanced. The gendered paradox began to resolve itself as ngo
staff discussed and reflected on women’s participation inside their organi-
zation. As one male fieldworker said:

Even here in this project there is no equal participation for women

fieldworkers. How will she create women’s participation in villages? So
very slowly, whatever is in our pre-�planning and written in our hand-
book, that much women’s participation we may not get; we may do less.
We keep thinking about it, between us we keep arguing and reason-
ing (tarksangat ladaaii) and we talk a lot about it. See, some way may

144â•… Kathleen O’Reilly

 emerge (nikal jaaye). There may be a blast (visfot) which will bring
complete participation and equality in society. (Ravinder 2000. Unpub-
lished. Data from fieldwork)

Although Ravinder admitted that women fieldworkers did not participate

in his ngo on equal footing with men and realized that, despite plan-
ning, fieldworkers might not be able to create women’s participation in the
management of village water resources, he was encouraged that men and
women within his ngo were talking about the issues. Ravinder’s words
emphasize that women’s participation in development was a dialogic pro-
cess (for example, “arguing and reasoning”) that included negotiating how
women fieldworkers would participate within their own organization. He
was hopeful that through these verbal exchanges—or some “explosion”—
equality in society might occur. This fieldworker’s awareness of the power
of discussion led me to consider the ways that ngo staffs’ voices emerged
to produce expanded meanings and open new spaces for women’s partici-
pation in the activities of the ngo.
In the pages that follow, I situate my argument within current critiques
of participation and then introduce my case study ngo, Our Water, its
goals, and its project area. I discuss the general condition of women in
northern India that informed project goals for women’s participation. This
discussion is followed by an outline of geographic theories on the power
struggles that cocreate language and space. I argue that our understand-
ing of feminist struggles inside ngos are enhanced when we consider that
tensions over meanings of terms like “women’s participation” are produc-
tive of new meanings and spaces. I ground these ideas in ethnographic
examples that demonstrate how meanings and spaces of development
are produced through the daily speech and practices of agents—in this
case the many different individuals who made up the staff of Our Water.
Framing dialogues as micropolitical processes that have spatial outcomes
enables us to discover that although “there is no equal participation for
women fieldworkers,” internal struggles inside an ngo may begin to re-
solve the gendered paradox.

Women’s Participation: Theory and Critique

Just as development planning eventually incorporated women into projects
(Boserup 1970; Tinker 1990; Kabeer 1996), so too have participation pro-
grams become gendered (Tinker 1990; C. Moser 1993; Guijt and Shah
1998; C. Jackson and Pearson 1998; Cornwall 2003). Following general par-

Resolving a Gendered Paradoxâ•…145

ticipatory goals (Chambers 1983, 1997) and adding women, policy makers
plan that village women’s participation in development projects will in-
clude them in community decision making (Guijt and Shah 1998; Agarwal
2001), lead to sustainable resource management (C. Jackson 1993), or raise
women’s incomes and social capital through income-Â�generation schemes
(United Nations Development Program 2003). Additionally, women’s par-
ticipation, it was suggested, may lead to women’s empowerment, but how
empowerment happens, at what scales it happens, and even what consti-
tutes empowerment remains in question (Friedmann 1992; Kabeer 1996;
Rowlands 1997; Guijt and Shah 1998).
Feminist scholars have criticized participatory goals by finding within
them opportunities for women’s exploitation (Jackson 1993; Schroeder
1999), the inability of participation to overcome existing discriminatory
social contexts (Agarwal 2001), and the focus of empowerment on indi-
viduals, away from collective action (Kamat 2004). Participation has been
influenced by neoliberalism, where it comes to mean achieving project effi-
ciencies at the expense of empowerment (Dagnino 2008), a managerialist
approach to the work of ngos (Townsend, Porter, and Mawdsley 2002), a
redirection of ngos’ efforts toward pleasing donors and away from client
concerns (Miraftab 1997), and/or the construction of individual capability
as the solution to individual problems, instead of focusing attention on
collective action to address structural problems of poverty and inequality
(Kamat 2004). That said, we risk stabilizing neoliberalism when we fail to
question the ability of ngos to spread neoliberalism (Bebbington 2004a).
Katharine McKinnon (2007, 779) concludes that the development process
should always be seen as a political struggle, and as such, the possibility of
“new strategies and modes of engagement” opens.
Critics of participation charge that participatory approaches have failed
to become an active practice—that is, donors, practitioners, and planners
may speak the language of participation, but their actual approach during
project implementation remains “top-Â�down” (Mosse 2001).1 Other crit-
ics claim that participatory approaches are chosen because they increase
projects’ cost and time efficiency by accessing local labor (Kabeer 1996;
Rahnema and Bawtree 1997; O’Reilly 2006b).2 G. Mohan and K. Stokke
(2000) criticize participatory approaches for being overly “local” and
therefore neglecting broader unequal relations of power within which
the “local” is embedded. Samuel Hickey and Giles Mohan (2004) in their
introduction continue the critique that participation has yet to deal satis-
factorily with issues of power. Power is also a central focus for Bill Cooke

146â•… Kathleen O’Reilly

and Uma Kothari (2001), who take a Foucauldian approach to partici-
pation in order to explore participation as a discourse through which
power circulates. By framing participation as a discourse that contains
“the potential for an unjustified exercise of power,” Cooke and Kothari
(2001, 4) argue that participation can be tyrannical in its exercise. Like any
discourse, what is included and omitted in discourses of participation has
important implications for project outcomes. The language and practices
of participation can be deployed both to extend and to undermine power
(see also Crush 1995; Escobar 1995; Kothari 2001; O’Reilly 2006b). Project
documents and fieldworker trainings are intended to stabilize meanings
of participation, but ngo employees generate alternative meanings of
participation through their practices, which change over time and cir-
cumstances (Crewe and Harrison 1998; Mosse 2001; O’Reilly 2006b).
Recent work in critical development geography has focused on the
agency of actors in making development meanings and spaces (Bebbing-
ton 2000; Nagar and Raju 2003; Laurie 2005; Page 2005). The question
remains: what is the connection between project discourses and staff
practices? Within development studies and critiques of participatory ap-
proaches, scholars continue to try to understand how participatory dis-
courses link up with social processes “without even approximately deter-
mining the form or defining the logic of the outcome” (Ferguson 1990,
275). A unified discourse of participation may emerge in ngo documents,
but that discourse does not reflect the multiplicity of positions and voices
of staff (to say nothing of donors’ or villagers’ voices). Discourses may
make a world, but they do not make a whole world. Beyond that world are
alternative meanings (see Schech and Haggis 2002). Development plans
may fail to do one thing (what they planned), but they may succeed in
doing something else (usually unplanned) and “that something else has
its own logic” (Ferguson 1990, 276). It is necessary, then, to go deeply
into the everyday production processes of meaning creation. With this in
mind, I began to notice how negative attention focused on women’s par-
ticipation seemed to strengthen it and encouraged the resolve of ngo staff
who favored it. Staff spoke up about women’s participation with more fre-
quency and in more spaces as the project progressed.
The spatial has often been overlooked in previous work about partici-
pation, but Andrea Cornwall (2004, 75; see also Fischer 2006; Gaventa
2006) argues that framing participation as a spatial practice allows us to
think about how “particular sites come to be populated, appropriated or
designated by particular actors” in ways that enable or disable social trans-

Resolving a Gendered Paradoxâ•…147

formation. Development project staff ideally create spaces for participa-
tion as a way of establishing opportunities for those on the margins to be
included or for different voices to be heard. However, if we accept that
space is socially and discursively produced, then it is always already im-
bued with social relations of power. Dominant meanings of participation
will influence who enters, who speaks, and how what is said is understood
within invited spaces. Existing social relationships, previous experiences,
and a wider sociopolitical context are not left at the boundaries of such
spaces (Cornwall 2004; see also Agarwal 2001). These dynamics are espe-
cially important given that invited spaces are designed to include a hetero-
geneous group of actors (Cornwall 2004, Fischer 2006). Cornwall (2004)
and Frank Fischer (2006) conclude that more needs to be known about
when, where, and under what conditions invited spaces work to produce
what is hoped for, but also how routinized forms of participation may have
transformative potential. This chapter contributes directly to those goals.

The Project and Its Area

My case study, Our Water, was a joint Indo-�German development project
designed to supply town and village populations in Rajasthan’s khaaraa
paanii (saline water) belt with clean drinking water. Existing groundwater
is undrinkable there due to its high salt content (C. Henderson 1994).
The project area covered approximately 20,000 square kilometers in three
northern districts of Rajasthan: Churu, Jhunjhunu, and Hanumangarh.
Phase 1 of the project (completed December 2005) covered 378 villages
and two towns, reaching almost 900,000 people. Villagers harvest sweet
rainwater during the rainy season (July–August) from rooftops, ground-Â�
level kunds (passive rainwater catchments), and other traditional sources.
Before the arrival of project water, residents of the area received water
twice daily at public taps through a Government of Rajasthan pipeline.
The work of fetching water from public taps is predominantly the work
of women and girls. Water provision by the Government of Rajasthan
was sporadic, allegedly treated and free, but the Our Water supply was
intended to flow twenty-�four hours a day and was strictly for household
consumption and livestock watering. At each village’s entrance a meter
records total water usage; each household pays a share of the monthly bill
depending on the number of its members and heads of cattle, sheep, or
camels. The underlying logic was that villagers want clean water regularly
supplied, and they are willing to pay a nominal charge in order to get it.
Community participation, according to Achievements 2002 (Our Water

148â•… Kathleen O’Reilly

2002, 22) would “ensure sustainability and enhancement of the benefits”
of a regular, reliable drinking-�water supply.

The NGO: Our Water

Our Water comprised a technical side that was responsible for building
the massive drinking-�water supply infrastructure and a social side that
was responsible for implementing community participation. The Gov-
ernment of Rajasthan employed the engineers of the technical side. The
social side was a consortium of five regional ngos that unified to form
one purpose-�specific ngo over the life of the Our Water project. It was
charged with creating a village water committee in every village; building
awareness for payment and water conservation; educating village popu-
lations about health, hygiene, and sanitation; and implementing women’s
participation, considered “essential across all activities” (Our Water n.d.,
n.p.).
The term “ngo” means many different things across contexts, and in
India particularly, ngo represents a myriad of institutions, including reli-
gious organizations, trusts, fronts for other operations, and organizations
contracting for social services with the state (O’Reilly 2010). I identify the
social side of Our Water as an ngo because it comprised local nonprofit,
nongovernmental organizations—two internationally funded organiza-
tions engaged in rural social service, and three institutions involved in
field and classroom training for rural management and social work. While
all the staff considered one of these organizations as a home institution,
Our Water strove to act as a cohesive unit with great success.
Approximately seventy Indian staff worked for the social side of Our
Water out of a main office and scattered field offices in the project area.
(From this point forward, I use the name “Our Water” specifically to mean
the employees working on its social side.) These members were a diverse
group: some were local, some were not; their home state, first language,
socioeconomic background, caste, education level, age, and marital status
varied from person to person. Seven program officers (one woman, six
men) managed the project from the main office and made occasional visits
to the field. There was a German consultant, as required by the German
donor bank. As of March 2001, there were thirty-�six male fieldworkers
and fourteen female fieldworkers, who lived and worked in area villages.3
Each field team comprised one woman and two men. Women fieldworkers
implemented women’s participation activities, which ranged from mobi-
lizing women’s groups, to map making, to trainings on household clean-

Resolving a Gendered Paradoxâ•…149

liness and safe water-�handling practices. Male fieldworkers initiated
village-�level water management institutions, discussed payment plans,
and supported latrine building. Some men (especially team leaders) con-
cerned themselves with the work of women’s participation, but for the
most part, there was a fairly rigid division of labor. No man was ever as-
signed to the women’s participation component, nor any woman to the
water distribution management or sanitation component. Field teams
acted as the primary link between villagers, the technical side, and Our
Water program officers. Similarly, women fieldworkers formed the funda-
mental connection between village women and other ngo staff. Field staff
worked out of village offices-�cum-�residences and met together monthly at
the main office for “experience sharing” and training sessions.
From summer 1998 until winter of 2002, I visited Our Water and its
project area intermittently for five periods of two months to one year. Dur-
ing that time, I gathered project documents and conducted participant
observation with staff as they worked in the main office, field offices, and
villages. I informally questioned staff about Our Water’s goals, women’s
participation, and their practices. I recorded daily field notes, informal
discussions, interactions, and practices. My research assistant, Tasneem
Khan, and I recorded, transcribed, and translated twenty-�two formal
interviews taken in semistructured format in Hindi, Marwari, and English.

Women’s Participation in a North Indian Context

In general, north India4 can be characterized by low education levels,
poorly functioning public services, and limited roles for women (Dreze
and Gazdar 1998, 60). Despite recent economic growth, the region shows
slow rates of poverty decline (Dreze and Gazdar 1998, 33). In Rajasthan,
where socioeconomic conditions are broadly representative of the wider
region of north India, liberalization and government quotas in the 1990s
have led to some opportunities for women in the areas of workforce and
political participation. However, compared to the rest of the country,
north India lags in terms of gendered social development indicators such
as mortality, fertility, morbidity, nutrition, and illiteracy (Dreze and Gaz-
dar 1998, 33). North Indian women compare less favorably to men across
human development indicators: employment, literacy, wages, age at mar-
riage, health care access, level of education, and property rights (Mahbub
ul Haq Human Development Centre 2000; S. Desai et al. 2010; United
Nations Development Program 2003).
The agency of north Indian women as it relates to their reproductive

150â•… Kathleen O’Reilly

health, fertility rates, and child care has been closely linked to the status
and location of women after marriage (Dyson and Moore 1983; Jeffery
and Jeffery 1997; L. Rahman and Rao 2004; S. Desai et al. 2010). In north
India, married women usually join their husbands’ families in their vil-
lage (sasuraal ) after marriage. Both older mothers-�in-�law and younger
daughters-Â�in-Â�law practice ghuunghat—fully covering the face as a sign of
modesty and respect—and purdah (literally, “curtain”), which involves:
not leaving the house; ghuunghat in front of strangers, senior men, and
senior women; and staying silent or lowering one’s voice in the presence
of these people (Luthra 1976; Joshi 1995; Unnithan-�Kumar 1997; Agar-
wal 2001). Unmarried girls, living in their natal villages, although their
work burden is greater than their brothers, do not veil or stay in seclusion.
Ghuunghat and purdah are not rigid institutions, as Varsha Joshi (1995)
and Gloria Raheja and Ann Gold (1994) find, but are fluid depending on
a woman’s age, kinship relationship to her husband’s family, caste, class,
religion, and marital status. While recognizing that purdah is a “restric-
tion and restraint for women in virtually every activity of life” (Jacobson
1982, 82 as cited in Raheja and Gold 1994, 168; see also Nabar 1995), Raheja
and Gold (1994, 169) write that purdah is “not a monolithic prison but a
subtle, fluid, and often highly manipulatable bundle of practices and pre-
cepts” (see also U. Sharma 1978). Women find ways of expressing their
agency within patriarchal systems; they accept, contribute to, and under-
mine gendered oppression. Men may be dominant, but their dominance is
never complete; thus it is important to seek out how north Indian women,
who often may appear powerless, destabilize male dominance (Jeffery and
Jeffery 1997).

Women’s Participation in the Our Water Project

The status of women in Rajasthan provided the impetus for Our Water’s
gendered intervention. According to ngo documents, women’s partici-
pation was critical to project success in terms of its goal to improve the
health conditions of the population. It was primarily married women, in
their roles as mothers and household caretakers, who could learn water
hygiene techniques and teach them to their children, thereby bringing
about long-�term health benefits. Project plans called for women to give
their opinions about where neighborhood public taps should be placed, to
monitor taps for water use and misuse, and to take responsibility for clean-
ing public taps. One or more women’s representatives was required to sit
on village-Â�level water management committees to “incorporate women’s

Resolving a Gendered Paradoxâ•…151

concerns in the decision-Â�making process” (Our Water 2002, 31). In addi-
tion, women’s “essential” qualities of conscientiousness and commitment
were required by the project to achieve sustainability (Our Water n.d., 27).
Women were targeted as those who will want the system most and who
would do the most toward convincing others to take care of the system.
Ultimately, it was hoped that women would be empowered by participat-
ing in the project and would collectively begin to solve other problems.
Women fieldworkers—whether they were local or not, spoke Rajasthani
or not, had a lot or a little education—were expected to facilitate village
women’s participation. The ngo’s approach of hiring women to promote
women’s participation was in keeping with global trends of women’s in-
creasing employment in ngos for the purpose of assisting women’s devel-
opment schemes (Crewe and Harrison 1998; Garcia 2001; O’Reilly 2004).
However, support for women fieldworkers within the ngo and for the
women’s participation component was ambiguous. Some staff denigrated
women’s involvement, others celebrated women fieldworkers’ capabili-
ties, but a majority of ngo staff (both program officers and fieldworkers,
both men and women) engaged in practices that signaled an ambivalence
about women fieldworkers’ importance in the project (O’Reilly 2006b).
Although mixed feelings about women’s participation did not break down
neatly along gendered lines, often divisive problems surrounding it were
conceived as women versus men. The multiple attitudes of ngo staff cre-
ated the gendered paradox that ngos marginalized their women employ-
ees even though they were charged to facilitate village women’s partici-
pation.

The Micropolitics of Language, Space, and Practice

One of the aims of this chapter is to take space seriously as a realm of
active political engagement within a context of unequal gender relations
(see Robinson 2000). Space, as used here, is “the spatial configuration
of power-Â�imbued social relations” (Massey 2000, 283). Following Doreen
Massey (2000, 282; see also Massey 1994) space may be conceived as
“actively and continually practised social relations,” or as Henri Lefeb-
vre (1991, 17) puts it, as “spatial/social practice”—to suggest that space is
coded with social and spatial practices as it is produced. Considering space
as relationally constructed foregrounds the spatial “as an active force in
the formulation and operation of dominance/resistance” (Massey 2000,
283; see also Sharp, Routledge, Philo, and Paddison 2000; Gaventa 2006).

152â•… Kathleen O’Reilly

Massey (2000, 284) argues that what is at issue politically is “transform-
ing, subverting, and challenging the constitutive relations which con-
struct spaces in the first place.”
Such a politicized view of sociospatial relations is critical to an in-
vestigation of the work of development projects because projects aim to
both build on and subvert existing spatial/social practices (see, for ex-
ample, Schroeder 1999; Schroeder and Suryanata 2004; O’Reilly 2006a).
ngo agendas often contain a mandate for social change; grassroots or-
ganizations set themselves the task of challenging existing social rela-
tions (see, for example, Routledge 2003). Our Water had a complemen-
tary sociospatial goal: getting women out of their houses and involving
them in drinking-Â�water supply management. Women’s participation in
water management was eventually supposed to lead to their empower-
ment (O’Reilly 2006a). Notwithstanding that such plans are fraught with
tropes of colonialism, gendered private/inner spaces, and the home, they
also indicate that development policies link changes in space to changes
in social relations, both in the workplace and in villages. The practices
of ngo field staff can be examined for their efforts to reorder gender re-
lationships of unequal power.
Massey’s argument that space is continually produced out of social re-
lations of unequal power parallels Bakhtin’s theory of meaning creation.
Bakhtin suggests that social change and the creation of space may be ex-
plored by framing dialogues as fraught with micropolitics and by trac-
ing meanings as they occur through dialogic exchange (see Bakhtin 1986;
Bakhtin and Voloshinov 1994; Morris 1994). The utterances of individuals,
Bakhtin posits, create direct and indirect challenges to oppressive social
relations by suggesting that alternative meanings are possible (Bauer and
McKinstry 1991). When individual voices suggest aloud new or different
meanings of terms already defined by a dominant narrative, dialogue has
occurred. His ideas allow that all meanings have some power, and some
meanings dominate without having total power. Bakhtin theorizes that
in social contexts of unequal power, multiple and conflicting voices are
potentially productive. A dominant monologue is no longer a monologue
when an individual literally gives voice to alternative meanings; alternative
meanings come into play directly in conversation. Furthermore, they also
engage at the scale of wider, dominant narratives, as when fieldworkers
suggest village women should leave their family compound in order to
attend mixed-�gender village water committee meetings, discourses of

Resolving a Gendered Paradoxâ•…153

women’s participation compete with dominant understandings of public
space as men’s space. Dialogic exchange occurs between persons, but en-
gages more broadly with prevailing narratives.
Bakhtin’s ideas present development scholars with a micropolitical,
discursive approach to research seeking out the processes of sociospatial
change by suggesting that dialogic exchange creates new meanings of
words, like “women’s participation,” that are potentially subversive. Ex-
tended ethnographic fieldwork is an ideal method for tracing the shifting
meanings of terms over time and space. The work of fieldworkers is pri-
marily talk—another reason to turn to Bakhtin—and as they talk, field-
workers mobilize particular ideas about women’s participation and space.
Project discourses of participation are not simply read off project docu-
ments and implemented verbatim. Instead, they are interpreted and en-
acted by fieldworkers in a variety of ways and contexts.
In the pages below, I combine geographers’ ideas about space as social
relations that can both inhibit and enable particular dialogues and prac-
tices and Bakhtin’s conceptualization of meaning creation in order to pry
open the “black box” of ngos (Ferguson 1990; Everett 1997). I use a variety
of examples to illustrate how shifting dialogues about women’s participa-
tion resulted in small changes inside ngo spaces and ngo practices of
women’s participation. In these dialogues, we can hear individual voices
reworking meanings of women’s participation, and listen for the tensions
that produced spaces where voices favoring participation emerged (or did
not) or where recognizable spaces for women were created (or were not).
It was through dialogue that the meanings of women’s participation and
the spaces where it might occur expanded over the course of project im-
plementation.

Creating Spaces for Women’s Participation

In spaces where a dominant monologue is active, one subversive voice may
plant the seed for dialogue, creating an opening in time-�space where hege-
monic meanings can be engaged dialogically. A monthly Our Water staff
meeting provides an example of an opening created by the voices of two
program officers, who chose to speak about the importance of women’s
participation. In monthly staff meetings whenever women began to speak
about their work toward women’s participation, most of the men would
cease listening and talk softly among themselves. At such a meeting in
July 2000, when the susurrus drew her notice, the women’s participation
program officer berated those making the noise for failing to consider the

154â•… Kathleen O’Reilly

activities of women’s participation important to the work that they were
doing individually and to the project. A senior program officer added his
voice and authority, addressing those present on the seriousness of the
matter: “Seriousness kii kamii hai. Man lenaa padegaa but seriousness kii
kamii hai. . . . Mahiilaa binaa yah project nahiin chalegaa” (Seriousness is
lacking. You have to think [about this issue] but seriousness is lacking. . . .
Without women this project will not go forward). This was the first time
to my knowledge that male fieldworkers’ casualness toward women’s par-
ticipation was openly addressed.
Through their words the two program officers attempted to influence
directly meanings of women’s participation by declaring its importance
and urging fieldworkers to think about it seriously. Speaking from posi-
tions of power, their authority enabled a shift to occur—suddenly the
women fieldworkers in the room became visible and audible. The meeting
room became a space where, temporarily, all voices were heard, not only
those of men fieldworkers. Men began paying attention to what women
were saying when they spoke. Reminders to men fieldworkers became
more and more frequent in the main meeting room over the months I
studied the project, and served to reinforce the growing importance of
the women’s participation component. If the women’s participation pro-
gram officer was not present when women were reporting, other program
officers would speak up about the need for men’s attention if it drifted
away from women’s remarks. The initial incident in the presence of all
staff set the stage for future insistence on women fieldworkers’ critical
project roles.
The authority of these two program officers enabled them to challenge
an existing norm that men need not concern themselves with women’s
participation reporting in the main meeting room. Their words challenged
an existing monologue that marginalized women’s participation; by speak-
ing they created an opening for dialogic exchange about women’s partici-
pation in the ngo and its importance to the project overall. However,
authority does not always enable a development worker to engage those
around him/her in dialogue about women’s participation. For example,
Ravinder often spoke in favor of women’s empowerment, but he felt con-
strained in speaking to the women of his own family about unveiling:

I know my mother and wife should do this work [of empowering

women] but I cannot make them [do it] because change in society
comes slowly. I know women should not follow the veiling system (par-

Resolving a Gendered Paradoxâ•…155

 daaprathaa) but I cannot say to them [my wife and mother], why are
you covering your face (kyon ghuunghat nikaal rahii ho)?

Ravinder found that he could express his views on women’s empowerment

in other villages in the project area and that they meshed with Our Water’s
stated goals for women’s participation. Despite his readiness to discuss
women’s empowerment when he was in other villages, he acknowledged
his silence. “Change in society happens slowly,” he told me, indicating
that he knew his words would not, or could not, be heard. He could not
open up a conversation about veiling because he was aware of the village
context in which they all were living. Ravinder was not ready or willing to
disrupt the power relations in which he was embedded. Although he did
not express it, conceivably, Ravinder’s awareness of his multiple positions
was in part what silenced him. He knew he carried the authority of an ex-
perienced fieldworker, but he was also neighbor, son, and husband. In this
particular example we hear a fieldworker realize that he cannot raise more
radical meanings of women’s participation within his own family/home.
He spoke of it in other places, but in his own village a monological dis-
course spoke singularly about the practice of veiling. His own voice, which
might have spoken dialogically, was silenced. The following example de-
picts a fieldworker introducing a more radical meaning of women’s par-
ticipation.
Although a naturalized, gendered division of labor existed within Our
Water, over time women fieldworkers began expressing an interest in
working on sanitation or water distribution management, besides women’s
participation. Sometimes women would unofficially take on these tasks,
as male fieldworkers occasionally did with women’s participation activi-
ties. Eventually a woman fieldworker named Savitri erupted in a monthly
meeting, demanding tearfully that women be given the chance to form a
women-�only field team and prove what women fieldworkers were capable
of doing in villages (O’Reilly 2004). At the time the incident was down-
played, but Savitri’s indictment of the gendered inequality within Our
Water stirred some fieldworkers to reflect negatively on the ngo’s gen-
dered division of labor (O’Reilly 2004). Savitri’s outburst disrupted the
status quo about appropriate jobs for women and men. She alerted staff
to the fact that there were spaces for women’s participation that extended
beyond villages into their own workplace (O’Reilly 2004). She reminded
those attending the meeting that women’s participation was not only
for village women, but something that should be happening inside Our

156â•… Kathleen O’Reilly

Water as well. She seized the monthly meeting as a platform for a femi-
nist agenda. Savitri’s words suggest that women fieldworkers reconceived
particular spaces as spaces of action (Nagar 2000)—in this case the space
of the meeting room. She took an opportunity in the ngo’s meeting room
for dialogue with those in power about greater participation in ngo ac-
tivities by women fieldworkers.
When it appeared that women fieldworkers’ roles might expand into
the realm of previously male-�only jobs, certain staff grew defensive; how-
ever, by that time an atmosphere of support for women’s participation had
been established inside Our Water, even if practices had not dramatically
changed. Those staff opposed to women’s participation could no longer
claim it was not important. The tension between women’s potentially ex-
panding roles in the ngo versus men’s dominance took an ironic turn dur-
ing an annual visit by donor bank officers in June 2000. The most senior
officer’s frequent inquiries indicated to staff and to villagers that women’s
participation was high on the bank’s agenda. There was talk that $2 mil-
lion were on the table for women’s participation. Some staff handled the
attention to women’s participation by denigrating the component, saying
it was important only because it brought in funds. Together, both the posi-
tive and negative dialogues worked to establish a high profile for women’s
participation during the German officer’s visit, which culminated in an
all-�staff meeting in the main office. Within the atmosphere of support for
women’s participation, men well known to be opposed to women’s partici-
pation said that they considered women’s participation an integral part of
the project. Unlike how they might have denigrated women’s participation
in other settings, in the presence of a German bank officer, they argued
that their work supported women’s participation. (With the exception of
Nilam, all participants are men.)

German bank officer: Do you have sufficient resources and tools

for doing your jobs [of women’s participation]?
Ravinder: In our team’s area, there are only two women and twenty-Â�
eight villages. The women’s groups are coming up rapidly, so there
should be more women fieldworkers.
Gopal: Yes, increase the number of women fieldworkers. And they
should stay in the ngo longer [in reference to high turnover of
women staff].
Nilam: Why not give the women fieldworkers responsibility for sani-
tation? We have been restricted.

Resolving a Gendered Paradoxâ•…157

 German bank officer: Do you want to do that work?
Nilam: We are accountable. Men were doing it . . .
A senior male program officer cuts her off.
Vasant: All the project components are interrelated.
Ramu: We don’t take an individual approach. It’s team work.
Gopal: We work together. All do the work. Men are not seeing women’s
participation as separate.
German bank officer: Are men involved in women’s participation?
Anand: They do it.
Kamal: The things are related.
Vasant: We take the microcredit groups’ mission. When there were
no women fieldworkers, we did this work.
Anand: And school sanitation. We take all the activities of the ngo
into the schools.

Knowing that they were expected to be working toward women’s partici-

pation as part of the whole project, men who ordinarily maligned women’s
participation insisted it was an integral part of their work. Their state-
ments were belied by the fact that travel for women’s participation al-
most always came last when field teams prioritized vehicle use; male team
members generally controlled the travel schedule of the team as a whole.
The absence of women fieldworkers from teams was less likely to lead
men fieldworkers to work toward women’s participation (as suggested by
Vasant in the dialogue above), as it was to enable teams to disregard those
activities as significant for the project.
Similar to Savitri’s words in the monthly meeting, Nilam, a woman
fieldworker, attempted to argue for a change in the division of labor that
would enable women fieldworkers to work on sanitation. A program offi-
cer used his authority to silence her. Perhaps he considered her remarks
too subversive or simply did not want any tension to mar the German offi-
cer’s visit. But the incident indicates the limits of support for women field-
workers’ participation in Our Water’s activities, because so much more
could have been said to support an expansion of their activities. Before
this meeting, when women did work on sanitation, it was to supervise
construction when the male fieldworkers were not available. Some in-�
the-�field flexibility in the gender division of labor gave women some infor-
mal opportunities. However, women seldom got recognition for this work,
which they wanted from the program officers and their male coworkers.
The words of the men who spoke after Nilam may be understood as

158â•… Kathleen O’Reilly

a backlash against the increasing importance of women’s participation
and women fieldworkers. Most male fieldworkers resisted any intrusion
of women fieldworkers into their work, and many preferred the spatial
segregation between their activities. Interestingly, field staff who recog-
nized that some men were exaggerating their activities did not call their
bluff. Few wanted the work of the ngo to look bad in front of the Ger-
man officers, but perhaps also the existing atmosphere of support for
women’s participation enabled men’s activities to be viewed in a differ-
ent light. For example, Anand’s reference to school sanitation work may
have reminded staff that access to latrines at schools enabled girls to at-
tend. These male fieldworkers’ voices ironically reinforced women’s par-
ticipation as a critical project component. Importantly, within a month of
this meeting, program officers began discussing reassignment of women
fieldworkers to sanitation and water distribution management jobs. The
recognition women fieldworkers sought was now under consideration.
Later that same year, women fieldworkers asked for and received training
in health education, which became an education component for village
women on safe water handling practices.
During the same visit of donor bank officers, women fieldworkers took
an opportunity to suggest that village women’s activities be expanded,
and in particular to open up village water committee meetings for village
women’s participation.

German bank officer: Women’s groups are not formal, so how can
they be sustained?
Sita: This is a good question. The women’s groups should be made
equal to the village water committees. Even if they are informal,
these groups don’t feel they are weaker. They have different work
but they are no weaker.
Sima: User groups [of public tap users] are mainly women, so they feel
that it is for their benefit [to participate in them].
Nilam: We have to give more and more responsibility to them.
German bank officer: Which responsibilities?
Nilam: Payment collection [of water charges]. There could also be
more roles for the self-�help groups.
Pushpa: The latrine subsidy forms are filled in women’s names.
Sita: The women’s groups and self-Â�help groups should be called into
the village water committee meetings. Maybe they don’t have legal
power, but they should sit in the meetings.

Resolving a Gendered Paradoxâ•…159

These utterances are part of a larger dialogic and material struggle over vil-
lage women’s access to the power/space of village water committees. It was
well known in Our Water that despite a guideline that every village water
committee have one or more women’s representatives present at meet-
ings, meetings were often held without women present or that the women
who did come were foto sadasya (dummy representatives). If a women’s
representative attended, she did not often sit with the male members. In-
stead she would sit silently outside of the main meeting area, but within
hearing range. In this example, the German officer’s question about sus-
tainability was a verbal sanction of women’s participation. It carried sig-
nificant weight among staff, despite the fact that the German officers
did not make decisions about Our Water’s daily activities. Women field-
workers responded by suggesting that women’s participation stretch into
the male spaces of village water committees by increasing the number of
women invited. In their words, women’s groups were placed on a par with
village water committees, and the activities and spaces of user groups and
self-Â�help groups were augmented. These women fieldworkers’ unstated
hope was that greater numbers of women’s representatives would allow
women to sit with men in the main meeting room and to speak.
In the presence of all other staff, they sought the German bank offi-
cer’s approval to expand village women’s access to public space. Both vil-
lage water committee spaces and gatherings of the ngo were conceived
as further frontiers for dialogic exchange. At the same time that women
fieldworkers were attempting to expand project guidelines about women’s
representatives in village meetings, they were also increasing their own
participation in the ngo by advancing activities for women’s participa-
tion at the village level that would increase their own contributions to the
project overall. As the profile of women’s participation grew over time,
increasingly struggles surrounding women’s participation in one space
for one group (for example, opening village water committee meetings to
women’s groups) manifested themselves in other spaces for other women
(for example, women fieldworkers advancing their own ideas about village
women’s participation). Dialogic exchange began to push for the expan-
sion of women’s participation both in the ngo and in villages.

Dialogue and the Growth of Women’s Participation

In the project’s early years, women’s participation appeared to have little
relevance to project activities. A monologue that defined women’s partici-
pation as superfluous enabled the component to be considered by many

160â•… Kathleen O’Reilly

staff as “some talks in a corner” (German consultant interview, 2000). I
was asked when I arrived to do dissertation fieldwork the reasons I was
studying the Our Water project if I were interested in women’s partici-
pation. However, over the years I studied the project, dialogue about
women’s participation increased and formed a basis for gendered change.
The more women’s participation was talked about, the more presence it
had—even if that presence was controversial. The more presence it had,
the more women’s participation became a recourse and support to those
seeking gender equality within the organization and in villages. The pres-
ence of female fieldworkers was always considered critical support for
producing women’s participation, but a need for more women staff be-
came pressing: “More effective and efficient support has to be given . . .
mostly in the form of frequent visits by the female [staff] of the ngo, the
number of which has to be increased substantially” (Our Water 2000, 12).
Staff began to think reflexively about women’s role in the organization;
fieldworkers spoke up about women’s exclusion from certain project roles.
Enough momentum was generated that program officers organized a gen-
der sensitivity training led by outside facilitators in early 2001.
As the introductory quote from Ravinder hints, these dialogues about
women’s participation created the project’s women’s participation goals
about where village women and women fieldworkers would spend their
time and who would control it. Dialogic struggles surrounding women’s
participation—a multiplicity of voices for it or against it—challenged un-
equal, gendered social relations and moved the conversation into new
spaces. As Chik Collins (1999, 86) indicates, the “same words mobilized
in different ways [. . .] make a profound impact on processes of social
change.” New meanings of women’s participation had repercussions for
gendered spaces, as nearly all of the dialogues about women’s participation
inherently involved a challenge to men’s control of space, by tuning out
women’s voices or retaining village water committee meetings as male-Â�
only gatherings. Expanded meanings of women’s participation resulted
in an interruption of previously male-�only spaces, territorial claims for
women’s space, or reconfigured spaces so that fieldworkers could speak
in support of women’s participation and be heard.
Moving past critiques that village women’s participation may be in
name only or make little of its intended impact (Agarwal 2001; Cleaver
2001; Mawdsley, Townsend, Porter, and Oakley 2002), this research has
sought to retheorize participation through an examination of the micro-
negotiations behind the intended and unintended impacts of a gendered

Resolving a Gendered Paradoxâ•…161

participatory approach. Following Mike Kesby (2005), I have sought out the
power dynamics behind language and practices that depoliticize women’s
participation. Hickey and Mohan (2004) write that through participatory
approaches, the bargaining position of the poor may be strengthened—
that is, that power relations may not be overturned, but within unequal
relations of power the position of the poor might be rendered less un-
equal. This element of their argument is an important thread in mine, be-
cause I found that although a radical social transformation did not occur
inside Our Water, women’s participation as an idea gained support over
time. Staff succeeded in establishing women’s participation as an issue
that could be spoken of, debated, reflected on, and that—despite forces
against it—kept women’s participation on the Our Water project agenda.
The ngo’s original goal of organizing village women into women’s groups
which would go on to solve other village problems (beyond water supply)
was not realized. However, a variety of women’s groups did emerge, and
women fieldworkers began to raise their voices with confidence.
Can we call these newly raised voices a form of women’s empower-
ment? If we accept Jo Rowlands’s (1997) definition of empowerment as
a process that increases self-�confidence, agency, and a sense of dignity,
then arguably feminist struggles inside Our Water over women’s par-
ticipation were implicated in growing empowerment for women field-
workers. When we hear women fieldworkers taking advantage of “spaces
of opportunity” (for example, the meeting room during the German bank
officer’s visit) to assert their desire to do other work besides women’s par-
ticipation, their voices sound like the voices of empowered women. The
research suggests that it is through ambiguity and contradictions that
women and men began to envision new roles for women in the ngo.
Controversy and mixed feelings about women’s participation led women
and men to speak up in favor of women’s increasing roles. Those ideas had
support from Our Water’s leadership and officers of the donor agency,
but not from all. As Hickey and Mohan (2004) suggest, gender inequali-
ties may not have been overturned, but women’s position in the ngo be-
came a little less unequal as controversy over women’s participation con-
tinually put women’s participation on the agenda and gave fieldworkers
opportunities to speak their minds. Fieldworkers gain new insights into
themselves, their situatedness in relationships of power, and their work
as they talk about women’s participation (Kesby 2005). Participation may
lead to empowerment if through participation words and practices chal-
lenge the status quo and move beyond existing relations of power (Kesby

162â•… Kathleen O’Reilly

2005). This is an important consideration, given that women’s empower-
ment for women fieldworkers was never on the project agenda—women
fieldworkers were assumed to be empowered already. The research also
shows that empowerment is a less-�than-�linear process: considering par-
ticipation as a spatial practice lets us tell a story about women’s participa-
tion in ngos as a goal that was simultaneously supported and thwarted,
and as a practice that appears and reappears at different times and places
(Kesby 2005). What is more, women’s participation grew too big to be
ignored, and the controversies that surrounded it enabled staff to think
about their own roles individually and gender roles collectively inside the
�organization.

Conclusions
As Bebbington (2000, 495) suggests, development theorizing requires
“more nuanced interpretations of development that emphasize human
agency and depict what room to maneuver exists within otherwise con-
straining institutions and structures.” This chapter illustrates that women’s
participation was originally defined too narrowly, both in general and spe-
cifically with regard to space. Women’s participation as defined did not en-
compass the many opportunities across project spaces that women field-
workers took advantage of. Their successes were not in the creation of a
dynamic village women’s program, but in their own attempts to create
greater equality inside their ngo. Bakhtin’s ideas move us beyond concep-
tualizing fieldworkers’ actions as “resistance” by suggesting that they work
with and against the variety of meanings of women’s participation that
circulate (O’Reilly 2006b). Development policies like participation, once
ngo staffs begin discussing them and making plans for operationalizing
them, begin to take on a life of their own as meanings are struggled over
between project actors of unequal power (Collins 1999; O’Reilly 2006b; Li
2007; Mackinnon 2007). ngo fieldworkers engage in dialogic process not
just person to person, but with the overarching meanings and spaces of
women’s participation that circulate within a project. Unlike policies that
seek to predetermine the meanings of terms like “women’s participation,”
we see from the examples above that meanings remain open, ambiguous
and always available for re-Â�construction (O’Reilly 2006b).
Lewis et al. (2003) demonstrated in a study of organizational cultures in
multi-�agency rural development projects that the various cultures inside
organizations may lead to integration or fragmentation. They found that
breakdowns in cultural understanding explained why some ideas, espe-

Resolving a Gendered Paradoxâ•…163

cially contentious ones like ‘empowerment,’ were never realized. Using
a Bakhtinian approach, my research shows that despite a lack of shared
meanings within Our Water, a highly contested idea like women’s par-
ticipation did gain ground, and part of what enabled the component was
the tension between a stated, gendered participatory approach and the
ambiguous feelings of many employees, both male and female, about
women’s participation’s importance to the project. As Lewis (2003) indi-
cated, norms of organizational culture cannot be read off as fixed aspects
of social interaction but are instead negotiated and reshaped or even abol-
ished within certain situations. It is these “certain situations” that a Bakh-
tinian analysis teases out, and particularly in this chapter, teases out with
an ear to untangling the voices and power relations surrounding the pro-
duction of spaces for women’s participation.
This research suggests that over the course of a gendered intervention,
ngo staff create a variety of opportunities where and when meanings and
practices are struggled over, and where and when gendered space is in the
making. Space for women’s development is what is at stake territorially,
but so also are those meanings that might emerge in that space. We must
try to understand how power operates through language and practice, and
its implications for the opening and closing of spaces (Bebbington 2004b).
Our Water field staff were simultaneously influenced by and contributing
to shifts in gendered domination, flexible meanings of women’s participa-
tion, and spaces for newly audible voices. The gains may have been tem-
porary and incremental, but where before there was little precedent or
feeling for women’s participation, over time, the issue of women’s partici-
pation refracted and connected with almost every aspect of the drinking
water supply project. The findings of this research indicate that develop-
ment planners, policy makers and ngos might reconsider their defini-
tions of success for gendered participatory approaches. As the fieldworker
Ravinder is aware, “change in society happens slowly,” thus it is a signifi-
cant step toward social change that discussions of women’s participation
eventually suffused the ngo. Where previously women’s participation had
been muted, meeting rooms, offices, and villages became spaces remade
for women’s participation through the words of ngo staff.
This chapter illustrates that spaces are produced by dialogues occur-
ring in those spaces, and that dialogues can be productive of new spaces
and practices. The above examples indicate that altering spaces of domi-
nation do not require an exclusive space. A space where dominant narra-
tives can be engaged dialogically will suffice. Women fieldworkers sought

164â•… Kathleen O’Reilly

to change unequal relations of power by occupying spaces and by opening
up for question and feminist struggle previous understandings of those
spaces as male-�controlled. Even dialogues that may not have led directly
to changes in ngo practices contributed to an overall atmosphere open
to alternative meanings for women’s participation. Continuing dialogue
produced engagement with the ideas and goals of women’s participation;
dialogue created new spaces (e.g., meeting rooms that were not just for
men’s reporting) and repeatedly introduced women’s participation on the
agenda, which eventually led to shifts in ngo practices. The gendered
paradox of women participating in their own ngo was not wholly re-
solved, but “arguing and reasoning” brought positive change.

Notes
This chapter is reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis from Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 97, no. 3 (2007): 613–34.
1. In the case of Our Water, plans for activating community participation followed
trends favoring participatory approaches to natural resource management. How-
ever, community participation was fitted into preexisting large-�scale plans that left
scant room for local actors to maneuver. The Government of Rajasthan and the
German donor bank had already decided upon the necessity of a new water supply
system infrastructure and its design prior to signing cooperation agreements.
Community members were given only minor roles—for example, public tap site
selection, election of local management boards, and payment arrangements.
2. This criticism holds for Our Water as well, since villagers pay for water and assume
responsibility for system maintenance inside village boundaries—responsibilities
previously those of the Government of Rajasthan.
3. The real names of fieldworkers have not been used. As the women’s participation
program officer is unique in her position as the only woman manager, I have re-
ceived her permission to identify her in the text.
4. North India is defined here (and elsewhere) as Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh,
Bihar, and Rajasthan (see Dreze and Sen 1996; Jeffery and Jeffery 1997).

Resolving a Gendered Paradoxâ•…165

╉CHAPTER 6 LeeRay M. Costa

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activism

Introduction
Packed tightly into a hotel ballroom in Chiang Mai in 1996 with
nearly 300 other people, I listened to the panel of seven Thai
scholars, politicians, and five women and two men who repre-
sented nongovernmental organizations (ngos). The significant
presence of Thai activists at the Women’s Forum of the Sixth
International Conference on Thai Studies and the fact that this
forum at the conference was conducted entirely in the central
Thai language made the session unusual. During the forum Mae
Somjit, a rural Thai woman leader from the north, stood up to
speak.1 A woman in her mid-�fifties, with gray hair visible at her
temples, she quickly captured the attention of the room, her lilting
accent pleasing to the ear and her colorfully woven sarong a feast
for the eyes. With a sweet smile and tilt of her head she said that
Thai scholars had relied too much on foreign theories in analyzing
women in Thailand and asserted that each society must be exam-
ined individually, with attention to difference and the particulari-
ties of place. She claimed that the concerns of village women were
quite different from those of urban and upper-�class women, and
they too needed to be addressed. Speaking in the northern dialect
(kham muang), Mae Somjit emphasized her regional identity and
her status as a grassroots2 woman leader from the north, thereby
establishing the authenticity and authority of her claim.
Intrigued by Mae Somjit’s comments that challenged status
quo politeness and suggested contestation among women activ-
ists, I later went to visit her at her home. We discussed her community-�
based organization, the Project for Tomorrow (pft), which works pri-
marily with women and youth in the rural north. By the end of our meet-
ing she had agreed to participate in my research study on Thai women’s
social change work. But difference and dissent among Thai women were
more difficult to ascertain than I had initially and perhaps naively believed,
given Mae Somjit’s comments. While conducting ethnographic fieldwork
in Thailand, I was struck by the amount of activism engaged in by dif-
ferently located women, the diverse strategies used to achieve overlap-
ping goals, and the reluctance of rural women activists to openly criticize
or even raise questions about the approaches of more privileged women
activists and ngo workers.
Such reservations should not simply be interpreted as the effect of Thai
cultural norms that stress the avoidance of open confrontation and the
suppression of women’s opinions in political or public (read: male) spaces.
Rather, they might better be understood as the effect of power relations
structuring rural Thai women’s entry into ngos and spheres of activ-
ism that are simultaneously empowering and exclusionary. In addition
to class, education, and age, women’s differential experiences of activism
were shaped by spatialized rural or urban cultural ideologies, nationalist
discourses of development, and the expansion of (foreign) donor-�driven
projects.
In this chapter I attend to the complexity of Thai women’s activism and
the challenges of organizing across difference. In doing so I seek to stimu-
late discussion about both the commonality and heterogeneity of Thai
women’s concerns and methods of effecting social change, and to identify
some of the fault lines that threaten to divide Thai women in their activist
efforts—including those deepened by the presence of ngos and the pro-
cesses of ngoization. This may result in a more nuanced understanding
of power and difference among Thai women activists as well as women
activists in other geographic locations.
In Thailand, as in many countries around the globe, “women” (phuu-
ying) is a term that activists deploy strategically, yet without explicit atten-
tion to the diversity it both subsumes and excludes. I found that factors
such as class, education level, and geographic location divided women de-
spite ongoing efforts to bring diverse women into shared spaces to work
collectively. Here I identify some of the competing discourses engaged in
by differently located activists and their relationship to the ngoization

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activismâ•…167

of women’s activism in Thailand. Using feminist theories to explore Mae
Somjit’s claims, I argue that rural activist discourses intimately represent
the situated interests of rural women as they interpret them and reflect
a tacit understanding of social stratification within Thai society gener-
ally and among women specifically. Rural women’s approaches to social
change contest their marginalization, both in middle-Â�class women’s dis-
courses and in ngo projects focused on the empowerment of women—
even when those approaches are not explicitly articulated. At the same
time, urban middle-Â�class women’s discourses reflect their own situated
interests and their relative power and privilege in Thai society.
Grounding my analysis in women’s actions and discourses, I draw on
feminist theories of intersectionality to highlight how categories such as
class, age, education, and geographic location are mutually constitutive
and intimately shape Thai women’s experiences (see, for example, Sacks
1989; P. Collins 1990; Mohanty 2003) and influence their understandings
of social problems and social change theories that underpin women’s
varied forms of praxis. Similarly, feminist research on women’s commu-
nity activism privileges women’s motivations, strategies, and redefini-
tions of politics (West and Blumberg 1990; Naples 1998; Naples and Desai
2002; Stein 2004). This shift in analytical attention both decenters domi-
nant male definitions of politics and activism in Thailand and underscores
the multiple and invisible ways that Thai women struggle to effect social
transformation.3 Furthermore, my analysis is informed by critical femi-
nist work theorizing difference specifically in women’s activism and how,
through reflexivity and dialogue, solidarity might be achieved. In particu-
lar I bring the work of Nira Yuval-�Davis (1999, 2006) on transversal politics
and the work of the Sangtin Writers and Richa Nagar (2006) on collective
transformation and solidarity to bear on the Thai case presented here.

Theorizing NGOization and Feminist Coalition Building

Feminist scholars have explored the contradictory effects of ngoization
on women’s ngos and feminist movements in both the global North
and South, in places as varied as Germany, Russia, Bangladesh, and the
countries of Latin America (Alvarez 1998, 1999; Lang 2000; Nazneen and
Sultan 2009; see also the chapter in this volume by Hemment). ngo-
ization has been characterized as a complex and spatially varied process
marked by one or more of the following: increasing professionalization
(including emphasis on paid as opposed to voluntary labor) resulting in
the creation of “experts” or “femocrats” (Lang 2000, 290), intensified hier-

168â•… LeeRay M. Costa

archization, reliance on external (state and foreign) funding, the privileg-
ing of donor-�driven (as opposed to locally defined) agendas, and an em-
phasis on policy advocacy. In some cases, ngoization may involve closer
ties between ngos and the privatized, neoliberal state as well as a greater
orientation toward self-�help, development, and service provision (Lang
2000; Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006, 159; see also the chapter in this
volume by Hemment) that may cause ngos “to lose their critical edge”
(Alvarez 1999, 198). Ironically, as ngos and their paid staff begin to re-
place community-�based and feminist social movement activism, they are
increasingly called on as “convenient surrogates for civil society” (Alvarez
1999, 193), complicating discussions of representation and participation.
My research in Thailand4 suggests that all of these elements of ngoiza-
tion, though to varying degrees, may be found among the women’s orga-
nizations and ngos that I encountered. However, here I focus mainly on
processes of hierarchization and the tendency to privilege outsider (that
is, expert, authoritative, or scholarly) definitions of social problems as they
apply to women. The vast majority of women’s workshops and confer-
ences I attended were organized by middle- and upper-�class Thai women,
especially scholars and ngo experts, and financed by international fund-
ing agencies such as the Asia Foundation and Frederich Ebert Stiftung.
For rural women, participating in social and political networks with these
relatively more powerful women provides crucial opportunities for edu-
cation, training, and future networking, not to mention fun (sanuk) (Mills
1999a). Moreover, similar to the migrant women labor activists described
by Mills, rural women activists who attended these events and joined ngo
projects could envision themselves as “at least temporarily appropriate
occupants of privileged sites of social power and knowledge production”
(Mills 2008, 118).
Although in the late 1990s these women’s activities were often framed
by discourses of democracy and participation that sought to break down
barriers of inequality and difference, organizational discourse and practice
continued to rearticulate status hierarchies and to assert that rural women
must learn from their urban, middle-�class, educated sisters. The relation-
ship of dependency that often forms between differentially located Thai
women, a relationship that both metaphorically and literally mimics kin
and political relations of phii/nong (older sibling/younger sibling), may
silence rural women, rendering them invisible in the national struggle for
women’s empowerment.5
At one seminar in Chiang Mai on rural and indigenous women—Â�

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activismâ•…169

organized by the transnational organization Asia Pacific Forum for
Women, Law, and Development—an urban middle-Â�class Thai scholar
commented: “We should have added ‘middle class’ to the title of the con-
ference since all the women here are middle class. We need to remember
the differences among rural women and their needs.” Similarly, another
avowed Thai feminist remarked (to a group of foreign visiting scholars):
“It is still difficult for the women’s movement. We are still accumulat-
ing visibility in society. We have invested so much time among ourselves,
not reaching out to the constituency of the grassroots or upper-�class
women’s groups.” Although many urban, educated middle-Â�class women
are certainly aware that women’s differences pose challenges for collec-
tive action, they seem less sure how to tackle them in ways that ensure
empowerment for all.
ngos in Thailand, which number in the thousands, range in size,
structure, membership, goals, and practices.6 Although Amara Pongsa-
pich and Nitaya Kataleeradabhan trace contemporary ngos to traditional
and religious-�based organizations established in the thirteenth century
(1994), other scholars argue that Thai ngos emerged as part of the pro-
democracy movement in the volatile period of the 1960s and 1970s and
were largely seen as oppositional to a violently oppressive state (Pasuk
and Baker 1995; Connors 2003). But the challenges of securing funding
following the 1980s economic boom and subsequent structural adjust-
ment programs have resulted in a blurring of state-�ngo boundaries, with
ngos increasingly engaged in development projects supportive of nation-�
state goals. Women’s cultural, religious, and professional organizations
have a significant history in Thailand, with ngos focusing on women’s
equality and empowerment emerging from the 1970s onward (Pongsapich
1995, 1997). In addition to ngos (ongkorn eegkachon), I refer to women’s
village- or community-�based organizations (ongkorn chaobaan, ongkorn
chumchon) and housewife associations (klum maebaan), also known as
the Village Women’s Development Committee (Khanakammakaan phad-
thana satrii muu baan).7 Rural women often participated in one or more
of these groups and were quick to identify the differences among these
three types of organizations, with the latter two characterized by volun-
tary membership (ngo pen asasamak) and ngos defined by their career
orientation (ngo pen aachiib). These folk categorizations reflect the in-
creasing professionalization of community-�based work experienced by
rural activists that I interviewed and the proliferation of ngos in Thailand.

170â•… LeeRay M. Costa

 As a non-�Thai, outside observer commenting on the relations of Thai
women activists, it is important that I situate my approach in this analysis.
My intention is neither to excessively valorize nor unnecessarily romanti-
cize the work of grassroots, rural women activists.8 I do not mean to imply
that rural women’s interests are more important or that their practices
are somehow more “authentic,” than those of urban, middle-Â�class women
thereby constructing a hierarchy of oppression or tactics for social change
that feminist scholars have rightly challenged. Neither do I mean to sug-
gest that tensions do not exist among rural women activists or within
their organizations; they do. Although space limitations preclude further
examination of this issue here, I have explored these tensions elsewhere
(Costa 2001, 2008). At the same time, this chapter is not intended to be a
form of middle-Â�class “ngo bashing,” as one colleague put it. In fact, urban
and middle-�class activists and ngos in Thailand have made innumerable
significant contributions to improving the lives of Thai women both in-
side and outside of ngos (Darunee and Pandey 1991; Virada 2003), and I
enthusiastically support these efforts. My analysis is offered in the spirit of
increasing opportunities for women’s empowerment through heightened
self-�reflexivity and attention to difference among activists and scholars.
I seek to more complexly render contemporary Thai women’s activism,
to examine a few of the impacts of ngoization on women’s organizing,
and to stimulate dialogue about processes of empowerment and solidarity
within contexts shaped by processes of neoliberalism, nationalism, and
globalization. Chandra Mohanty points out:

In knowing differences and particularities, we can better see the con-

nections and commonalities because no border or boundary is ever
complete or rigidly determining. The challenge is to see how differ-
ences allow us to explain the connections and border crossings better
and more accurately, how specifying difference allows us to theorize
universal concerns more fully. It is this intellectual move that allows
for my concern for women of different communities and identities to
build coalitions and solidarities across borders. (2003, 226)

Like Mohanty, I consider my exploration a necessary component of trans-

border coalition building, although I acknowledge that this analysis is less
fraught for me as a feminist from the global North who writes from a privi-
leged position. Unlike the Sangtin Writers and Richa Nagar (2006) who
“played with fire” in their critical account of Indian women’s ngos and the

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activismâ•…171

politics of difference, my livelihood is not dependent on the organizations
examined here. But as the innovative work by the Sangtin Writers demon-
strates, interrogating the intersection of ngos with women’s activism is a
critical step in advancing empowerment not only for rural, poor women
but for all women. It is likewise a necessary move for scholars seeking to
understand ngos as spaces for the exercise of power, both liberatory and
oppressive (W. Fisher 1997).
Below, I focus first on Thai women’s activism in the scholarly litera-
ture. The persistent exclusion of rural women’s activism in textual ac-
counts both homogenizes women and privileges middle- and upper-�class
women, ironically perpetuating hierarchies that many seek to eradicate
via activism and ngo work. Next I examine the discourses and practices
of contemporary rural women activists observed during my fieldwork. I
compare rural activists’ discourses of community development, cultural
preservation, and activist mothering with discourses of feminism, civil
society, and human rights circulated by urban and middle-�class women.
In delineating these discourses and the power relations that inform them,
I discuss how these narratives, while perceived as empowering in varied
ways, may reproduce middle-�class notions of rural Thainess (and back-
wardness), gender essentialism, and nationalist development rhetorics,
thereby facilitating the ngoization of women’s empowerment projects
and reiterating global North-�South disparities. Finally, I consider the im-
plications of these discourses and practices for building political solidarity
and collaborative knowledge production among diverse Thai women, im-
plications that have resonance for feminist scholars and activists inter-
ested in women’s ngo work and the dilemmas posed by difference within
transnational feminist activism.

Women, Activism, and Representation in Thailand

Published work about women’s activism in Thailand is scant.9 Existing lit-
erature emphasizes the experiences and strategies of two major groups:
elite women (that is, members of the Thai nobility and wives of high-�
ranking government officials and business leaders) and highly educated,
middle-�class, professional women located in urban areas and/or univer-
sity settings (see, for example, Darunee and Pandey 1991; Pongsapich 1997;
Doneys 2002). Following Nerida Cook, I use “middle class”

to refer to the newly affluent middle classes which have arisen com-
paratively recently in Thailand. Class is a necessarily relational phe-

172â•… LeeRay M. Costa

 nomenon, and the usage here is intended to highlight the way in which
many of these women contrast themselves both with the rural majority,
and with a [elite] wealthy sector of urban society associated with tra-
ditional forms of power and with a conservative world view. (1998, 251)

Although elite women’s activism is important and has interesting points

of convergence with rural women’s activism,10 it often eclipses rural and
poor women’s activism because elite and highly educated, professional,
urban women often have the resources, education, and time to assume
leadership roles in national women’s movements and formal ngos. As
Christine Walley points out, “focusing solely on formal ‘feminist’ organi-
zations obscures ‘indigenous’ forms of feminism that do not necessarily
accord with the middle-Â�class Euro-Â�American model” (1997, 425)—or, I
would add, a middle-Â�class Thai model. Walley continues: “For example,
the activism of peasant, working-�class, and minority women may be
downplayed when evaluated solely in terms of gender interests rather than
the intersection of gender with ethnic and class issues” (ibid.). It is pre-
cisely rural Thai women’s concerns about issues of class, ethnicity, and
cultural difference that situate their interests differently from those of
elite and middle-�class women, complicating cross-�class, translocal, and
transnational Thai women’s organizing. Chujai, a rural activist from the
North, described it this way:

The women who come to work like this, they don’t start like me. I come
from the real grass roots. I come from having nothing and do this work.
But for the most part, they are people who are ready for everything.
They have position or rank, duty, money, a job with a salary that they
are capable of doing. But we can see that those like that, it is a hobby
for them.

Some rural activists, while admiring the success and prestige of their
upper- and middle-�class counterparts, comment that their interests di-
verge. I encountered such sentiments after attending a high-�profile Bang-
kok Thai Women’s Forum dismissed by some activists as a frivolous meet-
ing of the “high heels.”
Because they are the face of Thai women’s activism in the sphere of
transnational ngos and women’s activism (such as at the United Nations’
Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995) and because they
can amass financial, organizational, and political resources, urban middle-�
class organizations can and do operate as gatekeepers that may prevent

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activismâ•…173

Western donors and scholars from directly accessing local, community-�
based groups, or prevent grassroots women from accessing transnational
feminist networks. Urban, middle-�class women (and their handpicked
rural sisters [nong]) have the power to decide which rural, village activ-
ists are “appropriate” and “authentic” grassroots representatives, ready to
enter the sphere of transnational women’s activism (see, for example, Min-
dry 2001). At one meeting of local ngos and community-�based groups
organized by a university women’s center, a visiting representative of a
funding agency stated: “Our focus is on the intermediaries, the multipli-
cators. But without access to grassroots activities it won’t work.” This gate-
keeping role assigned to formal women’s ngos and middle-Â�class leaders
is legitimized by funding agencies in the global North and reinforced by
Thailand’s social hierarchy, which privileges individuals according to edu-
cation, class, urban origins, ethnicity, and age. One women’s center direc-
tor admitted that she struggled with this role because of the way it re-
inforces existing social hierarchies and concentrates power in the hands
of a few. At another conference I attended, a participant spoke about how
there were always the same women at the meetings. She expressed frus-
tration with problems in getting important information out to “real vil-
lagers.” After more than a year of attending women’s meetings and seeing
the same faces over and over again, I too began to think more critically
about issues of participation, inclusion or exclusion, and the importance
of connections (sen yai; literally, “big noodles”) in Thailand and the larger
ngo world.
In fact some of the best information about rural Thai women’s activi-
ties comes from foreign ngos, though distribution of their publications is
limited. Unfortunately these texts emphasize women’s entrée into formal
politics (that is, as headmen or parliamentary representatives) rather than
into civil society organizations or grassroots work, where Thai women’s
activities are more highly concentrated. This narrow focus reinforces defi-
nitions of politics that limit women’s recognized contributions to those
achieved within the existing political structure and effectively erases
women’s efforts within ngos and community groups, thus reiterating the
masculinist orientation of much academic work.11 Literature on women’s
activism in Thailand therefore results in a partial knowledge that skews
our understanding of the range and complexity of women’s activism, and
in particular the experiences of women in voluntary ngos.

174â•… LeeRay M. Costa

Discourses of Social Change and Empowerment
Based on my observations of and conversations with activists in the late
1990s, I discuss here several discourses through which women articulate
and practice social change and empowerment. Although these discourses
are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive, they do offer insights into
the relations of power and difference influencing Thai women’s activism.
These discourses must be understood as historical artifacts intimately
shaped by a range of hegemonic national and international discourses.
Rural women commonly framed their activist work through discourses
of community development (phadthanaa chumchon) and cultural pres-
ervation (ragsaa or pongkan wadthanaatham), while urban, middle-�class
and educated women relied on discourses of feminism, civil society ( pra-
chaasangkhom), and human rights (sidthi manudsayachon). Though it
may appear as if these are mutually exclusive, oppositional discourses,
they have points of convergence in nationalist sentiments circulated dur-
ing this historical moment that promote both national development and
Thai culture (see, for example, Klima 2004; Costa 2008) and in trans-
national discourses of self-�help (courtesy of the World Bank and Interna-
tional Monetary Fund, or imf), decentralization, and civil society (cour-
tesy of ngos). I consider how identity categories such as class, education
level, and geographic location contribute to activists’ respective orienta-
tions and how they structure power relations within women’s organizing.

Community Development and Cultural Preservation

Rural women’s discourses of community development and cultural pres-
ervation underscore the specific problems they identify as most urgent
(for example, economic marginalization, lack of education, cultural loss,
and drug addiction), the types of activities they organize (such as income-�
generating activities, scholarships for girls, and cultural celebrations), the
ways that they talk about social relationships (for example, the family as
a building block of the community or nation), and the ways they concep-
tualize their roles as activists (including as mothers and as nurturers, or
caretakers of children, family, community, and society). These discourses
reflect and have the potential to entrench neoliberal discourses of self-�
help that exacerbate global North-�South divisions, as well as discourses
of regional and local cultural identity that perpetuate middle-�class defini-
tions of rural Thai people as simultaneously authentically Thai and back-

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activismâ•…175

ward—and therefore in need of help from middle-Â�class or elite Thai and
foreigners in the form of ngo projects.
Rural women’s concern with community development and cultural
preservation stresses immediate concerns, sometimes referred to in the
literature as “practical gender interests,” as opposed to “strategic gender
interests” (Molyneux 1986, 284). I prefer to think of these as situated inter-
ests that reflect both the contingent social locations women occupy and
the situated knowledges that arise from them (Haraway 1988), for what is
considered practical or strategic depends on positionality and context and
may shift. Furthermore, as Nancy Naples (1998) points out in her study of
grassroots antipoverty activists in the United States, this distinction often
breaks down in practice as women discover how the practical and strate-
gic are intertwined.
From the perspectives of the rural Thai women I met, some of the
most pressing problems in the late 1990s included the negative effects
of economic restructuring and globalization. I conducted research be-
tween 1997 and 1999, at the height of the Asian economic crisis. The baht
(Thailand’s currency) fell to an all-Â�time low, and the Thai government
was forced to accept an imf loan in the amount of $17.2 billion. Although
government rhetoric claimed this economic and social burden would be
shared equally by all citizens (in its “Thai help Thai” campaign), rural Thai
and particularly women largely carried the load.12 This was expressed in a
local rhetoric of self-�help (chuay tua eeng) rooted in rural Thai practices
of self-�reliance (phung ton eeng) and subsistence that conveniently dove-
tailed with imf discourse as well as King Bhumipol Adulyadej’s speech on
his seventieth birthday, in which he extolled national self-�reliance. Refer-
ences to globalization by rural women activists was thus largely rooted
in personal experiences of economic marginalization and deprivation,
though coupled with growing awareness of their political, social, and cul-
tural marginalization as well.
Rural women were admittedly proud of their ability to seek solutions to
problems of the imf era, using what they referred to as “local wisdom” and
relying on local networks. Mae Somjit’s organization, pft, hosted groups
of housewives from the northern region of the country who came to ob-
serve local weaving cooperatives and other cottage industries. For these
women, addressing issues of poverty, joblessness, and lack of financial re-
sources was considered a form of activism and empowerment because
it challenged the state-�led (top-�down) development paradigm and Thai
conceptualizations of women as followers rather than leaders, evident in

176â•… LeeRay M. Costa

the oft-Â�repeated aphorism that “women are the back legs of the elephant.”
Moreover, both rural and mixed women’s meetings became crucial sites of
activist practice in and of themselves as women shared ideas and strate-
gies translocally. I still recall the excitement with which rural women from
the north interacted with residents of a fishing village during a field visit
organized by a university women’s center as part of a training program
for paralegals.
Not only economics captivated rural women’s attention. Education
of rural youth was perceived to be an important way to address poverty
and offer status mobility. Rural women frequently commented on the low
education levels of young people, especially girls,13 and created scholar-
ship programs for them. Concerns for education were reiterated in dis-
courses of cultural preservation. Rural women identified cultural impacts
that they felt were ripping apart their communities, such as drug addic-
tion and prostitution—problems they dealt with on a daily basis and as-
sociated with the spread of Western values, especially materialism and
lack of moral control. Rural women frequently spoke about the increasing
licentiousness and promiscuity of village youth, their declining interest in
traditional practices (such as local music, spiritual beliefs, food, and ritu-
als), and their fascination with the foreign and modern. These youthful
practices had serious implications not only for traditional gender roles
and premarital sexual relations, but also for the Thai social hierarchy that
privileges the aged over the young. Rural activists sought to counteract
these changes through organizing cultural activities and events for vil-
lage youth. The discourse of cultural preservation was particularly notable
among those involved in village-�based organizations such as pft, and in
village housewives’ groups. For example, pft held “local music” classes
and organized groups to promote “local careers” (for example, raising fish,
growing vegetables, processing and selling compost, and weaving). Mae
Somjit said that she tried to act as a role model for village youth, teaching
them how to live in culturally appropriate ways, including dressing in the
traditional phaasin (sarong) crafted from locally produced fabrics.
Cultural preservation has a long history in Thailand, especially within
indigenous development philosophy (that is, community culture ap-
proach; see Costa 2001) and—ironically—among elite women (Jeffrey
2002). This was evident even in 1998 in a noticeably nationalist speech
delivered in the northern dialect by an elite woman for Burma Women’s
Day that stressed the importance of culture and the role of women in bet-
tering the nation. But community development and cultural preservation

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activismâ•…177

were less a priority for urban, professional women. Although some did
participate in revitalization movements for regional cultures and iden-
tities—particularly as consumers of Thai textiles—many seemed more
interested in challenging culturally prescribed gender roles than in pro-
tecting culture (especially a culture that they saw as limiting women’s
opportunities) and in appealing to notions of civil and universal human
rights. However, discourses of cultural preservation could be conveniently
marshaled by middle-�class ngo workers as proof of gender essentialism
and rural Thai backwardness, and as evidence that rural women could
benefit from development and ngo projects emphasizing human rights
and women’s empowerment. More than one educated activist told me
with derision that rural women “think just like villagers,” while a highly
revered woman politician referred to the approach of her rural colleagues
as “old-Â�fashioned.”
Tied to women’s conventional roles as socializing agents and keepers of
tradition, cultural preservation is expressed in language about protecting
the family and community, not simply individual civil rights. Discourses of
both community work and cultural preservation are based on an implicit
homology among family, community, and nation as well as on the idea
that a woman’s work improves the community and culture or nation as a
whole—a sentiment popular in nationalist and postcolonial movements
(Chatterjee 1989; Kandiyoti 1991; McClintock 1993). This is captured in the
concept of “activist mothering” (Naples 1998).

Activist Mothering
For many rural Thai women, motherhood is a primary form of identifica-
tion. Problems that rural women identify frequently revolve around con-
flicts they experience as mothers, guardians, and providers. Many rural
women first experience organizational participation through government-�
sponsored housewife groups at the village level, and it is interesting to
note that many of the rural activists I surveyed stated “housewife” when
asked their occupation, since they associate occupation with paid labor
(reinforcing the voluntary-�career ngo distinction). For Mae Somjit, par-
ticipation in her village housewife association led to other leadership posi-
tions and her role in the 1983 establishment of a village day-�care center.
As a working mother of three, she observed the difficulties women faced
balancing child care and wage labor outside the home, and she mobilized
mothers to work with her in village and subdistrict housewife associations.
In 1994 the center received national recognition from the Social Welfare

178â•… LeeRay M. Costa

Department for its “activities which remind [villagers] of mothers’ good
deeds” (Phuying Geng 1998, 29).
Naples argues that activist mothering is “political activism [seen] as
a central component of mothering and community caretaking of those
who are not part of one’s defined household or family” (1998, 11). Activ-
ist mothering includes not only women’s “community work derived from
concern for their children’s well-Â�being” (114), but also activism that moves
beyond one’s immediate family context to that of the broader commu-
nity, however defined. Though coined in the context of US social welfare
community action projects in the 1980s, activist mothering helps clarify
both the discourses and practices engaged in by rural Thai activists.14 Like
Mae Somjit, a number of rural women leaders I met had been involved
in establishing day-Â�care centers through local housewives’ associations.
Despite comments by middle-�class activists, ngo workers, and commu-
nity development workers that local housewives’ associations are simply
“ladies’ clubs” that accomplish little and replicate traditional gender roles,
housewives’ groups remain a critical space for women to obtain commu-
nity organizing skills and develop vital personal relationships that may
lead to participation in other village-�based organizations, ngos, and even
formal politics (Nongyao 1996; Bowie 2008). It was not uncommon for
rural women to rationalize their concerns for community development
as a logical extension of their care for their families. One member of a dis-
trict housewives’ association commented: “If we are mothers and house-
wives, we are able to take care of our families and make them happy, and
we can also help society.”
Also indicative of activist mothering are linguistic practices in which
well-�respected rural women leaders in the north, such as Mae Somjit and
Mae Malee, are referred to with the honorific mae (literally, “mother”).15
Not only are they mothers in their own right, but they mother, nurture,
and protect their communities and, by extension, the Thai nation (Costa
2008). Activist mothering transcends the private sphere and demon-
strates the interpenetration of private and public realms, challenging
narrow definitions of politics and strategic versus practical interests. This
redefinition of politics and celebration of women’s contributions can be
seen in one of the songs crafted by community activists and frequently
sung during women’s meetings I attended in the northern region:

What is milk? Do you know or not?

Milk is the medicine that builds our strength and power.

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activismâ•…179

 Anyone who drinks it will be really very satisfied and pleased.
Milk has power and strength, that is breast milk!
Milk has power and strength, that is breast milk!16

This song plays on the double meaning of the Thai word nom, meaning
both milk and breast. When women sing “breast milk,” they motion with
their hands as if they are lifting up and emphasizing their breasts. When-
ever I observed (and participated in) this song, women broke into melo-
dious laughter—expressing embarrassment and fun, but also audacity and
defiance. The milk song calls attention to women’s embodied difference
from men—and mothers’ difference from nonmothers—as well as to the
unique power and strength women possess through nurturance (liang), a
Thai practice recognized for its ability to “[display] power and hierarchy”
in both public (that is, political) and private spheres (Van Esterik 1996,
23). In a gender-�discriminatory society this reclamation of female power
in public space is a significant act. Situated in contexts of women’s con-
ferences that brought together women from diverse social locations, the
song points to rural women’s embodied experiences of marginalization
and struggle and is an important narrative of empowerment that women,
especially mothers, tell themselves about the contributions they make to
society and the larger women’s movement.
Related to nurturance is the concept of sacrifice (siasala) that rural
women activists used in descriptions of their community work, a practice
that in the frameworks of both Buddhist merit making and family care-
giving bestows prestige and honor on them. Sacrifice was often linked
to activism as a voluntary act and opposed to activism as a paid job, re-
inforcing the practical and moral dilemmas faced by women in contexts of
ngoization. Mae Somjit commented critically that one of her volunteers
had “abandoned” her (thing; literally, “to throw something away”) when
she had the opportunity to work for money at another ngo. Mae Somjit
also noted that a well-�known woman leader from her area had persistently
“refused” her invitations to participate in pft activities until the organiza-
tion received a large grant from a foreign donor because “she didn’t think
our small activities had importance.” Both examples illustrate that con-
flicts and jockeying for status are as evident in rural women’s activism as
they are in women’s activism generally.
The emphasis on motherhood, nurturance, and sacrifice as sites for
individual and community politicization is notably absent from the dis-
courses and practices of urban, middle-�class, professional women. In fact,

180â•… LeeRay M. Costa

many middle-�class activists I encountered, especially university teachers
and scholars, were neither mothers nor wives and represent the growing
numbers of Thai women choosing not to marry or have children (Erera
et al. 2002).17 For them, being a mother was not a primary identification
through which they felt empowered to change society, and they rarely par-
ticipated in singing the lively milk song, choosing instead to retreat to the
edges of meeting spaces and talk among themselves.

Feminism and Human Rights

In contrast to their rural counterparts, middle-�class, urban, and profes-
sional Thai women enact discourses that deconstruct conventional gender
categories and challenge forms of domination using a “rights based ap-
proach to civil, political, socio-Â�cultural and economic problems” (Virada
2003, 2).18 Although Thai women often emphasize their high status rela-
tive to other Asian and even Western women, they are still considered in-
ferior to men legally and in the religious sphere (Kirsch 1982, 1985; Chat-
sumarn 1991; Virada 1997). Moreover, a double standard structures male
and female sexual relations, making it not only acceptable but inevitable
that single men should “sample many flavors,” as the saying goes, and that
married men should have affairs, while women should remain chaste until
marriage and monogamous thereafter.
For urban, middle-�class women activists, gender oppression is often
approached through a rather academic feminist lens—one familiar to
those of us working with feminist scholarship and ngos in the global
North. A feminist analysis of Thai gender relations identifies men’s unde-
served social, economic, religious, and sexual privileges and the way that
social norms reinforce those privileges and reward men. Discourses en-
gaged in by middle-Â�class women stress a “women’s rights as human rights”
model rooted in individual citizenship. According to Manisha Desai, dur-
ing the 1995 Beijing women’s conference “human rights discourse be-
came the language for demanding women’s rights” (2002, 29)—and this
discourse now circulates through transnational women’s networks and
women’s ngos, where it is articulated “in local terms of new democracy
and the role of women in nation building” (Naples and Desai 2002, 39).
This was evident in Thai conference and forum titles such as “Democ-
racy without Women?” and “The Women’s Movement, Rights, Politics
and Development.” Notably, the word “feminism” was so new in the Thai
language in the late 1990s that its translations (satriiniyom and itthisaat)

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activismâ•…181

were more or less meaningless to almost all of the rural women whom I
met. One prominent Thai feminist told me:

The majority would not have a chance to hear the term “feminism.” Or
those who have, they don’t understand, or they are totally against it,
or they are skeptical about it. Because they perceive feminists as those
who always take matters to the street. It is against Thai culture. In Thai
they always use this term pood rong yo-�yo. Yo-�yo means, you know, very
annoying, you know, and noisy, very impolite, wrong.

For middle-�class women, feminism might be defined as equality with men

in all areas of life. The same Thai feminist stated: “We have to look at the
cultural and political environment [women] are in. How do women think
and act? It is the society that puts them there. They are under the domi-
nance of male culture; women are victimized and stigmatized.” For some
Thai scholars, feminism also means viewing aspects of Thai culture as
potential obstacles to women’s activism and social change, such as social
norms dictating that women should “not be aggressive in personality”
but gentle and sweet. Feminism also means educating women19—rural
women in particular—to challenge the limitations of gender ideology em-
bedded in culture and politics. The middle-�class activist Kanokwan told
me: “If I educate them and let them know their rights and their duties—
because if you check back in the Thai curriculum, Thais are taught to learn
only duty, but they don’t know their rights—it will be better I think . . . I
believe education will change this country.”
In her critique of Gita Sen and Caren Grown’s (1987) work, Mitu Hirsh-
man argues that implicit in statements by First World feminists that call
on Third World women to “shed traditional submissiveness” and aspects
of culture is “the need to show that Third World women as ‘women’ (i.e.,
victims of men and capitalism) share the same cultural space and political
rationality as Western feminism and that they can be relied upon to par-
ticipate in the feminist politics appropriate to the pursuit of their interests,
namely women’s empowerment vis-Â�à-Â�vis men and male establishments”
(1995, 51). In the contexts that I describe, elite, middle-�class, educated Thai
women could be viewed as attempting something similar, though several
were quick to tell me that their approach was distinct from Western femi-
nism. As they seek to organize grassroots women for their own multiple
purposes (that is, to put more women in formal political positions at all
levels, to advance a certain vision of women’s empowerment, or to main-
tain their own positions in ngos), they run the risk of discursively sub-

182â•… LeeRay M. Costa

jecting rural Thai women to a particular kind of global Northern feminist
(and development) discourse that fails to account for the specificities and
diversities of women’s experiences and their varied locations in shifting
relations of domination.
It must be recognized that such middle-�class notions of feminist activ-
ism emerge from a relative position of socioeconomic, educational, and
geographic privilege—privileges that are not always explicitly acknowl-
edged though they are ritually embodied and enacted in the diverse
spaces of women’s meetings. For example, rural women’s relative mar-
ginalization was simultaneously reinforced and momentarily concealed
during women’s meetings when they could “enjoy stylish furnishings,
air-�conditioning, and [be] treated to the pleasures of uniformed service,
restaurant-Â�style meals and snacks—the trappings of middle-Â�class urban
privilege” (Mills 2005b, 6–7). Similar to the female Thai migrant workers
and union members whom Mills describes, rural women activists at these
ngo meetings were able to “lay claim to public spaces of Thai modernity,
and assert their membership in ‘modern’ ‘civil’ society” in ways not gen-
erally open to them (ibid., 7; see also Mills 1999a). However, this member-
ship was belied by other ngo practices that included seating and clothing,
and—as Mills found—other “distinctly hierarchical norms of etiquette,
emphasizing deferential language and bodily comportment for all but the
highest status experts and officials” (2008, 118).
The fact that middle-�class, educated women have access to transna-
tional activist networks and organizations further “creates divisions at
the national level between the elites who belong to such networks and
the vast majority of grassroots women who don’t” (M. Desai 2002, 31). I
experienced this disparity in privilege and cultural capital when, during
my fieldwork, several rural women on different occasions approached me
privately to request help in securing foreign funding to start their own
ngos.20 As I argue elsewhere (Costa 2001, 394–99), such requests point
to the social status, prestige, and power increasingly associated with the
role of ngo worker even as women struggle with the shifting meanings
of community work (voluntary versus career) in contexts of ngoization.
Although many rural women are committed to the goals of feminism
in theory, such as the equal rights as enshrined in the constitution, Thai
women disagree over how to practice gender equality without alienating
their husbands, children, and neighbors; without losing the social status
or pleasure that comes with the identities of mother and wife; and with-
out giving up aspects of traditional culture they cherish and find meaning-

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activismâ•…183

ful (see, for example, Bowie 2008). For example, some rural women find
the “hard” manner with which middle-Â�class, urban, and academic women
practice their activist work problematic, according to the Thai feminist
mentioned above. Mae Somjit admitted that she was a feminist but added:
“not like Ajaan [a teacher]. I’m not too radical because it won’t work. We
need to use our tenderness, our gentle, sweet way of being a woman to get
what we want.” As in the United States, the term “feminist” in Thailand
carries negative connotations. It may be associated with aggressiveness,
confrontational behavior (typically frowned on in Thai social interaction),
the dislike or hatred of men, and lesbianism. Similarly, feminism is often
seen as an importation from the West, though such assertions remain
hotly debated. Nevertheless, it is true that urban, professional women’s
discourses of feminism and social justice are shaped in significant ways
by these women’s education abroad in countries such as the United States,
the United Kingdom, and Australia; by their frequent interaction with for-
eign funding agencies; and by their alliances with Thai scholars and other
ngo activists working for political reform. These discourses are further
configured through women’s experiences in international academic and
development meetings, un and ngo conferences, and research and study
programs. Given national sensitivities surrounding globalization and all
things Western during the late 1990s economic crisis, it is easy to see why
feminism might have been suspect for rural women. Yet for middle-�class
and urban women, feminism and the discourse of human rights are per-
ceived as highly empowering, especially as they are concretized in national
and transnational legal systems.
Since urban, middle-Â�class Thai activists seek to overcome women’s op-
pression in the spheres of marriage and divorce, employment, and politics,
they often take a legal approach to instigating change. The Women’s Studies
Center at Chiang Mai University has instituted this approach through a
paralegal training program funded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. This
program invites community-�based women leaders to participate in legal
training seminars so that they can in turn educate the members of their
rural communities and empower rural women. Middle-Â�class women’s dis-
course on law and human rights was especially salient during my field-
work, since in 1997 a new people’s constitution was passed that enshrined
women’s equality with men. The new constitution also reformed and de-
centralized the country’s political structure and made specific stipulations
about women’s political participation. Urban women’s ngos were eager

184â•… LeeRay M. Costa

not only to make rural, village women aware of these changes but also to
encourage them to run for public office. Middle-�class women with whom
rural activists were frequently in contact consistently emphasized the im-
portance of women’s participation in formal politics. This seemed to be in
part a result of the work conducted by Thai ngos such as the Women and
the Constitution Network and Women and Politics, as well as the zeitgeist
of the period—which included passage of the new constitution and the
ample funding available from foreign and transnational ngos for decen-
tralizing political structures and building civil society.
One conference brought together members of women’s networks from
the four regions of Thailand. Session leaders (all scholars and/or middle-�
class women) appeared to assume that women’s local organizations and
regional networks would play an active role in the upcoming elections,
even though historically it has been a challenge to increase rural women’s
participation in politics.21 This is because many Thai women, from rural
housewives to highly educated urbanites, think of formal politics as “dirty.”
When I asked one urban ngo leader whose explicit goal was increasing
the number of women candidates if she would ever consider running for
office herself, I was surprised when she answered: “No. I know my role.
Because since I was a student I decided I would not be a candidate be-
cause it’s too dirty for me. I’m too clean and I know I can’t—I can’t be a
politician. I can’t play the dirty game.” Similarly, it has been difficult to
persuade rural women that participation in formal politics is the best way
to address their concerns, since women politicians frequently face accu-
sations of marital infidelity and promiscuity because they are constantly
in male-�dominated environments and transgress gendered spatial and
political boundaries.22 The rural activist Weeraya told me that when she
was elected to the local district council, villagers spread rumors about her
having an affair with the headman and teased her husband. The “narrow-Â�
mindedness” of villagers combined with “dirty” political practices such
as vote buying made her reluctant to seek office beyond the local level.
Married women politicians may also face accusations of bad mothering
and suffer violence at the hands of angry husbands. Clearly a politics of
virtue that reinforces women’s role in nurturing and sacrificing for family,
community, and nation is at work here. It enforces rural women’s ten-
dency to choose community and ngo work over formal politics in a way
that simultaneously empowers them because they find value in such roles
and disempowers them because it reinforces middle-�class views of rural

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activismâ•…185

women’s backwardness and needs for help and development.23 I turn now
to the implications of this situation for women’s solidarity and activism
in Thailand.

Toward a Transborder Feminist Solidarity

Scholarship demonstrates that ngos as spaces of civil society and dis-
sent hold promise for women seeking empowerment and social change.
In fact, women’s ngos in Thailand have in many ways enabled the pro-
gression of the women’s movement and novel opportunities for women’s
political engagement. Nevertheless, as I and many other feminist activists
and researchers have observed, the promise of ngos is not fully realized
(Mindry 2001; A. Moser 2004; Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006). We are
thus compelled to ask, as we do in this volume, how ngos do (or do not)
serve women, which women, and why, and to explore the broad ramifica-
tions of ngoization for women’s empowerment and solidarity.
My analysis of contrasting discourses and practices engaged in by Thai
women suggests that ngos structure power relations in ways that both
reflect the processes of colonialism and development originating in the
global North and reinforce the processes of social hierarchy and differ-
ence specific to Thailand. Like colonialism, development turns on divid-
ing practices, which categorize people into binaries such as developed
or underdeveloped, knowledgeable or ignorant, progressive or backward,
and modern or traditional (Foucault 1971, [1977] 1995). This provides the
necessary rationale for those in the global North to help, protect, or em-
power those in the global South (Hobart 1993). In the late twentieth cen-
tury, ngos from the global North played a significant role in promoting
this development paradigm, often reproducing its disempowering rhetoric
unawares (Escobar 1995). For the women’s organizations that I observed
in Thailand, this transnational development discourse was articulated in
the identification of target groups (rural, poor, uneducated women), in the
ways that traditional practices (such as cultural preservation and mother-
ing) valued as empowering by rural women were recast as obstacles and
backwardness, and in ngos’ internal hierarchies that privileged expert
urban, middle-Â�class women’s approaches and interests in a rights-Â�based
approach to social change. Mohanty’s (1991) critique of Western feminist
representations is appropriate here, though the “eyes” in the title of her
work are no longer simply Western. Mohanty’s analysis alerts us to the
challenges of unacknowledged hierarchies wherever they exist—both be-

186â•… LeeRay M. Costa

tween countries and cultures and within them. When rural Thai women
become the other to urban, educated, middle-�class women, then the latter
can envision themselves as “liberated, and having control over their own
lives” (Mohanty 1991, 74), and thus well-Â�equipped to help their Thai sisters
(phii or nong) as members of a global sisterhood. However, as Annalise
Moser (2004) points out, this is not necessarily a “happy heterogeneity.”
It is not surprising that urban, educated, middle-�class Thai women
maintain their relative privilege and power in ngos. Neither is it un-
expected that many of them fully recognize the difficulties inherent in
transborder organizing. However, difference does make solidarity build-
ing more challenging, particularly when some women feel unable to voice
comments or concerns that may threaten a social order that offers bene-
fits as well as disadvantages. As I demonstrate here, identity categories of
class, education level, and geographic location structure relationships be-
tween differently located women in Thailand. Class privilege allows edu-
cated, urban, middle-�class women to take for granted the fact that their
basic needs will be met through relatively stable jobs, incomes, and social
networks and to position themselves as helpers or teachers of the rural
poor by maintaining discursive control over workshops and conferences
and practical control over financial resources. Similarly, education is per-
ceived to be a critical form of knowledge and expertise that legitimizes
middle-�class control of ngo activities (see also Mindry 2001, 1195) and is
a form of social status that compels the deference of others. Education is a
crucial avenue for pursuing donor funding, as demonstrated by numerous
rural women who—like Mae Somjit—returned to school in their forties,
fifties, and sixties to complete their middle- and high-�school education
in order to work more effectively in the career ngo world. Weeraya told
me that her decision to work toward her bachelor’s degree resulted from
“pressure—not from myself or villagers, but from when I have to associate
with others outside the village who have higher education,” including ngo
representatives.
Differences in geographic location threaten unity among Thai women
activists in their links to women’s situated interests, and point to the im-
portance of place in both enacting and theorizing social change (Har-
court and Escobar 2002; Mills 2005a; Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006).
Numerous Thai studies scholars have commented on the oppositionality
between rural and urban areas and on the historically hierarchical rela-
tionship between villages and provincial or urban centers, which was ex-

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activismâ•…187

acerbated during national programs of modernization and development
(Mills 1999b, 2008). At the same time, privileging urban centers and ap-
proaches belies late twentieth-�century tendencies to romanticize the vil-
lage, its culture, and its people as evidence of a more authentic Thainess,
a tendency sometimes evidenced by ngo activists themselves who refer
to “real villagers” of the “grassroots” when seeking to identify project par-
ticipants or targets (see, for example, Mindry 2001).
Women’s activism in Thailand has faced many challenges from his-
torical erasure, political instability, and periodic state vilification to popu-
lar resistance against new sociocultural and gender norms introduced by
activists. But one of its greatest and most implicit challenges—one famil-
iar to women activists globally—has been that of building solidarity across
differences. Mohanty argues that “solidarity is always an achievement” and
a result of “mutuality, accountability, and common interests anchoring
the relationships in diverse communities” (2006, xiv), while Richa Nagar
writes that “solidarity is achieved through an active engagement with di-
versity rather than presumed from outside through the constitution of
groups defined homogeneously by neediness or powerlessness” (2006,
141). My observations in late 1990s Thailand indicate that despite continu-
ing and laudable efforts to bring diverse women into shared spaces of en-
gagement, power and difference continue to undermine women’s efforts
at solidarity. ngo activists from all locations require both increased self-�
reflexivity and more sustained analysis of intersectionality and how ngo
organizational practices and hierarchies threaten to disrupt projects for
the empowerment of all women. This type of critical self-�analysis is neither
easy nor without risks, as the Sangtin Writers amply demonstrate, but it
can have productive and rewarding results.
The challenges of exclusion and hierarchization faced by Thai women
activists and intensified by ngoization are by no means unique. Feminist
activists and scholars have long grappled with how to address women’s
diverse and at times contradictory interests in emancipatory movements,
locally, nationally, and transnationally (see, for example, Grewal and
Kaplan 1994; Ong 1996; Mohanty 2003; Cockburn 2007). Here I sum-
marize two related approaches that may serve as resources for women
activists in Thailand and elsewhere who are facing these challenges: trans-
versal politics, and collective transformation and solidarity. Yuval-�Davis
describes transversal politics as a “dialogically situated epistemology” that
rejects both assimilationist, universalizing politics and identity politics

188â•… LeeRay M. Costa

(2006, 276; see also 281). According to her, transversal politics is based on
(1) standpoint epistemology, or “a recognition that from each position-
ing the world is seen differently, and thus any knowledge based on just
one positioning is ‘unfinished’”; (2) “the encompassment of difference by
equality,” in which differences are recognized as important but should not
be replaced by equality or hierarchized; and (3) “a conceptual—and politi-
cal—differentiation between positioning, identity and values,” in which
shared identity does not equal shared positioning and shared positioning
does not mean shared social and political values (2006, 281; 1999, 94–95).
This is relevant to my discussion of Thai women’s activism because in
transversal politics, feminists and community activists (regardless of their
status or location) are neither “representatives” nor the “authentic voice”
of their communities but “advocates,” and they “should be reflective and
conscious of the multiplexity of their specific positionings, both in relation
to other members in their constituencies and in relation to other partici-
pants in any specific encounter” (2006, 282). Furthermore, it is not nec-
essary to be a member of a constituency for which you advocate thereby
doing away with fixed boundaries and reified categories and avoiding ex-
clusionary politics (ibid.). Transversal politics is achieved through a pro-
cess of “rooting and shifting” that relies on open dialogue and the recogni-
tion that not every conflict is reconcilable (1999, 96), though Yuval-�Davis
(2006) notes that transversal politics is not without its own challenges.
Another approach that specifically critiques the exclusionary pro-
cesses of ngoization and is relevant to the Thai case analyzed here is the
methodology of collective transformation and solidarity painstakingly de-
scribed by the Sangtin writers and Nagar in the context of Indian women’s
ngos. This methodology is built on the collective autobiographical writ-
ing and reading of diverse women’s subjective experiences as a form of
“reflexive activism” (Nagar 2006, xxii) and a process of shared knowledge
production that attends to intersectionality and the negotiation of power.
Coming together regularly over an extended period of time, these women
tackled the inequalities of class, caste, religion, and education that struc-
tured their entry into ngo work and knowledge production and chal-
lenged themselves to move beyond narrow understandings of women who
were different from themselves. The honesty and vulnerability demon-
strated by the Sangtin writers recalls the “rooting and shifting” stressed in
transversal politics and emphasizes a “model for empowerment through
dialogue” (Nagar 2006, 141).

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activismâ•…189

 Nagar concludes that “collaborative praxes that engage with place-Â�
based specificities of local processes and struggles can help us to articu-
late transnational feminist alternatives to ‘global sisterhood’ and ‘global
feminisms’” (149). By recognizing the diversity of women’s approaches to
social change, acknowledging the importance of their respective situated
interests, and facilitating more-Â�complex conversations about women’s
empowerment, both scholars and activists can move away from precon-
ceived notions of women and their identities, habitual global North-�South
interactions of self and other, and the privileging of expert knowledges
wherever they emerge.
As I hope this chapter has demonstrated, differently located Thai
women activists have their own discourses and practices with which to
address their situated interests. It is crucial that Thai women activists—as
well as their activist and scholar counterparts elsewhere in the world—Â�
foster more reflexive forms of activism and opportunities for collabora-
tive knowledge production that result in inclusive dialogue and praxis that
better attend to intersectionality and relations of power. In doing so, the
negative impacts of ngoization might be more adequately addressed and
the empowerment of all women might become a more attainable goal.

Notes
The research on which this article is based was funded by the Fulbright Founda-
tion, the American Association of University Women–Honolulu, the Pan-Â�Pacific and
Southeast Asian Women’s Association, and the University of Hawaii. Support from
the Luce Foundation allowed me to first draft some of these ideas. I would like to
thank Mary Beth Mills for her careful, detailed reading of this chapter and for sug-
gestions that greatly improved the text. I would also like to thank the volume edi-
tors, Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal; and my colleagues in the faculty writing
group at Hollins University.
1. The names of individuals and local Thai organizations are pseudonyms unless
otherwise indicated. Names of funding agencies have not been changed. All
translations from Thai are my own unless otherwise indicated.
2. Grassroots, or raagyaa in Thai, is a term used by activist women of all class levels
to refer mainly to rural, village communities and poor urban communities.
3. Bowie (2008) offers another example of the invisible yet critical contributions of
rural Thai women to formal politics at the local level. She analyzes how women
mobilize kinship relations to support specific candidates, maintain village unity,
and address postelection tensions.
4. I conducted fieldwork in Thailand in the period 1997–2000. Although my re-
search focused primarily on groups in the north, I also observed and spoke with

190â•… LeeRay M. Costa

 women activists from other regions of the country at women’s conferences and
workshops.
5. An important exception to this invisibility is the way that rural women’s bodies
are mobilized in national discourses. See Costa 2008, Jeffrey 2002.
6. Dej Poomkacha (1995) counted 2,547 ngos, while another study noted that the
National Culture Commission of Thailand had registered approximately 14,000
organizations (Serrano 1994, 7).
7. Housewife groups are part of a system of women’s associations at the village, sub-
district, district, provincial, and national levels that was established in 1981 by the
Department of Community Development to increase women’s participation in
local development projects.
8. Naples notes that “the privileging of the so-Â�called grassroots can also lead to a
romanticization of this site of struggle as well as a tendency to ‘other’ women said
to be of the grassroots” (2002, 4). See also Mindry 2001.
9. Work on women in other parts of Southeast Asia is more abundant (Cook 1998,
255). Edited collections about women’s activism in various nation-Â�states often
fail to include a chapter on Thailand.
10. See Cook 1998, Jeffrey 2002, Costa 2001.
11. Mills’s (1999b, 2005a) work on Thai women labor activists is an important excep-
tion.
12. For example, layoffs of male workers put more pressure on women to obtain
waged labor to support their families, while the negotiation of rising costs was
also largely women’s responsibility as the managers of household budgets.
13. Boys have access to free education by becoming monks.
14. Maternalism is evident in women’s movements worldwide (West and Blumberg
1990, 22–23).
15. This is a standard honorific, not one specific to activists, though it may vary by re-
gion. Some rural women reveled in this label and role, even though it was another
mark of their peasant origins and backwardness, according to some urbanites.
16. Unlike other developing countries, the Thai Ministry of Health promoted breast-�
feeding in the 1980s and 1990s without a prominent antiformula or anticorporate
discourse (Penny Van Esterik, personal communication). Although the origin of
this particular song remains uncertain, one doctor from the Thai Breast-�Feeding
Center notes that songs such as this were created and sung by villagers and ngo
workers during the 1990s (Jiraporn Wattana, personal communication).
17. Mills made the same observation of Thai women labor activists (2005a, 133–34).
18. The discourse of rights and justice (yudtithaam) is also evident in Thai women’s
labor activism as a result of “alliances with Thai feminist and human rights
groups” (Mills 2005a, 124).
19. This is done largely through consciousness-Â�raising among “both disadvantaged
women and the general public” (Cook 1998, 258).
20. Such requests underscore the power of women/ngos from the global North in

Power and Difference in Thai Women’s NGO Activismâ•…191

 the Thai contexts I observed, where rural women frequently assumed I was an
ngo representative even when I explicitly stated that I was a graduate student.
21. Bowie (2008) offers a provocative analysis of why rural women in the north
choose to forgo formal elected positions while simultaneously arguing that
women are central to Thai political processes.
22. Mills found similar concerns among Thai women engaged in labor activism
(2005a, 133).
23. Mindry (2001) makes a similar argument in analyzing the transnational moral-
izing discourses mobilized by feminists in the global North in their efforts to de-
velop and help women in the global South.

192â•… LeeRay M. Costa

╉CHAPTER 7 Lamia Karim

Demystifying Microcredit
The Grameen Bank, NGOs, and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh

While economic globalization refers to the removal of trade bar-

riers and open markets, its effects on communities are variable,
contingent, and locally constructed. This chapter is an interpreta-
tion of these variable, contingent, and local expressions of grass-
roots globalization through an ethnographic study of globalization
and neoliberalism in rural Bangladesh. It examines how globaliza-
tion and neoliberalism are brought to the grass roots—the most
intimate sphere of the social, the home, and women—through the
modernist discourse of women’s empowerment through micro-
credit.
Focusing on the microcredit policies and practices of the 2006
Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, and
three other leading nongovernmental organizations (ngos) in
the country, I analyze the centrality of gender in the expansion
of globalization and neoliberalism in Bangladesh.1 I examine how
Bangladeshi rural women’s honor and shame are instrumentally
appropriated by ngos in the welfare of their capitalist interests.
I analyze this relationship between rural women and ngos by
placing it within the political economy of shame, a concept I ex-
plain later.
Arjun Appadurai has defined grassroots globalization as:

new forms of social mobilization that proceed independently

of the actions of corporate capital and the nation-�state system
. . . these social forms rely on strategies, visions, and horizons
 for globalization on behalf of the poor . . . this kind of globalization
strives for a democratic and autonomous standing in respect to the
various forms by which global power seeks to further its dominions.
(2000, 3)

The grassroots globalization I studied in Bangladesh is contrary to Ap-

padurai’s model. It works through and not against corporate capital,
donors, states, ngos, and members of civil society and creates complex
new networks of social interdependencies that are laden with the finan-
cial interests of multiple actors at the local, national, and global levels.
This grassroots globalization weakens the sovereignty of the patriarchal
home family and replaces it with the sovereignty of the market through
ngos, contracts, and courts. The developmental ngo is the purveyor of
this new economic sovereignty that is represented by corporate and local
institutional interests (ngos) and is an architect of neoliberalism within
a developmental discourse of poor women’s empowerment through the
market.
Neoliberalism as an ideology rests on the idea that human welfare is
best served by the withdrawal of the state from welfarist policies (Harvey
2005, 64). Extending this economic definition, Aihwa Ong has termed
neoliberalism a rationality of governance, stating that “governing relies
on calculative choices and techniques in the domain of citizenship and of
governing.” It subjects citizens to act in accordance with the “market prin-
ciples of discipline, efficiency, and competitiveness” (2006, 4). Neoliber-
alism is about the subjection of targeted populations to certain rules that
inform and regulate behavior. In many postcolonial countries with weak
sovereignties, the notion of citizenship as a set of entitlements is lacking.
Instead, in its place, we see the emergence of a postcolonial governance
authorized by ngos whose clients are subjected to act in accordance with
the values of “discipline, efficiency, and competitiveness.” By postcolonial
governance I refer to the subjection of targeted populations by nonstate
actors such as ngos to new technologies of market-�oriented disciplinary
mechanisms. It also refers to governance by ngos that is similar to Ong’s
notion of “graduated sovereignties,” and they seek to implement social
engineering programs (population control, hiv/aids management, pri-
mary education, voter education, etc.) that were formerly in the domain
of the state.
But neoliberalism and globalization have also created opportunities for
rural people to access new routes of capital circulation and have facilitated

194â•… Lamia Karim

novel movements of migrant labor. In Bangladesh, microcredit borrow-
ers and their families have been networked into Appadurai’s “finanscapes”
(1998, 34). The circulations of these “finanscapes” have brought new
wealth, ideas, and social identities into rural areas. For example, in Ban-
gladesh successful rural women are sometimes able to pool their micro-
credit loans together to send a male kin to the Middle East or Malaysia
as migrant labor who, if all goes well, repays their investment at a high
interest rate to them.
In the analysis under consideration, neoliberalism and globalization
operate at the grass roots through the microcredit policies of ngos. As
providers of credit, jobs, and sustenance to a financially strapped poor
rural population, ngos in Bangladesh have tremendous power to regu-
late people’s behavior and subject them to ngo mandates and priorities. I
make three arguments in this chapter. Firstly, ngos that work with micro-
credit manipulate existing notions of Bangladeshi rural women’s honor
and shame in the furtherance of their capitalist goals and instrumentally
violate local norms of cohesion and community. I call this the “economy
of shame.” Secondly, the work of microcredit has resulted in unanticipated
neoliberal subjects, the female petty moneylender, for example, that this
chapter examines. Finally, I argue that the developmental ngo operates as
a shadow state in Bangladesh and is able to exercise tremendous control
over the lives of the poor through a Gramscian notion of hegemony where
their relationship is characterized by a “combination of force and con-
sent, which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating
excessively over consent” (Gramsci 1971, 248). This enables the ngos to
neutralize dissenting voices in public spaces, a point I discuss in the con-
clusion.
The research for this article was conducted over eighteen months
(1998–99), and was based on a study of the Grameen Bank and three of the
largest ngos in the country. Each of these ngos works with microcredit,
has millions of dollars in donor support, and millions of rural subscribers.
These ngos reach 80 percent of the rural population.2 According to the
Bangladesh ngo Affairs Bureau (ngoab), from 1990 to 1998 the cumu-
lative amount of foreign funds disbursed to ngos stood at 1,364,421,079
takas ($29,030,235 @ USD 1=47 takas, 1999 rate of exchange) for 5,096
ngo projects. In 1994–95, 20 percent of foreign funds were disbursed
through the ngos (Karim 2001, 97). For western donors in Bangladesh
the ngo sector is the preferred mode of developmental aid. The ngos
offer a streamlined and accountable system of aid delivery compared to

Demystifying Microcreditâ•…195
the Bangladeshi state, which is bureaucratic, corrupt, and inefficient and
is considered a “failed” state by Western aid agencies. The celebration of
the neoliberal policies of the Grameen Bank has to be understood against
this predicament of a postcolonial country

Globalization, Neoliberalism, and the NGO as a Shadow State

Globalization has been theorized as a “crisis in the sovereignty of the
nation-Â�state” with rapid movement of finance capital that lies outside the
control of the state (Appadurai 2001, 4). I analyze globalization in a dif-
ferent context: the virtually absent state in a postcolonial country where
the critical question is the emergence of a new sovereignty, the ngo as a
shadow state. In terms of national development, many Third World coun-
tries are heavily dependent on Western aid.3 It is precisely the lack of eco-
nomic sovereignty of Third World countries that allows the International
Monetary Fund (imf), the World Bank, and Western industrialized na-
tions and multinational corporations to exploit these countries and their
populations for their corporate and political goals. This lack of economic
sovereignty in developing countries gets exacerbated when ngos with
economic ties to Western capital enter development; target poor people
with much-�needed services that the state fails to deliver; and link together
economic, political, and social life through their programs. In the absence
of robust progressive social movements in many postcolonial countries,4
these ngos are able to set themselves up as working with the “poorest of
the poor” and install themselves as the progressive voice in rural society.
It must be emphasized that the ngo rhetoric of “working for the poor-
est of the poor” does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs in those instances
where the state has failed or has withdrawn from the welfare of its citi-
zens, shifting that responsibility increasingly to private charities, corpora-
tions, and developmental ngos. Consequently, ngos that step in to take
over many of the services traditionally reserved for the state (education,
healthcare, credit, employment) begin to act like a state. For example, in
Bangladesh, I found that villagers often referred to the ngo as sarkar or
the state (James Scott 2006).5
In the rural Bangladeshi economy, which is the focus of my analysis,
the Grameen Bank and ngos that were aided by Western donors largely
facilitated the process of globalization.6 Through microcredit operations,
rural people and ngos in Bangladesh have become mutually dependent,
and credit has connected rural people with multinational corporations for
the first time. Through ngos, microcredit recipients have become con-

196â•… Lamia Karim

sumers of products of multinational corporations such as finance capital,
breeder chickens, and cell phones, and as producers, they remain depen-
dent on multinational corporations for physical inputs such as seeds, fer-
tilizers, and pesticides. But ngos are not passive agents of capital. They
are also active producers of new subjectivities and social meanings for
people through their various economic and social programs. Thus, the re-
lationship between rural subjects and ngos is contradictory and varied;
they instrumentally exploit each other. However, the power rests with the
ngos. That said, very little ethnographic work7 has been done to examine
how this microcredit model might intersect with local patriarchal norms
and cultural practices and result in behaviors that may not correspond to
building social solidarity and goodwill among targeted populations (Goetz
and Sengupta 1996; A. Rahman 1999 and 2001; Ahmad 2007). It is impor-
tant to note that internal ngo staff and local and international consul-
tants hired by ngos and aid organizations do the bulk of the research on
microcredit institutions in Bangladesh (Hashemi, Schuler, and Riley 1996;
Counts 1996; Bornstein 1996; Khandaker 1998; Todd 1996a and 1996b are
some examples), and their employment situation often prevents them
from being critical of ngo work.

Microcredit and the Political Economy of Shame

Before proceeding to an analysis of how globalization and neoliberalism
operate in rural Bangladesh through microcredit operations, I would like
to first introduce the two terms I use to analyze the Grameen model:
microcredit and the economy of shame.

Microcredit
In development rhetoric, microcredit is the extension of small loans to
women for income-�generating projects and has been eulogized as a magic
bullet of poverty alleviation. However, according to Professor Muhammad
Yunus, the Grameen Bank model of microcredit is not solely a matter of
the extension of credit, it has a unique set of social objectives that it aims
to implement through microcredit policies:

• It promotes credit as a human right.

• It is aimed toward the poor, particularly poor women.
• It is based on “trust,” not on legal procedures and system.
• It is offered to create self-Â�employment, income-Â�generating activi-
ties, and housing for the poor, as opposed to consumption.

Demystifying Microcreditâ•…197
 • It was initiated as a challenge to conventional banking, which re-
jected the poor by classifying them as “not creditworthy.”
• It provides service on the doorstep of the poor based on the principle
that the people should not go to the bank, the bank should go to the
people.
• It gives high priority to building social capital.8

If we replace the term “credit” with “debt,” we get the mediation of rural
social relations through debt-�related dependencies. In theoretical terms,
debt ties the present and the future together. Debt is thus a regulator
of social behavior, and present behavior determines future payoffs. By
replacing credit with debt and introducing the concepts of culture and
the uncertainty of the market into the equation, we can ask some diffi-
cult questions of microcredit practices of development. What happens to
people in a face-�to-�face community when they are linked through rela-
tions of debt introduced by a modern banking system? What happens to
the social position of women when they become the bearers of debt within
the patriarchy of the home and the patriarchy of the modern ngo?

The Economy of Shame

The use of shaming as an instrument of social control of the poor, particu-
larly of poor women, has a long history in rural Bangladesh. Women are
the traditional custodians of family honor. The shaming of men through
their women (mothers, wives, daughters) is a preexisting social practice.
In a face-Â�to-Â�face society, one’s ability to maintain honor (the protection
of one’s good name, the honor of the womenfolk, and the patriline) struc-
tures one’s social acceptability. To lose face is the ultimate mark of dis-
honor. Rural discourse is structured around notions of honor, and any
trespassing behavior (a woman seen talking to a nonkin man, for example)
is spoken of in terms of the protection of the honor code—that is, our
women do not do X because we are honorable people. For the poor, the
discourse of honor is a symbolic covenant with God. It is a moral resource
through which they view themselves as morally superior to rich and urban
people.
The economy of shame refers to the appropriation of preexisting forms
of shaming by a modern institution, the ngo, which instrumentally de-
ploys various forms of shaming in its own capitalist welfare—that is, the
recovery of loans. Shaming takes many forms in Bangladeshi rural society,
from rude language to regulation of women’s sexuality; disciplining of

198â•… Lamia Karim

poor people through accusations of sexual infidelities that often result in
public floggings, pouring pitch over bodies, tonsuring women’s hair, and
hanging a garland of shoes around one’s neck; isolating one’s family in the
village; publicly spitting on the person every time s/he walks by; making
adults hold their ears as a sign of their guilt in a public forum; breaking
apart a person’s house to recover money; and so on. In this context, Gra-
meen Bank’s insistence of a no-Â�collateral loan and repayment of loans
at 98 percent takes on a different meaning (for a celebratory reading of
Grameen Bank, see A. Sen 1999, 201). The honor and shame codes act as
the collateral of these loans. It is the honor of the family that is at stake,
and that the woman represents. If the woman gets publicly shamed, the
family is dishonored. In a face-�to-�face society, men and their families try
to maintain the sanctity of their family honor by observing the honor of
their women.

GOs in Bangladesh
Bangladesh, as an independent state, entered the global economy in 1971
when globalization and neoliberalism were dismantling the traditional
welfare state in the West, and women-�centric aid policies had become
the norm for Western aid agencies. After nine months of war against Paki-
stani forces, Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan on December 16, 1971,
and declared itself an independent state. In 1947, when the British divided
India into India and Pakistan, Bangladesh was the region known as East
Pakistan. The West Pakistani leadership had paid little attention to the
growth of its eastern province, which was ethnically Bengali and distinct
from West Pakistanis. Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) was an inter-
nal colony of West Pakistan that provided raw materials, such as jute, tea,
paper, to West Pakistani–controlled corporations. After the war in 1971,
the already fragile infrastructure of Bangladesh was in chaos (Sisson and
Rose 1991; Umar 2004). It was under these circumstances that develop-
mental ngos stepped in as rural service providers.
ngos began their work of war reconstruction and rehabilitation of
refugees, occupying an infrastructural vacuum in the newly independent
state. The developmental ngo sector soon capitalized on the women-�
in-�development (wid) paradigm of the United Nations and Western
aid organizations. The Bangladeshi state, under military leadership, also
capitalized on the wid paradigm to gain development dollars and legiti-
macy from Western democracies.9 The idea of women’s participation in
the economy was celebrated as a national goal, and developmental ngos

Demystifying Microcreditâ•…199
were given a free rein to grow and expand their rural outreach with West-
ern aid. The Western aid organizations also preferred the ngo sector as
their allies. It enabled them to bypass the bureaucracy and corruption of
the Bangladeshi state10 and to directly reach targeted segments of the rural
population (Karim 2004). Over time, this developed into a lattice of de-
pendent relationships between aid organizations, Western capital, ngos
and the Bangladeshi state.
With the transition to democracy in Bangladesh in the 1990s, ngos
have moved into the political sphere. They have begun to use their bor-
rowers as vote banks, urging them to cast votes for political candidates
who represent an ngo-�friendly platform.11 ngos, through their part-
nership with Western aid agencies, usaid in particular, that emphasize
“good” governance programs, have reconstituted themselves as institu-
tions that work for grassroots democratization. In Bangladesh, the na-
ture of democratic politics is under construction through a diverse set of
actors—Â�national political parties, ngos, clergy—all of whom make claims
on rural female subjects for their adherence. Neoliberalism has unhinged
politics from the older left-�identified politics, that is, the vanguard politi-
cal party as the catalyst of social justice, and have introduced a new poli-
tics of grassroots mobilization of the poor organized by the ngos. Given
the dominance of ngos over rural populations, national political parties
also seek their alliance in order to win elections. Many ngos have aggres-
sively sponsored their female members for village-�level local elections,
posing a challenge to the rural patriarchal power structure through demo-
cratic means (Karim 2001, 99). For example, after winning the 2006 Nobel
Peace Prize, Professor Yunus (the founder of the Grameen Bank) initially
announced that he would start a new political party, a decision from which
he later withdrew.12 In the unfolding scenario, politics and development
have become conjoined in the making of globalization at the grass roots.
It can be said that ngos are remaking rural subjects as new subjects of
a market-Â�driven democratization. As Ong has pointed out, “neoliberal-
ism can also be conceptualized as a new relationship between government
and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as nonpoliti-
cal and nonideological problems that need technical solutions” (2006, 3).
It must be mentioned that although ngos can subject the poor to their
will, they do not control the choices people make. For example, once em-
powered to vote, ngo female borrowers often cast their vote according
to family preference.13 While this grassroots mobilization unleashes new
energies and potentials, and perhaps even challenges globalization at the

200â•… Lamia Karim

grass roots, it remains inhibited by the financial imperatives of ngos—
that is, the management of rural populations through microcredit that
tends to depoliticize political possibilities (Ferguson 1990).
There are several critical factors that allow the ngos to play such a de-
cisive role in rural life in Bangladesh. Firstly, there is the virtual absence
of the state in the rural economy. ngos dominate the rural economy from
rural credit to telecommunications to primary education. Secondly, the
ngos provide two-�thirds of the institutional credit in rural areas (So-
bhan 1997, 133). In Bangladesh, neither the government banks nor the
traditional moneylenders loan to the very poor because they lack physi-
cal collateral. This financial dependency of rural people on the ngos has
given them the power to act as patrons of the poor. Thirdly, the ngos are
a major source of employment in a country with limited job opportunities
for its burgeoning young population. Young college graduates seek entry-�
level jobs with ngos that are seen as the future—the promise of a better
life and, for the better educated, an opportunity to go abroad for training.
Fourthly, the ngos have silenced dissent in the public sphere by induct-
ing a large number of university professors and researchers as consultants
in their various programs—public intellectuals who might otherwise have
spoken out against the excesses of ngos. In fact, many university profes-
sors operate as full-�time ngo consultants and part-�time teachers. This
shift is legible in discourse. Researchers talk about ngo research as a job
(kaaj) and not as research (gobeshona). Finally, the work of ngos has frag-
mented the left political parties from the 1970s onward, when both groups
struggled over the adherence of the poor. The resource-�rich ngos won,
and they introduced loans and services that the left parties could not pro-
vide to rural constituents. Thus many people—from the rural to the urban,
from the illiterate to the highly educated—are direct and indirect benefi-
ciaries of ngo programs.

The Grameen Bank Model of Microcredit

Grameen Bank (gb) has reversed conventional banking practice by re-
moving the need for collateral and created a banking system based on
mutual trust, accountability, participation, and creativity. gb provides
credit to the poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh, without any collat-
eral. At gb, credit is a cost-�effective weapon to fight poverty, and it serves
as a catalyst in the overall development of socioeconomic conditions of
the poor who have been kept outside the banking orbit on the ground that
they are poor and hence not bankable.

Demystifying Microcreditâ•…201
 The Grameen Bank (or Rural Bank) was started by a local economist,
Professor Muhammad Yunus, in 1976. The Bank had originally targeted
rural men for its credit programs. In its early days, the Bank ran into dif-
ficulties in collecting money from men who would not allow themselves
to be subjected to the Bank’s strict rules. By the late 1970s, the Bank had
appropriated the women-�in-�development (wid) paradigm of Western aid
agencies and reinvented itself as a bank for poor women. By 1998, the Bank
had over two million members, and 94 percent of its borrowers were poor
women.
Grameen Bank has made significant contributions to rural banking. It
has made credit available to the poor who were denied commercial loans
due to a lack of physical collateral. It has demonstrated through its 98
percent rate of recovery that the poor are not defaulters, that the poor
pay back their loans. It has taught women the importance of managing
money and keeping basic accounts of expenditures. Additionally, it has
introduced some new forms of social identity among rural women, such as
the women’s weekly meetings where women collect and discuss loan pro-
posals, and the creation of a space where women can speak without men
dominating the discourse. Moreover, Grameen women are required to say
their and their husbands’ names publicly (rural women do not speak their
husbands’ names because it is against social norms), women are taught to
sign their names on loan contracts, and learn the Sixteen Decisions of the
Grameen Bank that focus on social engineering (Hashemi, Schuler, and
Riley 1996, 649).
Professor Yunus advocates this liberal doctrine for poor women. In
many of his speeches, he claimed that not only is capitalism good for the
poor, “the poor are good for capitalism.”14 Basing his claims on the 98
percent rate of return of his bank, he argues that the poor are good in-
vestments for large banks, and the financial world should take notice of
that fact. Thus, the chief contribution of the bank lies in proving to the
development community that the poor are “bankable”—that is, the poor
repay their debts.
In my research, I found that microcredit benefited several categories
of women the most: the rural middle class, women with marketable skills,
women whose husbands had marketable skills—or whose husbands had
regular employment and could thus pay the weekly installments—widows,
and divorced and abandoned women. In the majority of the cases, the hus-
bands and male kin of the women used the loans. In most instances, their

202â•… Lamia Karim

husbands were day laborers, and this allowed them to repay the weekly
installments on the loans.
The Grameen Bank model rests on the idea of the individual entrepre-
neur who, with the help of microcredit, becomes self-�employed, owns pri-
vate property (the assets she builds with the loans), and sells her labor on
the market. The out-�of-�the-�home entrepreneur links seamlessly with the
ideology of neoliberalism. She is an owner of petty capital. This produc-
tion of the ownership ethic is against wage labor, overtime pay, retirement
benefits, and worker’s compensation—that is, against the very founda-
tions of a welfare state.15 Failure to succeed now rests solely with the indi-
vidual and not with the corporation/ngo/state.16 In this scenario, the state
withdraws from the welfare of its citizens to work for the welfare of capital.
Interestingly, microcredit policies have also shifted the discourse of
poverty to a discourse of neoliberalism at the local level. Calling oneself
poor17 is now seen as pejorative in rural Bangladesh. Prior to the mass
mediation of rural relations through credit, the poor felt a claim on the
wealth of the rich because they were in a patron-�client relationship. Thus
in times of hardship, the poor could forage on the lands and ponds of the
rich for sustenance. In exchange, the rural rich would make claims on
the free labor and adherence of the poor. This traditional patron-�client
relationship has been replaced by a neoliberal discourse of self-�help and
individual responsibility.
While the Grameen Bank and ngos claim that poor women are the
beneficiaries of these loans, it is the husbands of the women and other
male family members who really use the loans. Bangladeshi women are
primarily the carriers of ngo loans; they are not their end users. In my
research, I found that men used 95 percent of the loans. Even Professor
Yunus has conceded as much. Commenting on the long struggle of Gra-
meen of loaning to women over their husbands, he says, “Grameen has
come a long way since then. Now Grameen lends money to husbands, but
only through the wives. The principal borrower remains the wife” (Yunus
and Jolis 1998, 91; my emphasis). In my research area, rural men laughed
when they were asked whether the money belonged to their wives. They
pointedly remarked that “since their wives belong to them, the money
rightfully belongs to them.” Women also told me that, as a Bangladeshi
woman, I should know that they would give the money to their husbands
who labor outside the home.
ngo officers and researchers who are connected with the microcredit

Demystifying Microcreditâ•…203
industry are aware that the men control the use of the money, but in their
public scripts they censor this vital information. This silencing of who
really uses the money occurs for two reasons. On one level, it fulfills the
Western aid mandate of targeting women in development. ngos can
show to their Western donors that women are participating in loan ac-
tivities. On another level, ngos seek out women because they are seen as
docile subjects who can be coerced more easily than men.
Rural kinship relations are an important aspect of microcredit opera-
tions. Based on gender, status, and age differentiations, kin members have
varying levels of obligations to each other. Into this set of existing obliga-
tory kin relationships, the microcredit ngo has inserted the notion of
collective responsibility alongside individual loans. That is, the group is
both the enforcer and the guarantor of loans to the ngo. These two struc-
tures—kin obligations and collective responsibilities—are toxically syn-
ergistic, and coupled together they work to operate within an economy
of shame.
The following example illustrates how these kinship obligations work.
In my research area, an older woman (a widow) was returning home with
her loan from the Grameen Bank when she met her nephew. He said
that he knew that she had just received a loan from the bank, and as her
nephew he was making a claim on her money to fund his own business. As
this woman explained, as the aunt and as a woman (further complicated
by the fact that she was a widow), she was obligated to give him the money.
If she did not, there would be pressure from her family to do so. Thus, obli-
gation to give to a male kin was considered by her family to be her respon-
sibility, a higher good, and more important than her need of that money.18
Given the profitability of microcredit operations from the perspective
of ngos and the donor agencies (the loans of the poor are recovered), one
finds too many ngos with too much cash chasing too few creditworthy
members in the rural economy. Consequently, almost every female ngo
member has membership in multiple (in my area the average number
was between seven to eight) ngos. According to the Credit Development
Forum (1998) out of 1,200 foreign-�aided ngos, 369 dealt specifically with
credit. This had led to a routinization and simplification of ngo credit
operations, from the earlier function of social engineering to the newer
role as credit provider. As a result women were now unwilling to spend
time learning ngo rhetoric (the Grameen Bank’s Sixteen Decisions, for
example), and the loan officers were under pressure from headquarters to
find additional creditworthy borrowers. I found that very few Grameen

204â•… Lamia Karim

women knew of any of the Sixteen Decisions.19 At the time of getting loans,
women put down on paper various projects that they would undertake
with the loans. However, because of the pressure on loan officers to re-
cover money, officers seldom had the time to monitor what the borrowers
actually did with the loans. As one borrower’s husband said to me with
a smile:

We took a cow loan. Fifty percent will be spent to pay off old debts, and
another fifty percent will be invested in moneylending. If the manager
comes to see our cow, we can easily borrow one from the neighbors.

From the perspective of the microcredit ngos, what mattered was the
maintenance of high recovery rates and not the skills training of indi-
vidual borrowers. In fact, this emphasis on expanding microcredit opera-
tions had reproduced usury at multiple levels of rural society. Similarly,
the availability of ngo money had encouraged many rich clients to enter
the microcredit market.20 In many instances, richer clients used poorer
women as proxy members. That is, the rich client used the loan while the
poor woman joined the ngo as a proxy member in exchange for a fee. If
the rich client defaulted, it was still the poor proxy member who was held
accountable by the ngo.
In analyzing the reasons why rural men allowed their women to be-
come ngo members even though it brought their women in contact with
nonkin men, one noticed a deep level of complicity between ngos and
rural men. Despite rural codes of honor and shame that dictated that
women should not come in contact with nonkin men (and most ngos,
especially Grameen Bank, have male officers), rural men found it more
useful to allow their women to join ngos because they (rural men) work
during the day. That is, poor men who lack physical collateral “give” their
women in membership to ngos as economic reassurance. In reality, the
collateral that Grameen and all other ngos extract from the poor is the
Bangladeshi rural woman’s honor and shame. The poor give their honor
embodied in their women to the ngos in exchange for the loans. It is very
important to note that this is the pivot on which the success of the Gra-
meen model of microcredit hinges. However, rural men are also ambiva-
lent about the condition in which they find themselves. While they were
more comfortable with microcredit because their women could stay at
home, they also felt vulnerable because home enterprises do not neces-
sarily guarantee a fixed income at the end of the month. Many rural men I
spoke with said that they preferred jobs from ngos that would offer them

Demystifying Microcreditâ•…205
a guaranteed income. That is, given a choice between entrepreneurship
with its associated risks and regular employment, most people I surveyed
preferred the latter.

Group Versus Individual Responsibility

Group responsibility for individual loans is a fundamental organizing
principle of the microcredit model. The Grameen Bank operated on this
model.21 Forty women formed a Center, which was housed in a female
member’s house. The women elected a leader from the group who advo-
cated the loan proposals in their weekly meetings. These forty women
formed eight smaller groups that included five women in each group. Each
week, the women met in the Center and handed over their weekly install-
ments (kisti in Bengali) to the bank officer.
The loans, usually between $100 and $200, were given for a year on a
fixed interest rate of 16 percent, that came to 32 percent in effective or
actual interest (1999 figures). The borrowers paid the interest on the origi-
nal principal through the life of the loan. That is, the interest paid was
not adjusted as the principal was paid down. What the borrower actu-
ally ended up paying was much higher because these loans contained
many hidden costs (entrance fees, cancellation fees, late fees, mandatory
savings, and often product tie-�ins with loans) that raised the de facto rate
to 50–60 percent for many microcredit ngos.22 It should be borne in
mind though, that this number is still much lower than the rate charged
by the rural moneylender (120 percent). Thus, of the loans that the poor
could actually access, the borrowers were better off paying 60 percent to
the ngos than 120 percent to the rural moneylender.
All these women were jointly held responsible for the repayment of
individual loans. Thus each woman was responsible for the repayment of
all the other loans in the Center. When a default occurred, the bank (or
the ngo) withheld money from the other members, forcing them to either
pay up or lose access to future loans. The bank tied individual responsi-
bility to group responsibility, using that as a mechanism to (1) maintain
tight fiscal control over repayments; (2) police women borrowers’ finan-
cial conduct after they received a loan; and (3) enforce payment through
collective punishment for individual defaults.
This close surveillance of its women members23 allowed the bank offi-
cers to forestall any impending default. It was the women borrowers who
did the surveillance on behalf of the bank (or the ngo). Fearing potential
defaults, women informed their managers about misuse of the loans by

206â•… Lamia Karim

borrowers. This surveillance of conduct resulted in the daily strife that I
witnessed in these group relations. Since these women and their families
were linked together through loans, it was not only the women but also the
community that had become part of this surveillance mechanism.
The surveillance of women already exists in rural Bangladesh, espe-
cially in the regulation of rural women’s sexuality and comportment. The
microcredit ngo (the Grameen Bank and other ngos) appropriated and
routinized this form of surveillance as part of its credit operating struc-
ture. ngo managers routinely told their women clients: “You are respon-
sible for the loan and you have to make sure that no one defaults.” This
transference of responsibility from the ngo to the women reduced the
operating costs for the ngos (they did not have to hire additional people
to monitor the borrowers), and at the same time, it created a very effective
policing system whereby rural people voluntarily reported potential de-
faults to their managers for fear of financial reprisals. Thus, poor women
policed other poor women, evicting poorer members from the group in
fear of losing future income. This behavior let ngo officers off the hook,
and they did not take any responsibility for the actions that the commu-
nity took to enforce payments.
The picture gets complicated when one realizes that the most wide-
spread and profitable business from microcredit is the practice of usury
by women. Moneylending allows women to conduct business without
leaving their homes. Women who do not possess marketable skills opt for
moneylending as a profitable alternative. These women adopt the norms
of the traditional moneylender and loan money at 120 percent rate of re-
turn. This notion of 120 percent interest is a form of implicit social knowl-
edge. Rural women do not make exact interest calculations on these loans.
In their universe of social knowledge, two interest rates are known, the
rate charged by the ngo and that by the rural moneylender. As rational
economic agents, they opt for the higher number of the traditional money-
lender. Moreover, usury created a chain of dependencies that involved kin
and nonkin alike, and tied multiple ngos together. A loaned to B who
loaned to C who loaned to D, and so on. The failure on the part of a distant
person on this chain had a ripple effect in rural society, affecting a number
much higher than a couple of people or ngos.
During my research, I saw that credit-�related strife among members
and their families were routine occurrences. Women would march off
together to scold the defaulting woman, shame her or her husband in a
public place, and, when she could not pay the full amount of the install-

Demystifying Microcreditâ•…207
ment, go through her possessions and take away whatever they could sell
off to recover the defaulted sum. In those circumstances when the woman
had failed to repay, which happened several times a month in the ngos I
studied, the group members would repossess the capital that the woman
had built with her loans. This ranged from taking away her gold nose ring
(a symbol of marital status for rural women) to cows and chicks to trees
that had been planted to be sold as timber to collecting rice and grains
that the family had accumulated as food, very often leaving the family
with no food whatsoever. The women who committed these acts did so
at the exhortations of ngo officers, but they also considered these acts
to be “protecting their investments,” and the defaulting woman as some-
one who had “broken faith with the community.” These acts were com-
mitted with the full knowledge of ngo officers, but the officers did not
participate in these collective acts of aggression. Instead, they threatened
to withhold future loans from group members unless the defaulted money
was recovered.
In instances where everything had been repossessed because of a large
default, members would sell off the defaulting member’s house. This is
known as house breaking (ghar bhanga) and has a long history in rural
society. It is considered as the ultimate shame of dishonor in rural society.
In my research area, house breaking occurred several (six to seven) times,
whereas smaller forms of public shaming occurred every week. In addi-
tion, there were a few incidents of suicide committed by men who had
been shamed by their inability to protect the honor of their families. But
these instances were rare and were often the result of multiple causes,
such as flooding in low-�lying areas that had pushed the family into delin-
quency. What is important to note though is how these preexisting coer-
cive norms, house breaking for example, have become institutionalized as
part of the ngo technologies of loan recovery.
The ngos also used the apparatuses of the state, such as the police
and courts, to harass these poor women to pay up. ngos often filed cases
against individual women who would be taken into police custody and
kept as criminals (ashami ) until the family repaid the defaulted sum. In
Bangladesh where discourses of shame and modesty predominate, if a
woman was held in police custody overnight not only had she brought
shame on her husband as a criminal, she had also lost her virtue. When
loan recovery techniques became entangled in existing social attitudes
toward women, women who came into their affinal homes through mar-
riage were often isolated as “outsiders” and blamed for bringing shame to

208â•… Lamia Karim

their husbands and their families. I met with several of these women who
were divorced by their husbands because they had “disgraced” their fami-
lies by going to jail.24 Husbands blamed their wives for shaming them and
their families, although the husbands were the beneficiaries of these loans.
The question of rural women’s complicity and dissent were important
facets of how the practice of loan recovery worked in rural life. Women
did try to increase the wealth of their family by monitoring other women.
Being a provider of loans secured the woman’s status within the family as
long as she could forestall defaults and not shame her family. Women also
tried to manipulate the ngos by borrowing from multiple sources with-
out letting their managers know. To prevent membership overlap, ngos
required that their borrowers remained faithful to one institution. To cir-
cumvent that policy, women sometimes traveled to neighboring villages
to borrow from different ngos. Often women would make their loan offi-
cer wait for several hours when they were unwilling to return the money.
For women there were some positive aspects to ngo membership. ngo
association had given them some limited forms of practical freedom. Now
rural women had more reasons to be seen around town. They could take
some time off from their housework to do “ngo business” that their in-Â�
laws could not interfere in. But these poor women were firmly inside an
interlocking system of debt to multiple ngos, kin, fellow borrowers, and
traditional moneylenders. The more they expanded their circulation in
these overlapping systems of borrowing (that is borrowing from one to
pay off another), the more indebted they became.
With the spread of microcredit operations in rural economy, ngo man-
agers too faced tremendous pressure from ngo headquarters to operate
smooth loan programs. Failure on their part to collect the money from the
women borrowers resulted in the ngos’ withholding money from their
paychecks. Too many defaults in their area would result in their getting
fired or never being promoted. Thus, ngo managers applied a range of
tactics to recover money from the women such as cancellation and late
fees that formed a safety net in the event of a default. These charges do
not show up on the books, and can only be accessed by creating trust with
the women.
The ngo officers were fully cognizant of the negative consequences on
women of their actions to recover the money.25 Yet they were unwilling to
replace the notion of collective contracts with individual contracts. They
realized that weakening the tight fiscal control of loan recovery would
make them lose profit because recovery of loans would become quite diffi-

Demystifying Microcreditâ•…209
cult. When I mentioned some of my reservations about microcredit prac-
tices to a manager of the Grameen Bank, she pointedly said: “Why are you
surprised? Grameen Bank is a business and not a charity.”

The Female Petty Moneylender: Jahanara’s Story

Contrary to the claims of the Grameen Bank and other ngos that they
have reduced traditional moneylending through microcredit ngos, what
we find instead is the reproduction of usury at multiple levels of society,
and the normalization of that activity within a new group of actors: poor,
Muslim women.26 Through membership in ngo loan programs, the for-
merly assetless poor have been able to accumulate some assets which now
make them creditworthy in the estimation of the moneylender. Thus, the
net of usury is cast much wider, bringing all sorts of formerly poor and
assetless people inside its web. In my research area, the traditional money-
lenders often boasted that their business was better due to ngo loans. The
neoliberal subject that has emerged out of this encounter between micro-
credit and rural social relations is the figure of the female petty money-
lender.
Moneylending is prevalent in villages that are close to markets, for the
obvious reason that traders seek out the women borrowers for loans. In
my research area, this village was Krishnonagar, which was located next
to a large market, and on the other side of the market was the town. In an
informal survey of Krishnonagar, 100 households out of 230 ngo benefi-
ciary households were engaged in moneylending. As a result of the prox-
imity to the market, the women of Krishnonagar were visible in public
spaces. Compared to women living in the interior villages, these women
possessed a higher degree of physical mobility. Women here had more ac-
cess to nonkin men because of the location of their village, and it was ac-
ceptable for them to talk to nonkin men. ngo-�related activities had added
to that mobility and had created some new pathways for these women
to interact with the larger community. Grameen Bank, brac, Proshika,
and asa offices were spread through the town, and access to these offices
meant a trek through town. The women of Krishnonagar told me that they
had access to the market prior to joining these ngos. Many of them had to
walk through the market to get to other places. As they pointed out, ngo
membership did not necessarily make them into more “mobile subjects,”
but it did give them more reasons to be seen around town without people
necessarily casting aspersions on their moral character.
One morning in December 1998, I went with my research assistant in

210â•… Lamia Karim

search of female petty moneylenders in Krishnonagar. I was told that Jaha-
nara Begum was the most famous moneylender in this area. She had over
350,000 takas ($7,446) invested in moneylending.27 What did it mean, I
had wondered, for a woman to have amassed so much money? How did
she get to become such a successful moneylender?
Jahanara’s husband operated a tea shop with her money. Her husband
was considered a “weak” man by villagers because his wife was so success-
ful. Jahanara had two sons and two daughters. Her eldest daughter had
studied up to grade seven, and she was training to be a moneylender. How-
ever, none of the younger children was enrolled in school. In her words,
“What can they do with an education? Better to learn moneylending at a
young age.”
When we arrived, Jahanara came forward to meet us. She was dressed
in a red sari and wore substantial amounts of gold on her person (nose
ring, bangles, and a chain) for a rural person. A striking woman, Jaha-
nara looked confident and well fed. She had already notified several of her
neighbors that an elder sister from abroad was going to write about her in
a book that would be read by many people, and soon a group of women
gathered around us. They all admired Jahanara, and soon it was clear that
they were all in debt to her.
Jahanara invested her money in four categories: short-�term business,
small businesses in the market, middle-�level farmers, and ngo borrowers.
Of this, the majority of the money was invested in short-�term business;
usually the profits were repaid after three to six months. The money was
lent to traders who would buy local produce such as paddy, betel leaves,
jute, and timber and take them by boat to other parts of the country where
they fetched higher prices. Then they returned with produce from other
parts of the country to sell it in their local market. People consider it a safe
form of investment. They do not lose the money unless the boat capsizes
with the goods, which, from what I was told, was a rare event.
Jahanara’s day was not typical for a rural woman. She did not stay at
home to do housework. Most of her time was spent collecting money from
traders. She also spent considerable time going to ngo meetings to pay
her dues or to collect new loans. When I asked Jahanara about her success,
she began to share this with me:

I have also taken out loans in my daughter’s name and in the names of
other people. I am teaching my daughter my trade. I take loans out by
proxy. I pay these women 100 takas [approximately $2] each for letting

Demystifying Microcreditâ•…211
 me take the loan. Now all the ngos give me the highest loans possible.
If they do not want to give me the kind of loan I want, I say to them,
I will cross out my name and go elsewhere. There are so many ngos,
another ngo will give me money. (Here she paused and laughed.) They
need me more than I need them. They do not want me to leave. I am
a good investment. I have money so I always pay my installments on
time.

This is how Jahanara described her success:

One has to run. If you sit around, nothing will happen. I go with the
members to the ngo office when we have to get the loan. I get the
money and leave. I don’t stay in their office long. When I give money to
ngo women borrowers, I have to be careful. These women are so needy.
You cannot give them too much money; 1,000 or 2,000 takas [between
$21 and $43] is about the maximum amount. If I give them too much
money, then I have to walk around empty-�handed later. They will not
be able to pay back. I give them loans when they cannot pay their kistis
or when there is an emergency.

At the end of our conversation, Jahanara said that she didn’t think that
other women could become like her. According to her,

They do not understand anything except their husbands. If I gave my

earnings to my husband, he would use it all up. And I just invest my
money in business. In the beginning, I never thought of getting food,
clothes for my children. I was very careful with my money. If you go to
the homes of these women on the day they get a loan from an ngo, you
will find that for the next seven days they spend the money on fish and
meat. My husband is also not like other men. He lets me have my way.

The following week, we met Jahanara at the Grameen Bank meeting.

She was the Center leader of the Grameen Group in that village. Grameen
Bank officers only collect the installments after everyone has assembled
and paid up every single penny owed to Grameen. If any woman was miss-
ing, and that usually happened when she did not have the money to repay,
then all the other women in the group had to wait. This coercive technique
deployed by bank officers created a lot of friction among the women as
they were forced to remain at the Center instead of returning home to do
their housework.
At this meeting one woman called Kashai Bou (a butcher’s wife) was

212â•… Lamia Karim

not present. Kashai Bou lived several villages away, and the Grameen Bank
officer took Jahanara as Center leader with him to collect the money from
her. We went along with them. On the way to Kashai Bou’s house, Jahanara
proudly told us that she had broken many houses when members could
not pay: “We know when they cannot pay, so we take a carpenter with us
to break the house.”
When I asked Jahanara, “Why do you break the houses of kin?” Jaha-
nara became indignant at first. Her initial comment was: “Why shouldn’t
we? They have breached their trust with us. If they cannot pay, then we
will have to pay. Why should I pay for them?” Then she became quiet and
said after a while:

It is not good to break someone’s house, but we are forced to do it.

This is how we get loans from Grameen Bank and other ngos. They
put pressure on us to recover the money, then we all get together and
force the defaulting member to give us the money. We don’t care how
we do it.

Neutralizing Dissent: Power/Knowledge in Development

“The texts of development have always been avowedly strategic and
tactical—promoting, licensing, and justifying certain interventions
and practices, delegitimizing others. . . . What do the texts of devel-
opment not say? What do they suppress? Who do they silence—and
why?” (Crush 1995, 5)

Why is it that what I have written in these pages is not legible as a public
discourse? The answer to that question is that these critiques are silenced
in ngo-�dominated research spaces. Knowledge is power, but power also
legitimizes what counts as knowledge, and ngos are powerful institutions
in Bangladesh. The hagiographic transcripts of the Grameen Bank have
to be apprehended at the crux of power and knowledge in the context of
Bangladesh. For example, in Bangladesh, there is only one English lan-
guage academic publishing house of note called University Press Limited
(upl). Obviously, this gives its editorial board tremendous power over
what gets published in the English language in Bangladesh. In contrast,
the vernacular press is a rich source of NGO critiques, but Western donors
and researchers do not have access to them. In ngo-�dominated research
spaces where donors and Western researchers gather, the medium of com-
munication is English, and that keeps out the majority of Bangladeshis
who cannot communicate in English. In fact, the use of English in ngo

Demystifying Microcreditâ•…213
research spaces is ostensibly to accommodate the Western donors, but in
reality it regulates who and what can be heard.
Similarly, in the absence of a responsible state or a progressive social
movement, the rural poor have to rely on the goodwill of the ngos. Vil-
lagers critique ngos with the qualification that ngos offer them ser-
vices that they need, but that they want the terms of these loans to be
more humane. ngo officials in their private scripts admit that develop-
ment cannot take place solely through microcredit, but they censor this
in their public scripts for fear of jeopardizing their jobs (Pereira 1998).
The fragmented political left continues its critique of ngos, but since the
1990s they have lost legitimacy as a political voice. The role of feminists is
complicated because feminist organizations are now organized as ngos.
Furthermore, feminists find it more important to focus on other violent
forms of aggression against women, such as acid burnings and rapes, and
they try to keep a united ngo voice against the tyranny of the clergy.
On August 22, 1998, a conference was held in Dhaka titled “Yunu-
sonomics,” organized by a local professor. The intent of the conference
was to offer microcredit as the new panacea in development economics.
The conference papers were presented in English. When the floor was
opened for questions, the first speaker was an angry retired doctor who
said that he had expected the discussion to be carried on in a language
that was accessible to him. He added that he would speak his opinion in
Bengali. He often went to his village and found that most people were be-
coming poorer after several years of membership with Grameen Bank.
He had calculated the interest charged by Grameen to be over 50 per-
cent. He asked, “How could they claim that this was a new paradigm to be
followed? How was this high interest helping the poor?” Yet not a single
person among the speakers engaged with the doctor, an ordinary citizen
who had come to the conference to engage in a dialogue. There were some
donor representatives present at the conference, but it was unclear if they
understood what the doctor was saying. Thus, critique of microcredit and
Grameen Bank expressed in the vernacular language was effectively neu-
tralized within an ngo-�dominated research space.
In order to fully comprehend why this silencing occurs one has to
understand how the Grameen Bank operates as a source of symbolic capi-
tal for the middle class in Bangladesh. For the first time, we, the people
of Bangladesh—Henry Kissinger’s “bottomless basket”—have given a gift
to the Western development community. Now foreign dignitaries from

214â•… Lamia Karim

the former US President Bill Clinton to Senator Hillary Clinton to Queen
Sophia of Spain come to Bangladesh to study a development micracle, the
Grameen Bank. The Grameen Bank is a source of tremendous national
pride for many Bangladeshis, which makes it all the more difficult to cri-
tique its microcredit policies or its assertions about women’s empower-
ment. Those who do are often labeled as “traitors within.” When in 2006,
Professor Yunus and the Grameen Bank went on to win the Nobel Peace
Prize, it signaled Bangladesh’s arrival as an equal with the West. Bangla-
deshis were euphoric over the Nobel Prize, and elites continue to cite
Yunus as the most famous Bangladeshi in the world. Grameen Bank went
on to gain more power and authority both locally and globally by linking
women’s empowerment to entrepreneurship to create “brave new worlds.”

Notes
This chapter is reproduced by permission of sage from Cultural Dynamics 20, no. 1
(2008): 5–29, © 2008 sage.
1. The other three ngos are Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (now
called brac), Proshika Human Development Forum, and Association for Social
Advancement (asa). All of these ngos work with slight variations on the Gra-
meen Bank model. The Grameen Bank is officially registered as a bank under the
Bangladesh Bank Ordinance (1983) but conceptually it is a nongovernmental
organization. Therefore, in my analysis, I treat it as such.
My research was conducted prior to the events that have engulfed Grameen
Bank and its founder since 2011. The government of Bangladesh has removed
Professor Yunus as the director of the Grameen Bank in 2011. The Grameen Bank
Commission formed by the government in 2012 has recommended that the Bank
should be split into 19 organizations with 51% of shares to be given to the governâ•‚
ment (currently it owns 3% of shares). URL accessed June 21, 2013. http://www
.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/fears- �o ver-�b angladeshs-�b ank-�o f-�t he
-�poor-�grameen-�bank-�as-�commission-�says-�it-�should-�be-�split-�up-�8669179.html.
2. According to the websites of these ngos (www.grameen.com, www.brac.net,
www.asabd.org, www.proshika.org).
3. In Bangladesh, Western aid organizations channel most of their aid through the
ngo sector, which they helped to create in the 1970s. In 1997, the European
Union channeled 25 percent of its aid through the ngo sector.
4. This point will not necessarily hold for smaller ngos in Latin American coun-
tries that have a long tradition of social movements.
5. To facilitate social engineering (or the marketing of products), ngos and the
Grameen Bank undertake information gathering of their clients on diet, health,
education, consumption, etc. similar to the modern state.
6. The need for cheap labor from Third World countries has resulted in the out-�

Demystifying Microcreditâ•…215
 migration of rural people as labor overseas, first to the Middle East in the 1970s
and 1980s, and later to Malaysia and South Korea in the 1990s. These circulations
of people and capital have also brought new ideas into rural society.
7. I maintain that ethnography yields very different conclusions from survey re-
search and focus-�group interviews, the methodological tools of development
economists. Ethnography requires a sustained amount of time with a commu-
nity, building the members’ trust, and observing what people do as opposed to
what people say they do when they are asked questions in a survey.
8. Muhammad Yunus with Alan Jolis. 1998. Banker to the Poor. Dhaka: University
Press Limited.
9. During 1975–90, Bangladesh was under military dictatorship.
10. Transparency International (ti) routinely lists Bangladesh as one of the most cor-
rupt countries in the world.
11. The development ngos support either/or of the two leading political parties, the
Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.
12. ‘Nobel winner starts political party to tackle corruption in Bangladesh,’ The
Guardian, 22 Feb. 2007. URL (accessed June 21, 2013) http://www.guardian.co
.uk/world/2007/feb/23/debtrelief.development/.
13. Since the rural population is largely illiterate, voters are taught the symbols of
different political parties (fish, a sprig of wheat, the scales of justice, etc., that are
the signs for various political parties) to identify the political party.
14. See Yunus, Muhammad. 2008. Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business
and the Future of Capitalism. Washington, DC: Public Affairs.
15. Bangladesh was not formed as a welfare state.
16. In my research I found that ngo managers blamed the borrowers and their hus-
bands for their venture failures. For example, when 50 percent of breeder chick-
ens died within a week of the borrowers’ getting a breeder chicken loan and
setting up operations, the ngo (brac in this instance) managers spoke of the
failure as a fault of the “poor, illiterate village women,” and not as brac’s fault in
targeting people who didn’t have the wherewithal (the training, the facilities, and
so on) to run a chicken farm from a tin shed inside their family compound.
17. The ngo definition of poor is a family of four with less than 0.5 acre of arable land
and with a base income of $2 a day based on the Human Development Index.
18. Giving to kin has a double bind. It is expected that kin members will intercede
and prevent a potential default in order to save the honor of the family. However,
when the extended family is poor or has weak ties with the defaulting member’s
family, they ask the woman to find other means (such as borrow at 120 percent
from a moneylender) to pay off the loan.
19. The leading ngos have model villages, usually close to the capital, Dhaka, to
showcase to international donors how well their money is being spent to train
rural women in economic activities.
20. In my area, the local headmistress of a school, the wife of a lawyer, and wives
of some of the richest merchants in town were members of microcredit ngos.

216â•… Lamia Karim

 ngos prefer richer female members because they are less likely to default. More-
over, as high-�status people in rural society, they can more easily influence poorer
members to pay up.
21. All the ngos I studied replicated this basic structure: group responsibility of
individual loans, strict recovery through weekly (asa and Grameen) or biweekly
(brac) or monthly meetings (Proshika), and product tie-�ins with loans (hybrid
seeds with agricultural loans, breeder chickens for brac loanees). Since 2002,
Grameen Bank moved to a new model called Grameen II where they removed
group responsibility requirement for loans. But they retained the public repay-
ment part of their previous model, hence keeping the public shaming aspect of
loan recovery still in use.
22. At the time of my research, the Grameen Bank had decided to lower the payment
schedule from fifty-�two weeks to fifty weeks, which would mean an additional
rise in the weekly amount (kisti ) paid by the borrowers. For poor people, a weekly
rise of a few takas (the unit of currency) was a tremendous hardship.
23. In development jargon this is euphemistically known as peer monitoring.
24. In my area, the ngo Proshika had filed seventy-�four cases against its women
members, and many of them were taken into police custody. According to the
law of the country, people cannot be taken to jail for delinquency, but powerful
ngos violated these rules to meet their ends.
25. These incidents occurred in front of ngo officers. They would exhort the women
to “collect the money or else. . . .” I brought several such incidents to the atten-
tion of ngo workers in my area, but they would dismiss my concerns by saying,
“These are the work of illiterate people. We [the ngo] do not encourage this. Did
you see us present at the event?”
26. Moneylending in Bengal was traditionally handled by a caste of Hindu money�
lenders. In some instances, Hindu widows often participated in small-�time
moneylending. With the creation of Pakistan in 1947, and with the migration of
Hindus from Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), a new group of Muslim male
moneylenders have emerged. Muslims will often give up moneylending after per-
forming the hajj. However, the entrance of poor Muslim women into the institu-
tion of moneylending is a new phenomenon.
27. Calculated at 47 takas (1998 rate) to $1.

Demystifying Microcreditâ•…217
╉Part iiI╅ Feminist Social Movements and NGOs

P
art III begins with an essay by Saida Hodžić, who argues
that the feminist critique of ngos as neoliberal and de-
politicizing is flawed. She points out that ngos are often
constitutive of women’s movements and suggests that a
nuanced analysis might better understand these ngos as hybrid
formations or assemblages of different movements and organi-
zations formed by coalitions and collectives. Her critique is an
important departure from the argument that neoliberalism has
brought an end to a more progressive and radical feminist past.
She reminds us of the complex history of women’s movements,
not all of which could be seen as uniformly progressive or radi-
cal, which scholars have studied in such complexity, variety, and
detail, and which a “master narrative” of neoliberalism as depoliti-
cization is supplanting. Hodžić also reminds us that not all states
have similar trajectories and that the neoliberal politics of global
capital become sutured to quite different local teleologies and
temporalities, with distinct consequences for feminist activism.
The question of teleology is also taken up by Sabine Lang, who
follows up on her earlier work that argued that ngos have co-�
opted feminist movements. In her essay in this volume, Lang ar-
gues that as feminists have become part of the governance struc-
tures of the European Union (eu), forming part of the “Velvet
Triangle,” as it is called, those feminists and women who are out-
side of ngos or are working in social movements have lost the
ability to be heard. Lang sees this shift in the eu as a loss for
the political possibilities of feminism, especially feminism’s more
innovative traditions of social and collective action.
 Laura Grünberg’s essay focuses on the struggle of one ngo to be heard
in the context of Romania’s transition from a dictatorship to a liberal state.
She examines the relation between nationalism and ngo formation and
reflects on the emergence and history of an ngo that came into exis-
tence in Romania when the nation was at a point of crisis. The ngo, she
argues, reflects the history of the nation, so that within the ngo, as at
the national level, attempts at democratization lead to bureaucratization.
For the ngo, bureaucratization reduces its ability to develop innovative,
local responses to emerging situations. Grünberg’s essay, reflecting on the
problems of feminism in postdictatorship Romania, demonstrates that
local ngos are captured by national histories in states in ways that require
greater research and analysis. Nationalisms form subjects of ngos and
are intimately connected to questions of gender, sexuality, and feminism.
Questions of women’s empowerment are often framed within nationalist
concerns. Thus no feminist ngo can ignore the nationalisms that enable
it to emerge, yet may also present obstacles and constraints that impede
its progress.
In the final essay, Sonia Alvarez revisits her earlier, groundbreaking
research on the “ngo boom” in Latin America. Alvarez finds that femi-
nist work has taken over ngos to create some interesting and important
forms of agency and activism. In short, the ngo form is being taken over
by activists to work through feminist projects. Feminists, she argues, by
reflecting on and analyzing what had gone wrong with ngoization in the
1990s, have attempted to bring back movement building and collective
action to these ngos, even as feminism may not be the only social move-
ment that these collectives are embracing. Feminists now often become
politically active through multiple issues and collaborations. As a result,
feminism itself is changing to become a multidimensional project.
The feminist scholarship assembled here reveals both the power of the
ngo form and its transnational circulation. The essays also reveal the live-
liness of feminist projects and discourses and their dissemination through
ngos of various kinds. We suggest that the diversity of states and transna-
tional and local contexts means that the ngo form and feminist teleology
remain unstable and heterogeneous. The dynamic relationship between
feminisms and ngos is giving rise to new conflicts and collaborations.
Our concluding essay in this volume addresses this point in more detail
and offers some speculations about future directions.

220â•… Part III

╉CHAPTER 8 Saida Hodžić

Feminist Bastards
Toward a Posthumanist Critique of NGOization

Introduction
The Women’s Manifesto for Ghana (The Coalition on the Women’s
Manifesto for Ghana 2004), an important political document pro-
duced by a coalition of Ghanaian organizations and feminists, has
been celebrated as having transcended the limitations of ngo-
ization (Mama, Tsikata, Mensah-�Kutin, and Harrison 2005; Tsi-
kata 2009). Praising it, the Ghanaian scholar and activist Dzodzi
Tsikata highlights the successes of mass mobilization and coali-
tional work: “The Women’s Manifesto project is a showcase of
how broadbased political processes and partnerships involving
mass membership organizations can enable small organizations
to transcend their limitations, maximize their resources, create a
productive division of labour and, most significantly, to give their
projects legitimacy and grounding” (2009, 190). Feminist schol-
ars will likely recognize the positive value attributed to coalitions,
seen today as some of the most productive forms of politically
engaged feminist organizing (Mohanty 2003; Butler 2004; Swarr
and Nagar 2010). But what exactly is so dangerous about nongov-
ernmental organizations (ngos) that their limits need to be tran-
scended? And do coalitions such as the Ghanaian Women’s Mani-
festo indeed usher in a new era of political feminist organizing?
I take these questions as a point of departure for a critical
engagement with feminist criticisms of ngos, which I call the
“ngoization paradigm.” I will analyze the logic of this paradigm
and trace its theoretical genealogies in order to probe, in Joan Scott’s
spirit of critique, the “blind spots that insure coherence and stability”
(2008, 7). The ngoization paradigm now organizes feminist knowledge
about ngos, often constraining the space of analysis and critique. I sug-
gest that it obfuscates power relations in feminist organizing as much
as it reveals them, and that we need to pay close attention to the tropes
of failure, fall, and contamination that haunt it. By bringing theoretical
analysis in conversation with an ethnography of the Ghanaian Women’s
Manifesto (hereafter “Manifesto”), I attempt to think “otherwise” (Wieg-
man 2002a, 3) about new feminist formations and anti-�institutional cri-
tiques.
In feminist scholarship, ngoization is defined as a “steady increase in
the number of women’s non-Â�governmental organizations” and is under-
stood as a dominant trend in feminist organizing (Jad 2007, 177). ngo-
ization is not a descriptive, but an evaluative notion: it does not simply
refer to the boom in ngos, but understands this phenomenon as harmful
for feminism. Critics of ngoization claim that ngos have enabled the de-
politicization of social and women’s movements, their appropriation by
donor-�driven agendas, and a neoliberal co-�optation of feminist practice.
They understand ngos as a fall from Eden—a teleological decline from an
idealized age of revolutionary feminist activism to the contemporary era
of professionalized organizations that function as donors’ peons. Their ar-
guments, I will contend, hinge on a valorization of earlier women’s move-
ments, producing a nostalgic and Eurocentric revision of feminist history
and resuscitating an uncritically humanist vision of feminist organizing.
The ngoization paradigm has become institutionalized as a master
narrative and now serves as a normative theory that structures the femi-
nist field of knowledge about ngos. We see the operations of this referen-
tial normativity in a range of recent historical and ethnographic analyses
of regional women’s and feminist movements. Scholarship on feminist
activism, organizing, and ngos is increasingly framed by the questions
of whether ngoization happened and whether it affected feminism posi-
tively or negatively. We thus have examinations of ngoization in various
countries and regions: Israel (Herzog 2011), Romania (Grünberg 2000a),
the Czech Republic (Kapusta-Â�Pofahl, Hašková, and Kolářová 2005), the
former Yugoslavia (Bagic 2006), Bangladesh (Nazneen and Sultan 2009),
and the Americas (Markowitz and Tice 2002). This paradigm now also
structures entire ethnographies of ngos, in which the question “Is the
professionalized feminist ngo the most appropriate form of feminist po-

222â•… Saida Hodžić

litical practice?” (Murdock 2011, 5; my emphasis) serves as the central
point of analysis.
The normativity of the ngoization paradigm is also evident in feminist
scholarship that disagrees with its assumptions and conclusions. Scholars
seem compelled to address the ngoization paradigm to make their work
intelligible, even when this paradigm restrains the nuance and reach of
their analyses. Julie Hemment’s ethnography of Russian women’s orga-
nizing, for instance, attends to it by trying to “refuse the dichotomy of
success/failure” (2007, 145) and arguing against the assertion that bureau-
cratized ngos have stifled the wider participation of grassroots women
in the newly professionalized world of feminist organizing.1 Similarly,
Sarah Phillips’s study of Ukrainian women’s social activism addresses the
charges of professionalization and elite formation while arguing that a cri-
tique predicated on these terms prevents us from understanding the com-
plexities of ngos (2008, 140).2 Of note here is that these scholars have to
position their contextualized analyses in reference to a paradigm that is
prefigured as universally valid.
I take issue with the ngoization paradigm because it hinges on an
anti-�institutional critique, while having itself become a stable and closed
circuit of truth claims. Critics seem to know that ngos are detrimental
to women’s movements and feminist politics. In their analysis of trans-
national feminism, Linda Peake and Karen de Souza thus write that it
is “well documented” that “ngos have become corporatized, acting as
arms of the state and playing an active part in the downloading of labor
and costs from the state to local communities” (2010, 110). Consensus
about the depoliticizing effects of ngos has been reached, but not on the
basis of historicized or contextualized analyses in postcolonial or trans-
national contexts. Most notably, the ngoization paradigm disregards an
entire field of ethnographic scholarship that offers substantive critiques
of ngos (Weisgrau 1997; Fortun 2001; Riles 2001; Magno 2002; Hemment
2007; A. Sharma 2008; S. Phillips 2008; Murdock 2008).3 These scholars
examine the articulations of ngos, women’s movements, and feminist
organizing critically, but not in the evaluative and binary terms set by the
ngoization paradigm; rather, they analyze the sociocultural and political
life of ngos, their forms, and their contradictory effects. The refusal to
engage with this scholarship has contributed to the stability and imper-
meability of the ngoization paradigm. Bringing ethnography to directly
bear on this paradigm, I suggest, opens new analytical spaces for feminist
scholarship.

Feminist Bastardsâ•…223
The NGOization Paradigm and Its Genealogies
The work of two critics has been central to the initial formation of the
ngoization paradigm. Sabine Lang and Sonia Alvarez formulated the idea
of the shift from collective and political women’s movements to profes-
sional bureaucracies. Lang defined ngoization as a move from movements
to projects: “ngoization entails a shift away from experience-Â�oriented
movement politics toward goal- and intervention-Â�oriented strategies”
(1997, 116). Alvarez marked bureaucratization and institutionalization as
defining features of ngoization, writing about an “increased profession-
alization and specialization of significant sectors of feminist movements”
(1998, 295). Subsequent critics have relied heavily on Alvarez, and in doing
so, have singled out her negative assessments of ngos and ignored her
larger arguments.4 ngoization becomes a “hazard facing mass move-
ments” (A. Roy 2004, 41) that has depoliticized feminism: “Issues of col-
lective concern are transformed into projects in isolation from the general
context in which they are applied and without taking due consideration of
the economic, social, and political factors affecting them” (Jad 2007, 177).
More recent theorizations point to the rise of ngos in the global South
and stress their imbrications in the development apparatus and neoliberal
reforms. Tsikata characterizes ngoization “by the lack of a mass base,
connection and accountability; donor dependence; the substitution of
ngos for civil society and mass movements; the prioritization of a pro-
fessional technocratic approach over politics because ngos cannot be
overtly political or partisan; and a short-�term project-�based approach
and the favouring of magic bullets over long-�range broad agendas in the
struggle for women’s rights and gender equality” (2009, 186). Sangtin
Writers and Nagar take the criticism further by casting ngos as hege-
monic organizations that prevent feminist oppositional politics. Because
of ngos, “development ideology is reproduced in the resistant spaces of
political action—through homogenization, through the politics of fund-
ing, through the articulation of universalizing discourses of the modern
state” (2006, 146). Rather than critiquing the development apparatus, in
this view, feminists have been co-�opted by it and have become antipoliti-
cal. Arundhati Roy states pithily: “The ngo-Â�ization of politics threatens
to turn resistance into a well-�mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-�to-�5 job.
With a few perks thrown in” (2004, 45).
Though not completely overlapping, the above definitions of ngoiza-
tion share both formal and substantive features. For the critics, ngoiza-

224â•… Saida Hodžić

tion is formally distinct because it entails an alleged historical shift from
collective movements to organizations. As we shall see later, the differen-
tiation between earlier anti-Â�institutional women’s movements and con-
temporary formalized ngos is a defining feature of this paradigm. At the
substantive level, this scholarship brings together concerns about profes-
sionalization, the proliferation of donor-�driven agendas, and the domi-
nance of development ideologies, all of which are understood as stripping
away progressive political agendas from social and women’s movements.
Critics of ngoization point out ngos’ imbrications in the nexus of
discourse, power, and expert knowledge. Through the so-�called gender
mainstreaming and gender and development paradigms operationalized
by states, donors, and ngos, feminism is said to have become a gender
technocracy (Alvarez 1998, 312; Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006, 146).
Critics see ngos as stripping “gender” of its radical content and instead
producing bureaucratic expert knowledge geared at population manage-
ment (Alvarez 1998, 308; see also Hemment 2007, 83). The story is one
of the contamination of originally progressive and autonomous feminist
politics by the modernist and developmental state. This contamination is
seen as having depoliticized and professionalized feminism, thus disem-
powering nonprofessional women. Critics are concerned about the for-
mation of new elites, ngos’ lack of broader social base, and their stifling
of grassroots women’s voices (Jad 2007, 178; Sangtin Writers and Nagar
2006, 143). ngos are said to have reformulated feminist goals, replacing
sociopolitical transformation with complacent policy making. For critics,
ngos address only culturally and politically acceptable questions (Alvarez
1998, 306) and advocate for mere reform of the state—reform that might
extend state power over women’s lives and create new forms of depen-
dence and regulation (Lang 1997, 112). Some critics also draw attention to
the interstices between ngos, the retrenchment of the welfare state, and
the processes of privatization and liberalization, as well as the operations
of ngos as agents of the ostensibly democratic reforms imposed by the
United States (Jad 2007).
To understand the logic and power of this paradigm, it is useful to trace
some of its genealogies. The ngoization paradigm stands on the shoulders
of three important strands of critical theory: critiques of the development
apparatus, critiques of feminist affiliations with the neoliberal and mas-
culinist state, and critiques of the institutionalization of women’s studies
and the field’s concomitant failures. First, the ngoization paradigm ex-
tends Foucauldian analyses of power knowledge from development to

Feminist Bastardsâ•…225
feminist ngos, building on Arturo Escobar’s critique of developmental
conjunctures of power and knowledge about the Third World. The de-
velopment discourse, Escobar wrote, has “fostered a way of conceiving of
social life as a technical problem, as a matter or rational decision and man-
agement to be entrusted to that group of people—the development pro-
fessionals—whose specialized knowledge allegedly qualified them for the
task” (1995, 52). James Ferguson also argued that “the ‘development’ appa-
ratus” (1994: 15) propagates the “governmentalist” (1994: 36) dogma—the
notion that the state can and will benevolently shape economy and so-
ciety—while in fact expanding state control. To do so, the development
apparatus constructs its own objects of knowledge and ways of knowing,
reposing political questions in technical language (1994). By constructing
poverty as an outcome of ostensibly inadequate local knowledge or “back-
ward” rural traditions, for instance, it erases considerations of historical
inequalities, transnational labor migration, and class and race relations.
For critics of ngoization, women’s movements have become just such an
apparatus.
Another genealogy is what Robyn Wiegman calls “the late-Â�twentieth-Â�
century feminist tradition of critiquing the state as the end logic of politi-
cal reform” (2008, 51). Inspired by Wendy Brown’s critique of “feminism’s
turn to the state to adjudicate or redress practices of male dominance”
(1995, ix), this scholarship questions feminist alliances with state institu-
tions, and in particular the turn to legal reforms that do not challenge state
order itself. As Wiegman puts it, feminists identify “with social move-
ments whose profound political force had a great deal to do with their
ethos of anti-Â�institutionalism” (2008, 54). The rise of human and women’s
rights paradigms and liberal feminism changed this dynamic in the 1990s,
fostering demands for state protection, funding, and legislation. Brown ar-
ticulated the concern about this shift, poignantly demanding that we pay
attention to “the perils of pursuing emancipatory political aims within
largely repressive, regulatory, and depoliticizing institutions that them-
selves carry elements of the regime (e.g., masculine dominance) whose
subversion is being sought” (1995, x–xi). Consequently, critics of ngoiza-
tion see ngos as vehicles of state-�oriented, reformist politics.
This poignant critique has a blind spot: its appeal to the universality of
feminist dispositions leaves the issue of politics of location unaddressed.
Meanwhile, the question of the feminist relationship to the state was long
a point of conflict among feminists worldwide. Historically speaking,
feminists based in the United States and Western Europe did not collabo-

226â•… Saida Hodžić

rate with the state, and took issue with women in socialist countries who
did. Opposition to the state, then, has a particular valence in the global
North but is not a universally privileged form of feminism. As we shall see
later, African feminists do not see collaboration with the state as a betrayal
of feminist principles.
Finally, the ngoization paradigm resonates with the critique of insti-
tutionalized academic feminism (Wiegman 2002; Joan Scott 2008). As
feminism moved from street to university, in one account of the origin
story (Wiegman 2008, 60), it began to suffer from the double binds of its
successes and lost some of its “critical edge” (Joan Scott 2008, 6). Wieg-
man asks:

Has academic feminism betrayed its radical political roots, substituting

abstraction for action, legitimacy for risk? Have the emergent genera-
tions of professionally trained feminists abandoned their foremothers’
tradition by making of feminism an academic career? Has our suc-
cess, in short, engendered failure, transforming grassroots social move-
ment and anti-�institutional ethics to prototypically liberal and hence
reformist, not revolutionary, ideals? (2002a, 3)

The ngoization paradigm mirrors critiques of academic institutionaliza-

tion but lacks the latter’s historicized analyses and more nuanced (and
charitable) hermeneutics. Instead, when feminist scholars analyze the in-
stitutionalization of activism, failure is the dominant trope. Using ngos
as the mirror, then, allows academic feminists to deflect concerns about
failure and the danger of professionalization onto the other institutional-
ized feminists, those working with ngos.

Longing for Humanist Sisterhood: NGOization and Feminist Nostalgia

At the heart of the ngoization critique is the juxtaposition between
women’s movements and ngos. As we have seen, the very definitions
of ngoization are structured by the claim that feminist organizing has
turned collective and political women’s movements into professional ngo
bureaucracies. For the critics, ngos are everything that women’s move-
ments were not. The very concept of ngoization relies on a temporal logic
according to which women’s movements have given way, been subsumed
under, or turned into ngos. In Lang’s words, “sisterhood has converged
in what I shall call the establishment of ngos instead of political move-
ments” (1997, 106). Alvarez, in turn, refers to the critics’ mourning the
loss of original feminism and its radical character: “the heroic days of bar-

Feminist Bastardsâ•…227
ricades and demonstrations seem to be over” (1998, 305, quoting Alicía
Frohmann and Teresa Valdés).
The following table is a condensed and abstract rendition of the ngo-
ization paradigm. Although I have tried to interpret the critics’ claims re-
sponsibly and include only the language they used, tables cannot render
arguments in full or give a complete account of scholars’ claims.5 My main
purpose here is to reveal the contours of the oppositional framework at
the core of the ngoization paradigm and to point out the limitations of
the nostalgic imagination that guides the tropes of lack, fall, and contami-
nation.
In this paradigm, women’s and feminist ngos are understood in refer-
ence to women’s movements under the signs of contamination and for-
malization. Critics see ngos and movements as antithetical to each other,
to the extent that ngoization signals the end of everything in feminism
that is politically progressive and radical. In this view, ngos have led to
the loss of “the possibility of forming broader networks and institutions
that may indeed have the power to mobilize along central feminist issues”
(Lang 1997, 114). This understanding leads to nostalgic laments for the
romanticized “autonomous feminist groups or collectives of yesteryear”
(Alvarez 1998, 306). Overall, the critics’ assessments of ngos are struc-
tured by a particular economy of value: they idealize women’s movements
while disapproving of and dismissing ngos.
If ngos have indeed replaced women’s movements and taken the edge
off feminist organizing, we can understand why they are depicted as haz-
ardous. Yet at the core of this comparative framework is an uncritical con-
ception of past women’s movements that entails active acts of forgetting.
When the critics paint a largely positive picture of the feminist past, they
do not portray it as a concrete and historical referent but as a vortex of
valued symbolic epithets. They romanticize earlier forms of feminism, in-
voking essentialized notions of wholesome, egalitarian, and politically
unified collectives. In doing so, the critics obliterate feminist crises and
the inherent divisions, inequalities, and blind spots of past women’s move-
ments, such as their reliance on women as stable subjects with shared ex-
periences of patriarchy.
For instance, Islah Jad forgoes a sustained analysis of class, power, dif-
ference, and representation in earlier Arab women’s movements, even
though they were run by “highly cultured and educated upper-Â�middle-Â�class
women” who met in literary salons and established charitable societies
(2007, 184). Lang’s (1997) and Myra Ferree’s (1997) analyses of ngoization

228â•… Saida Hodžić

From Women’s Movements to the NGO Apparatus
Women’s Movements NGOs

Collectives, organic social networks Organizations

Feminist culture Femocracy
Large, fluid, functionally Small, disconnected, specialized
undifferentiated
Broad, interconnected concerns Issue-�oriented, narrow focus
Informal; have cause, mission, Professional
conviction
Experience Expert knowledge
Militant participants Paid staff
Feminists Genderists
Organizing, consciousness-�raising Projects, services, advocacy,
interventions
Processes Measurable outcomes
Mobilizing Networking
Intimacy, connection, broad social Distanced from “real” grassroots
base women
Raise contentious issues, connect Depoliticize gender, work on
the local and personal to the politically acceptable questions
structural and political
Gender as a critical, revolutionary Gender as a grant
concept
Autonomous, outside of capital Dependent on donors or the state
Antihierarchical, egalitarian, shared Inequitable internal power
power formation structures, elite
Antagonistic to the state, leftist Policy-�oriented, cooperative with
politics the state
Want to transform culture and Want to reform the state
politics
Face-�to-�face contact (public Modern communication methods
mobilization) (public relations)
Leftist oppose development “Free-Â�market” feminists promote
ideology, challenge global neoliberalism
inequality
and bureaucratization in postunification Germany are marked by a differ-
ent erasure: they rely on an uncritically ethnocentric and state-�organized
framework of who counts as a proper subject of German womanhood
and women’s movements. While lamenting the effects of ngoization on
“women as victims of unification” (Ferree 1997, 46), Lang and Ferree see
only German Germans as “women” and ignore the women’s movements’
neglect of migrant women in their midst. Their analyses of encounters be-
tween East and West German feminisms presuppose heteronormativity,
whiteness, citizenship, and unproblematic gendered subjectivity, leaving
invisible the consequences of historical and contemporary feminist orga-
nizing on Germany’s inappropriate/d others (Trinh 2005).
The idealized conceptions of a properly political and collective femi-
nist past do not readily map onto actual histories. When scholars analyze
ngos in reference to particular histories of women’s movements rather
than their ideal-�typic conceptions, the tropes of the fall and contamina-
tion reach their limits. For instance, Alvarez writes that Latin American
women’s movements subsumed the categories of class, ethnicity, race,
indigeneity, and sexuality to those of gender (Alvarez 1998, 300–301).
Hemment also questions the idealization of earlier women’s movements
as egalitarian, showing that feminism in Russia was never in the purview
of the popular and undifferentiated masses (2007).6
The erasure of concrete historical referents provides an answer to the
puzzle about the popularity and normativity of the ngoization paradigm.
I contend that the nostalgic rewriting of feminist history has popularized
the notion of ngoization by constructing a space for a positive mem-
ory making about earlier women’s movements. Indeed, this paradigm
may be one of few locations in critical feminist literature where women’s
movements are praised and celebrated. Feminist scholars are otherwise
highly attuned to the fact that issues of power and inequality were not
adequately addressed by Western women’s movements prior to the third
wave of feminism, and that they have not been resolved. The ngoization
paradigm seems to provide a curious respite from self-�critique.
Another problem with this memory work is that it builds on an un-
critical humanist and organicist discourse. In constructing movements
as collective and identity-�based while portraying ngos as technocratic
machines, the ngoization paradigm makes it clear that only the former
are valued. Movements are imagined as based on social communities and
“the model of the organic family” (Haraway 1991, 151), in which everyone
got along just fine. In contrast, ngos are understood as organizations first

230â•… Saida Hodžić

and people second. “Here the constituency is not a natural social group,”
Jad laments (2007, 185; my emphasis). In other words, the organic women-�
centered movement has given way to an externally driven machine moti-
vated by neoliberal ideology and directed by states and donors. In this
vision, the neoliberal free-�market, civil society and gender mainstream-
ing agendas have taken over feminist organizing. What is the problem
with machines? They reproduce a logic that turns political questions into
technical problems solvable by machines (Ferguson 1990). For politics, in
contrast, we need humans—according to a humanist understanding of
political agency.
However, for those of us who question humanism’s single vision and
ostensibly all-�encompassing inclusion, machines are not necessarily mon-
sters. I find it methodologically and theoretically important to question
the ascription of positive valence to the “organic” women’s movements
and the ascription of negative valence to the ngo machine. Who counts
as human in this paradigm? Who belongs in the “natural” social world of
women’s movements? Nature has long served as a boundary marker be-
tween citizens and subjects. The benefits of humanism have never been
universal, and race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and geopolitical citizenship
have organized their distribution.
I suggest that Donna Haraway’s metaphor of the cyborg—an early and
poignant response to humanism—helps us develop a critical analysis of
ngos. The metaphor, or myth, of cyborgs is constructed in opposition to
the humanist vision of the subject of politics and “does not dream of com-
munity on the model of the organic family” (Haraway 1991, 151). Unlike the
idealized women’s movements, ngos are “completely without innocence
. . . wary of holism, but needy for connection” (ibid., 151). A posthumanist
cyborg theory does not draw normative boundaries between movements
and ngos; rather, it confounds them. The very idea of a cyborg is “an argu-
ment for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in
their construction” (ibid., 150, my emphasis). For cyborgs, distinctions—
whether between species or, as in this case, between forms of feminist
organizing—are not absolute, but “leaky” (ibid., 152). ngos, I suggest, also
embody “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possi-
bilities” (ibid., 154).
Like cyborgs, ngos have ambivalent origins: “The main trouble with
cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militar-
ism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But ille-
gitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their

Feminist Bastardsâ•…231
fathers, after all, are inessential” (ibid., 151). Who, then, are the parents of
ngos? The critics of ngoization rely on organicist and woman-�centered
kinship metaphors to depict ngos as unwanted children of the women’s
movement, suggesting that the institutional takeover of feminism has pro-
duced illegitimate offspring that did not inherit the movement’s legacy. In
other words, if ngos are the unwanted children of feminist mothers, then
neoliberal states and donors are the dominant fathers to whom women’s
movements have succumbed. The horizontal feminist “sisterhood” (Lang
1997, 106) has died, and the bureaucratic, top-�driven, and masculinist
neoliberal state has given birth to feminist bastards.
But ngos, like cyborgs, are not always faithful to their origins. By
studying their practices, we shall see that where ngos come from and
which strange bedfellows they make need not be a dominant concern.
Some ngos transgress boundaries and produce new kinds of political en-
gagements, however tentative and fraught.
I will argue that the emergence of ngos is a prolifically productive
phenomenon. Here, I build on Jean Comaroff ’s (2007) take on the Fou-
cauldian notion of productivity. Comaroff invites us to consider spheres of
cultural production independently of axiological questions or value judg-
ments. In her analysis of hiv/aids related activism in South Africa, Co-
maroff argues that although few people would claim that the disease is a
positive phenomenon, it has nevertheless been productive: “It has given
birth to significant forms of sociality and signification, of enterprise and
activism, both negative and positive. . . . Such conditions breed desper-
ate forms of inventiveness, representation, and enterprise” (2007, 203).
Ghanaian ngos are productive in that they have breathed new life into
feminist organizing, helping foment new spheres of political activism. Yet
they are not innocent, and their effects are unpredictable and ambivalent.

Historicizing NGOs and Feminist Organizing in Ghana

I begin my analysis of Ghanaian articulations of ngos and movements
with a brief historical account, as I agree with Sarah Phillips that critiques
of ngos need to be set against the backdrop of specific contexts and histo-
ries (Phillips 2008, 140). Historicizing women’s movements from the Gha-
naian perspective challenges the master narrative of ngoization in two
important ways. First, the history of the Ghanaian women’s organizing
teaches us that the term “women’s movement” has never been innocent,
and that “movements” should not be celebrated. Ghana has a long history
of women’s political activity and organizing,7 but the first “women’s move-

232â•… Saida Hodžić

ment” to receive that name was far from horizontal. The 31st December
Women’s Movement was an organization founded in 1982 by the military
government, lending the state a “gender-Â�progressive” hue and a “grand
feminist illusion” (Prah 2003, 7) until its collapse in 2000. Although this
organization had a mass base and a membership of dozens of thousands
of women from all walks of life, it was a state-�led structure, directed and
controlled by the former first lady, Nana Rawlings. Scholars of Ghanaian
feminism have criticized this ostensible movement for monopolizing the
space of feminist activism and suppressing other kinds of women’s orga-
nizing (Manuh 2007; Tsikata 2009; Viterna and Fallon 2008). This history
reminds us that feminists and states rely on the symbolic capital of popu-
lar participation for their legitimacy and that the term “movement” is not
an innocent category, but also an effect of a political discourse and gov-
ernmental practice.8
Second, a contextual analysis teaches us that an anti-�institutional
stance is not universal to feminism. In Ghana and indeed across Africa,
the boundaries between movements and institutions are porous. Afri-
can women’s movements are not always grounded in informal groups
of loosely associated individuals but in various kinds of formal institu-
tions. These include women’s economic cooperatives, government orga-
nizations, and church groups (Mikell 1995), ngos and women’s associa-
tions (Tripp, Casimiro, Kwesiga, and Mungwa 2009; Fallon 2008) as well
as coalitions (Tsikata 2009). My research also points to the coconstitu-
tive emergence of contemporary Ghanaian feminism and ngos in the
waning years of the Rawlings regime.9 Opportunities for feminist orga-
nizing increased with the return of democracy, the availability of funding
for gender and development projects, and the emergence of international
feminists as donors who support projects in Ghana. Among the several
thousand domestic, Ghanaian-Â�led ngos that have women’s empower-
ment as one of their central projects, there are a few dozen women’s ngos
with politically radical agendas. Some of them, particularly those in large
cities, refer to themselves as “feminist,” while others eschew this name; all
are directed by women but see men as collaborators, coworkers, and con-
stituents. These ngos stand out among the organizational structures that
produce politically transformative feminist work.
I have seen Ghanaian activists in and out of ngos get things done by
working with, not against, the state. This is the case even when their work
involves challenges to the state order or the ruling government (Hodžić
2009, 2010). Ghanaian feminists see no value in being oppositional for the

Feminist Bastardsâ•…233
sake of taking a pure stance. Rather, they attempt to regender the state and
further their political agendas through strategic collaborations with spe-
cific institutions and individuals. African feminists think critically about
these alliances, considering them both dangerous and generative.10

The Women’s Manifesto for Ghana

The Manifesto also points to possibilities immanent in new feminist for-
mations that transgress institutional boundaries. This document, which
took Ghana by surprise and attracted a lot of enthusiasm, regenerated
political activism against neoliberal reforms and animated demands for a
neosocialist transformation of the state.
The Manifesto understands itself as a harbinger of a “movement” (The
Coalition on the Women’s Manifesto for Ghana 2004, 70), and its vocabu-
lary bears the imprint of feminism, using notions of “struggle” and “col-
lective action” (ibid., 9) and urging “solidarity” (ibid., 72). At the same
time, the Manifesto coalition is a hybrid form that blurs the boundaries
between institutions and activists. Initiated and “hosted” by an ngo
called abantu for Development, the Manifesto brought together an as-
semblage of individual feminists, ngos, and organizations ranging from
traders,’ teachers,’ and agricultural workers’ unions and associations that
collaborated for over a year. (For the purposes of my argument, note that
most of this work took place in Accra, where many of the coalition mem-
bers are located.) They initially refused funding offered by donors in order
to avoid the short-Â�term “project logic” (Jad 2007, 178) and were later able
to negotiate the terrains of funding and accountability on their own terms.
Porous boundaries and the assemblage of forms marked the making of
the Manifesto: it combined expertise and experience, thrived on the labor
of paid staff and unpaid activists, promoted both advocacy and political
mobilization, aimed at reforming policy as well as transforming the state
and society, and measured its successes on the basis of both outcomes
and processes.
The Manifesto was created in response to frustrations with the gov-
ernment’s work on gender and development and with donor-Â�hijacked
empowerment efforts. Critiquing the depoliticizing effects of the devel-
opment apparatus, the Manifesto takes issue with the ngos’ financial in-
security that constrains their autonomy and independence and “leaves
them open for co-Â�optation by donor priorities and donor-Â�led initiatives”
(The Coalition on the Women’s Manifesto for Ghana 2004, 67). It also
notes that the effects of “empowerment money” (Elyachar 2002), its far

234â•… Saida Hodžić

from transparent distribution, and the ensuing regulation of ngos have
engendered rivalry among ngos and undermined collaborative processes.
As one of its critical interventions, the Manifesto historicizes the
precarity of Ghanaian women. Critical of dominant understandings of
poverty and Ghana’s neoliberal economic policy, the Manifesto questions
the government’s foci on privatization, economic growth, and fiscal sta-
bility, which have “relegated social welfare, social security, and human de-
velopment issues to the background in official thinking and action” (The
Coalition on the Women’s Manifesto for Ghana 2004, 23). It also places
the causes of poverty and disempowerment in historical and global per-
spectives, linking critiques of inequality to the effects of underdevelop-
ment (ibid., 10, 55). Rejecting modernist development ideology, the term
used is “underdeveloped,” not “undeveloped,” and poverty is understood
according to the Marxist view as an effect of politics, the expropriation of
resources, and both colonial and postcolonial exploitation. In agreement
with a number of Ghanaian ngos, the Manifesto does not reject the term
“development” but resignifies it as an aspiration for economic and social
justice.11
Challenging the empowerment paradigm, the Manifesto builds on the
legacy of African feminists who have argued that the situation of women
in Africa cannot be addressed by prioritizing gender alone (Nnaemeka
1998). African feminists have paved the way for the Manifesto’s simulta-
neous focus on gender and its deprivileging as the dominant category for
explaining inequality in favor of contextualized and historicized analyses
of power and difference. Nevertheless, the Manifesto holds that Ghanaian
women are particularly vulnerable in the neoliberal context: they largely
operate in the informal sector of the economy (The Coalition on the
Women’s Manifesto for Ghana 2004, 13), are often responsible for both
household labor and social provision within households, and are imper-
iled by privatization (ibid., 24). The Manifesto therefore demands “social
security arrangements” for “all working women and men in the formal and
informal sectors and in rural and urban areas” (ibid., 15).
Since the Manifesto demands policy changes on the part of the gov-
ernment, it might be misread as a state-Â�centric, “advocacy” document
aimed merely at reform. As we have seen, the demands for state action
and the attribution of state power over the social and the cultural trouble
critics of ngoization, who see demands on the state as evidence of insti-
tutional co-�optation. Yet the Manifesto aims not at the simple reform of
the state or the continuation of the logic of empowerment as charity, but

Feminist Bastardsâ•…235
also at their transformation. Although the Manifesto was in part enabled
by neoliberalism, it articulates a set of aspirations that escape the neolib-
eral “common sense” (Harvey 2005, 39) and formulates neosocialism as
its ideological framework.
Moreover, in the Ghanaian context, demanding that the state redistrib-
ute resources is a political act in its own right. Scholars credit the Mani-
festo with fomenting popular disenchantment with neoliberal ideology
that individualizes responsibility for social welfare and deflects it from the
state: “All of a sudden, people were beginning to ask questions and make
demands on the government to provide certain things” (Rose Mensah-Â�
Kutin, in Mama, Tsikata, Mensah-�Kutin, and Harrison 2005). Aradhana
Sharma’s analysis of Indian ngos also rearticulates the politics of de-
mands: “The use of administrative or governance techniques such as em-
powerment paradoxically ends up producing a critical practice directed
at state agencies; this is a politics of citizenship centered on demanding
resources-Â�as-Â�rights from government bodies” (2008, xxii). In direct con-
trast to ngoization critics, who understand ngos as doling out as “aid or
benevolence what people ought to have by right” (A. Roy 2004, 45),12 we
see that the Manifesto subverts the logic of charity and mobilizes demands
for resources-�as-�rights. Such demands for rights, however embedded in
the logic of liberalism, can transcend the logic of reform because they have
a social life of their own. The production of the Manifesto, scholars and
activists argue, has exceeded the final product: “Collective processes have
become much easier, and trust and goodwill have been built” (Dzodzi Tsi-
kata, in Mama, Tsikata, Mensah-�Kutin, and Harrison 2005).

Coalition on the Fast Track: An Ethnography of Inclusion

Feminist coalitional politics is not free from effects of power. The fol-
lowing ethnographic analysis of the coalition’s efforts to include ngos in
northern Ghana’s Upper East region will show that feminist organizing
was circumscribed by national geopolitics. In this encounter at the cul-
tural and geopolitical margins of the state, the Manifesto coalition repro-
duced difference, reinforced inequality, and limited the scope of political
critique.
On a Friday morning in April 2004, I found myself in an air-�conditioned
conference room in Bolga, attending a “consultative workshop” on the
Manifesto. This coalition-�building effort took place against the backdrop
of regional inequalities. Due to complex historical reasons that range from
economic patterns of trade to warfare, colonial governance by difference,

236â•… Saida Hodžić

and neglect by the independent state, northern Ghana has been marginal-
ized—culturally, economically, and politically. As a result, this region has
become a vortex of ngo activity, much of it structured under the rubric
of development. The several politically engaged women’s ngos in the re-
gion are at the fringes of the national women’s movement. Few feminists
from the national capital address the problem of regional inequality, and
when they do, it is under the rubric of donor-suggested, liberal efforts at
inclusion. These geopolitical and historical constellations of feminism and
development turn inclusion and coalition building into a site of conflict
and the “cunning of recognition” (Povinelli 2002).
The coalition-�building effort was shaped by preexisting inequalities
and donor-�recipient relations. Since Accra-�based ngos and coalitions
are more visible and have easier access to economic and symbolic capi-
tal than northern ngos, they are often seen as donors. At cross-�regional
meetings, for instance, northern ngos commonly ask ngos from Accra
for funding. The Manifesto workshop was marked by more literal donor-�
recipient relations, as it was convened by an international ngo End to
Poverty Ghana (a pseudonym). Although technically an ngo and a mem-
ber of the Manifesto coalition, in practice, this organization functions as
a donor and funds a range of regional “partner” ngos. As these ngos
were the main workshop participants, other feminists from the region
were left out.
The conference room was packed with ngo directors who were bound
by obligations to their donor, even though the organizers had knocked
on their doors just the night before. I was accompanying Elizabeth, the
director of one of the Bolga-Â�based women’s ngos where I conducted part
of my research. The workshop was facilitated by Vida, who presented her-
self as occupying multiple positions: as a committed activist and a mem-
ber of the coalition, a senior officer for End to Poverty with authority over
resources, and a “fellow Northerner” who grew up at the margins of the
state. She was joined by Abena, a staff member from another Accra-�based
ngo. Vida began the meeting by taking credit for the impetus to organize
consultations, saying that she had personally initiated them. At first, she
explained, the coalition had rested on the notion that everybody was in-
vited and could participate equally. In reality, however, ngo activists from
northern Ghana find it difficult to travel to the cosmopolitan cities in the
south of the country, as these trips take anywhere from eight to over thirty
hours. To remedy this, Vida initiated the meetings in northern Ghana and
emphasized her personal commitment to this process: “I wear my official

Feminist Bastardsâ•…237
cap and my Northerner cap. As a Northerner, I felt obliged to do the con-
sultations in the North.” She returned to this point throughout the day,
emphasizing her background and her desire to create a “gender network
for the northern regions, as our issues are uniquely different.”
Vida knew that she would have to appease the local ngos for turning
to them at such a late stage—the coalition had been organized in the pre-
vious year, and at this point the final draft of the document was already
formulated. To preempt charges of having ignored the northern ngos,
Vida claimed that they had in fact been represented—by proxy. “Were you
involved as women from Bolga?” she asked rhetorically, and answered the
question herself: “Yes, because your District Assembly women and politi-
cal parties represented you.” Nevertheless, she stressed that she personally
found this level of representation insufficient and that she wanted to have
the perspectives of ngo-�based activists.
Despite this framing, tensions flared up before Vida even handed out
copies of the Manifesto. When Vida demanded that the participants say
why the Manifesto was an important document, Elizabeth suggested that
perhaps it was not. “We have been working on a similar document here
in Bolga,” Elizabeth said, simultaneously revealing the lack of knowledge
Vida had about local efforts as well as hinting at the more “local”—and
therefore legitimate—character of that document. Vida retorted: “This is
a document that comes from the grassroots, not from ‘Auntie Elizabeth
because she is who she is.’ ”
This conflict over the scope of “grassroots” needs to be unpacked. Eliza-
beth and Vida each characterized the other as elitist and exclusionary, and
used the definitional turf of the “local” and “grassroots” idioms to wage
their battle over leadership and vision in the Ghanaian women’s move-
ment. While Elizabeth questioned the need for the Manifesto and criti-
cized the coalition for ignoring the local efforts of Bolga activists, Vida
suggested that a document coming from Bolga could not be “grassroots”
because it would have been directed by Elizabeth, a well-�educated expert.
By simultaneously acknowledging Elizabeth’s position as an important
leader and accusing her of masterminding the local efforts, Vida skillfully
shifted the critique away from the Manifesto. Her position as a donor and
workshop convener allowed Vida to dictate the terms of debate and to set
limits to the critique that others were allowed to voice.
Later in the day, she made it clear that her definition of what counts as
“grassroots” was the right one. “When you invite people to a workshop,
make sure they represent others,” she said. “A woman from a village does

238â•… Saida Hodžić

not mean a grassroots woman. A District Assembly woman from a village
does.” In other words, grassroots women were those that the Manifesto
coalition had designated as such early on.
The very terms of inclusion and recognition of northern ngos also
produced an impasse. The meeting had the common format of a one-�day
workshop: it was quick and superficial. This format meant that nothing
radically new could be debated. Representatives of ngos were given only
one hour to read and comment on a few chapters of the Manifesto, which
is written in an academic style. As this linguistic register is not easily ac-
cessible to nonelite ngo workers, they were not able to engage with it
deeply. Moreover, the Manifesto’s underlying paradigm was unfamiliar to
most ngos in Bolga. The Manifesto rearticulates causes of women’s prob-
lems by pointing to their structural, historical, and global origins and con-
siders neoliberal policies as an impediment to livelihood and economic
justice. This radical break with the established ngo discourse was im-
possible to “popularize” in a few hours. Unfamiliar with this discourse
and called on to present “their unique issues,” in the ensuing group con-
versation representatives of local ngos listed cultural particularities and
resorted to the common culture-�blaming discourses about patriarchy in
northern Ghana.
Diana, one of the well-Â�known women’s leaders from Bolga, started off
the discussion of the “Women’s Economic Empowerment” section by
raising the issue of microcredit. The Manifesto criticizes microcredit pro-
grams, seeing them as fostering an informal, deregulated economy that
leaves women without access to health care and social security. For Diana
and others in the group, these criticisms were new and unappealing. They
saw microcredit as good—just not good enough for women. “Women
can’t even access credit because of lack of house ownership,” Diana said,
adding that “microcredit schemes should be improved.” Her vision of eco-
nomic empowerment was to extend microcredit, not to curtail it. One
could argue that her stance was a pragmatic one, based on the situation
she observes on a daily basis, since rural and urban women in the region
favor microcredit. Indeed, the most frequent complaint I heard from rural
women was that they did not get enough loans.13 The subsequent conver-
sation made it clear that the Manifesto’s alternative vision of economic
justice was both unfamiliar and difficult to engage with. Moreover, by cou-
pling her support of microcredit with the issue of “cultural” impediments
to economic empowerment, Diana opened the door to the familiar dis-
course of cultural pathologies, saying that “all cultural barriers to owner-

Feminist Bastardsâ•…239
ship should be removed” and telling a story of a woman who lost the pos-
session of her housing after her husband’s death.
“A widow in Garego was asked to marry her late husband’s brother,”
Diana said. “She refused and they burned her rooms.” Others quickly
picked up on this story: “Was anybody arrested?” “How did you find out?”
“Oh, but the village women don’t report to the police.” The discussion
turned to the issue of cultural discrimination against women, without
returning to the Manifesto. Eventually, the group representative wrote
Diana’s remarks on a flip chart. Later in the day, it became evident that
other groups also framed culture as the main cause of women’s problems.
Group reports and flip charts highlighted various aspects of cultural dis-
crimination against women and emphasized it as the main impediment
to empowerment.
Given the workshop format of the encounter, representatives of north-
ern ngos responded to the Manifesto in ways that resonated with their
idea of what workshops call for. Many ngos see “traditional patriarchy” as
the only kind of power that structures women’s lives in northern Ghana,
and culturalism is the dominant governmental framework for organizing
knowledge about gender inequality. This discourse is learned and prac-
ticed at ngo workshops. The workshop format is a machine that dictates
not only how the “business” of ngos is conducted, but also what is said.
Workshop contributions follow a common script, and the resulting flip
charts tend to look alike.14
Neither was the coalition able to learn anything new from the encounter
with Bolga ngos. The very terms of inclusion of northern ngos hinged on
the recognition of their cultural difference and self-�identification as the na-
tion’s “others.” Hence, rather than being attuned to the subtext of Diana’s
commentary, which addressed the greater precarity of rural women, the
coalition learned only what it expected to hear: northern culture discrimi-
nates against women and is the main impediment to empowerment. The
terms of inclusion, then, reanimated the common discourses about the
cultural pathology of marginalized groups rather than articulating new
frameworks for understanding gender inequality in northern Ghana.
The encounter also limited the scope of political critique. Despite the
Manifesto’s bold self-Â�definition as “a political document” (The Coalition
on the Women’s Manifesto for Ghana 2004, 5), at this meeting, Vida re-
fused to engage with local understandings of politics. She censored Evelyn,
another women’s leader from Bolga, when she started criticizing regional
inequality in the state’s distribution of resources.

240â•… Saida Hodžić

 “The Women’s Ministry has not been decentralized,” Evelyn lamented.
“In the North, we don’t know what she [the minister] is doing. The
Women’s Ministry is a political office. It belongs to those of the npp.15 It’s
not for everybody. They are there for their own people.”
By criticizing the government’s gender politics, Evelyn articulated a
common set of grievances about regional inequalities and the unequal dis-
tribution of resources that is structured by party politics and individual
patronage. Vida and Abena quickly silenced her.
“When you go talk to the women, please don’t get political. No npp, no
ndc,” said Abena. Vida quickly added: “This Manifesto does not belong to
any government, any party. . . . The document is completely antipolitical.
Let us not be political.”
Evelyn’s critique of the government’s gender politics and the regional
and party-�based practices of resource distribution was stopped because
it was deemed too “political.” Unpacking the discrepancy between the
Manifesto’s self-Â�representation as a political document and this erasure of
politics requires a consideration of the larger context of marginalization
of northern Ghana by the state, as well as its spectral reflections on par-
tisanship and politics. Ruling governments are understood as prioritizing
the regions in which they have most support, and the Ministry of Women’s
and Children’s Affairs was founded by the npp government, which was
seen as favoring southern Ghana. In addition, northern Ghanaians often
remarked that their marginalization resulted from the state’s refusal to
“decentralize” its resources.
Although Evelyn’s criticism was directed only at the government, it
may have been understood as an attack on southern privilege. Her com-
ments were perceived as dangerous because they were performative in the
sense that she was saying more than was obvious (Ebron 2007). Evelyn’s
critique of regional inequalities was perhaps too close to the question of
inequalities within the women’s movement, and this was not a debate that
the coalition was ready to have. Equally important, Evelyn’s commentary
about resource distribution was grounded in a popular critique of the state
that the Manifesto avoids. Although the Manifesto voices an academic
and leftist critique of the neoliberal retrenchment of the state, it does
not challenge the informal practices of resource distribution that many
Ghanaians object to. In other words, the Manifesto coalition wanted to
transform the state but was not willing to engage with the critique of the
state-�as-�lived.
Finally, the aftermath of the workshop brings into sharp relief the im-

Feminist Bastardsâ•…241
passes of inclusion that do not challenge larger regional inequalities. Here,
End to Poverty played bait and switch with the representatives of northern
ngos. Vida promised them funding, requesting proposals for workshops
with local women. Stipulating that these regional consultations should
be quick, efficient, and cheap, Vida put a serious strain on local ngos.
In three weeks, they would have to read and understand the Manifesto;
write proposals; negotiate the budget; reserve workshop locations; orga-
nize lodging and food service; invite workshop participants, both by mail
and in person; hold the actual workshop; write workshop reports; and
compile receipts and endorsements of the Manifesto. Some workshop
participants immediately objected to this time frame. Seidu, a senior offi-
cial of End to Poverty’s regional office, said: “Why are we rushing to have
this done by the 15th? You said it’s not just for the 2004 campaign.” Vida
retorted: “The consultations will continue afterward.” But Seidu insisted:
“But why rushing?” Abena put an end to the criticism: “You’re a Ghanaian,
I’m a Ghanaian. If we’re given a hundred years, we’ll never finish.”
Seidu knew not to push this topic further, but his colleague from the
northern region, Akolbire, returned to the same issue in the evaluation of
the workshop, criticizing the limited time for the consultations. It is not
surprising that the criticism came from within the organization’s ranks,
and from two men who are both in senior positions. While representa-
tives of women’s ngos learn to keep their criticism in check in order not
to alienate donors, these two men had no such constraints. They felt free
to criticize their colleague, who was a woman and similar in rank to them.
Representatives of local ngos, on the other hand, could only protest
“with their feet”—by refusing to comply with Vida’s request. Elizabeth
did not think that would be wise, however, since they “might not receive
money again.” Given power relations between the ngos and donors, de-
clining to hold the workshops was not an option. Hence, Elizabeth put
other projects on the back burner and planned the workshops Vida re-
quested. Conflicts emerged when Elizabeth and her colleagues revealed
that they did not want to completely follow End to Poverty’s plan. Eliza-
beth proposed an additional workshop for men only, in order to get them
on board at the outset. This aspiration reflects a divide between the vision
of many northern ngo activists and the Manifesto coalition. The basic
premise of the coalition is that gender issues are not a women’s question,
and that the Manifesto belongs to “all women and men in Ghana who
can identify with its demands” (The Coalition on the Women’s Manifesto
for Ghana 2004, 70). Yet Elizabeth and representatives of other northern

242â•… Saida Hodžić

ngos say that they cannot wait for men to begin to identify with their
demands—they want to bring them on board at the inception of each
project.
In the end, Elizabeth’s proposal was not approved. Moreover, word
came that “there had been a misunderstanding”—Vida had never wanted
local women’s ngos to organize further workshops, she said. This attempt
at a graceful exit convinced no one, ending the coalition building around
the Manifesto in the region for the time being. The northern groups would
later take up common projects again, as they are among the ngos that
“cannot afford to assume a purist position” (Hemment 2007, 142).
This bait-�and-�switch approach was neither the first nor the last time
that women’s ngos from Bolga were consulted by ngos and coalitions
from Accra at the last minute, or asked to write proposals by donors who
subsequently turned them down. These haphazard attempts at inclusion
are not an exception but reflect the order of things. In the course of my
fieldwork, I attended a number of meetings at which representatives of
ngos from Accra came to northern Ghana for “consultations,” only to re-
veal that all the important decisions had already been made. Mary, one of
Elizabeth’s colleagues, resignified the notion of “gender mainstreaming”
to critique this phenomenon. “Southern ngos and donors don’t include
the North in the project from the beginning,” she said. “They do some-
thing last minute here, and are then surprised when it fails. It’s the same
thing with gender—people don’t mainstream it into their projects at the
beginning, and then they wonder why it doesn’t work.”
These kinds of criticism are usually voiced in informal conversations
and are rarely uttered in the presence of those whom they target. In other
words, listening to the subtext of critical remarks, rather than censoring
them, would have been the only opportunity for members of the Mani-
festo coalition to grasp the dissatisfaction of northern activists with the
liberal terms of inclusion that end up marginalizing them.
How do we understand this outcome in relationship to the ngoiza-
tion paradigm? Given the structures of “empowerment money” and Vida’s
reliance on development forms such as last-�minute workshops, it is easy
to read the coalition’s impasse as evidence of failure of ngoization. I sug-
gest a counterintuitive interpretation. The impetus for this effort as well
as the impasse on which it foundered were structured by the same forces:
the geopolitical contexts of Ghanaian feminist organizing and the porous
boundaries between ngos and coalitions. Recall that the outreach effort
was driven by a donor activist, not by the larger movement. As a person

Feminist Bastardsâ•…243
from northern Ghana and as a donor with experience in this region, Vida
was more attuned to regional inequalities than many Accra-�based mem-
bers of the coalition. Her fusion of capital, subjectivity, and experience led
the coalition to attempt to broaden its base—but did it also stop her from
challenging the sedimented effects of marginalization? A critical under-
standing of regional inequalities, I suggest, was prevented both by the
form of the encounter as well as by the liberal terms of recognition offered
to the participants. Northern ngos were asked to voice their concerns,
but the only readily available position was that of cultural difference, and
the only shared language that of its impediment to empowerment.

Conclusion: Rethinking NGOization

My aim in this chapter has been to decenter the ngoization paradigm as
the organizing structure for feminist analyses of ngos in order to widen
our conceptual frameworks. This paradigm glosses over feminist crises
and inequalities in past women’s movements, and, I suggest, persists pre-
cisely because of its nostalgic valorization of anti-�institutional feminist
autonomy. We cannot conclude with questioning professionalization of
feminist thought and practice; we need to examine anti-�institutionalism
itself. The ngoization paradigm assumes a universal traction but stops
short of situating anti-�institutional critique in time and place. By taking
note of its location in the global North and in the academy, this essay at-
tends to some of its epistemological and geopolitical implications. Anti-�
institutionalism also prevents us from recognizing that various orga-
nizations have been constitutive of women’s movements in Ghana and
elsewhere. The possibilities of shifting feminist configurations will remain
invisible if we insist on anti-�institutionalism as the only proper form of
feminist politics.
How, then, do we think “otherwise” about new feminist formations
(Wiegman 2002a, 3)? My analysis points to the value of historicizing and
contextualizing the work of ngos rather than contrasting them to ideal-�
typic women’s movements. Feminist politics means—and should mean—
different things in different contexts. I also suggest that we would be better
served by neither dismissing ngos nor celebrating movements, but by
examining the articulation of their forms, as well as their blind spots and
productive possibilities. Neither ngos nor coalitions are pure, and the
tropes of purity and contamination are not useful for analyzing emerging
feminist formations.

244â•… Saida Hodžić

 This essay is therefore an exercise in a posthumanist critique of ngo
practices that moves beyond Eurocentric anti-�institutionalism. Rather
than denouncing ngos as illegitimate offspring of feminism, I have sug-
gested the cyborg as a metaphor that harnesses the productive potential
of transgressed boundaries. A cyborg theory does not draw normative
boundaries between movements and ngos; instead, it confounds them.
The notion of cyborgs helps us see that the form of feminist organizing (be
it movement, ngo, or coalition) does not determine whether its politics
are progressive. ngos, I have shown, are tied to neoliberalism, but they
are also constitutive of political organizing that challenges neoliberal dis-
courses and practices. Coalitions are situated in the same milieu and are
embedded in the equally problematic structures of capital, power, and in-
equality. It is these structures, rather than the institutional forms of femi-
nist organizing, that shape the outcomes of feminist politics. The Mani-
festo coalition reached an impasse because the larger women’s movement
has yet to address regional inequality outside the discourses of liberal in-
clusion and cultural difference as an impediment to development.
Like cyborgs, the kind of critique I offer here is not innocent, either.
ngo-�based activists from northern Ghana may agree with my analysis,
but they “make do” and move on. As they consider explicit and public cri-
tique of power and inequality neither gracious nor pragmatic, I take re-
sponsibility for its dangers and implications.

Notes
1. Hemment counters the “main charges leveled at ngos”—the depoliticization of
resistance, the formation of new elites, and co-Â�optation by donors (2007, 142–
44)—while calling for nuanced accounts of women’s agency, ngo workers’ own
critiques, and reflection on the politics of feminist knowledge production. Her
solution is to link critique to “constructive political projects” in conversation
with Russian women (ibid., 142).
2. See also Yakin Ertürk’s positioning in her study of women’s political organizing
in Turkey (2006, 99).
3. The ethnographic literature is vast, so I have only cited monographs.
4. Critics quote Alvarez selectively to validate their evaluations of ngoization,
ignoring her arguments about the productive influences of ngos on feminist
politics and organizing (Alvarez 1998, 1999). Meghan Simpson writes: “Local
and global ‘feminisms’ alike have undergone a process of ‘ngoization,’ bring-
ing movements to a broader political stage, but also effectively closing the door
to a wider participation of women” who are not in the professionalized ngo
circles (2009, 144). Amy Lind claims that “feminists from all strands have become

Feminist Bastardsâ•…245
 disillusioned to varying degrees by the bureaucratization, ‘partyization,’ and/or
‘ngoization’ of feminist struggles” (2003, 197). Jael Silliman writes that ngoiza-
tion “distanced the priorities and organizing imperatives of women’s ngos and
networks from the grassroots concerns of local women” (1999, 40), turning ngo
activities into “narrow, state-Â�centric strategies that appeared to respond more to
the logic of patriarchal domination than to an alternative feminist worldview”
(1999, 47).
5. Here, I focus on the work of scholars who attempt to define and theorize ngoiza-
tion, including Lang (1997), Alvarez (1998), Jad (2007), and Sangtin Writers and
Nagar (2006). Although they do not agree on everything, their work has estab-
lished a scholarly paradigm that is widely cited and accepted.
6. Russian women’s movements of the 1970s had also been the purview of “elites,”
Hemment argues, and were propelled by educated and urban women (2007, 76).
This is neither a celebration nor a lament, but an observation that questions the
basis on which we assess the effects of ngos.
7. Although Ghanaian women’s associations and groups were often repressed by
colonial and postcolonial regimes (Mikell 1995), women participated in the coun-
try’s political movements (against colonial economic policies, in the indepen-
dence movement, and in protests against military regimes and the state’s regu-
lation of markets) and were represented in political parties.
8. Ghanaians are well aware of this economy of value: one ngo has recently changed
its name from “Widows and Orphans Ministry” to “Widows and Orphans Move-
ment.” This ngo expunged the Christian connotations of the term “ministry,”
replacing it with the word “movement” that appeals to its current feminist sup-
porters and donors.
9. Ghanaian understandings of the term “ngo” are varied. Organizations are for-
mally recognized as ngos when they apply for and receive the requisite gov-
ernment designation. In popular culture, however, ngos are differentiated from
associations (ngos serve the general public, while associations are primarily ac-
countable to their members) and community-�based organizations (which are
registered as ngos but are based in small, often rural communities, and iden-
tify themselves as cbos). ngos are also seen as belonging to the larger category
of “civil society,” which is understood to include associations, unions, and also,
interestingly, state institutions.
10. The South African feminist Sisonke Msimang wants to “ensure that feminism is
not killed by its diluted sister—gad [gender and development]” (2002, 13) but
sees her professional work as valid and generative: “Many of us are feminists
by profession and our ‘experience’ and analysis comes from having worked on
projects that employ the terminology of Gender and Development” (2002, 12).
11. While living in Ghana, I too began to refer to “development” as an aspiration in
this particular sense. This experience, as well as my larger ethnographic project,
have taught me that we cannot assume that ngo workers uncritically accept
development and neoliberal discourses, even if they use the same terminology.

246â•… Saida Hodžić

 Anna Tsing’s articulation of “awkward engagements” captures well the gaps and
frictions in global encounters: “Words mean something different across a divide
even as people agree to speak” (2005, xi). Terminology can be resignified, these
resignifications can also be co-�opted, and working meanings are revealed only in
lived practices and specific encounters.
12. Arundhati Roy writes: “ngos give the impression that they are filling the vacuum
created by a retreating state. And they are, but in a materially inconsequential
way. Their real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid
or benevolence what people ought to have by right” (2004, 45).
13. The microcredit practices in northern Ghana are run by local ngos and are
neither predatory nor violent like those described by Lamia Karim (2011), which
is not to say that they are successful or unproblematic.
14. See also Kay Warren’s discussion of frameworks as “selective constructions, con-
veyed in fields of social relations that also define their significance” (1998, 178).
15. npp is the New Patriotic Party, which ruled from 2000 to 2008; the National
Democratic Congress (ndc) was then in opposition.

Feminist Bastardsâ•…247
╉CHAPTER 9 Laura Grünberg

Lived Feminism(s) in Postcommunist Romania

Introduction
For more than fifteen years I have “done” and lived feminism in
Romania: as the leader of a prestigious Romanian nongovern-
mental organization (ngo), AnA Society for Feminist Analyses;1
as editor-�in-�chief of AnaLize: Journal of Gender and Feminist
Studies;2 as a professor of gender studies; and as a woman, wife,
and mother in postcommunist Romania.
For years, on my personal post-Â�its of “urgent things,” AnA was
a priority. For years, I socialized in various national and inter-
national contexts, making contacts for the organization, partici-
pating in the implementation of various projects, promoting the
need for professional discourse on women’s issues in Romania,
and making the voice of the Romanian women’s movement heard
abroad. I grew up intellectually and evolved as a person, a leader,
and a citizen, alongside Romanian postcommunist activism and
academic feminism.
Over the years that I have spent practicing feminism in Roma-
nia, I have learned a long series of personal lessons about inno-
cence and pragmatism, enthusiasm and bureaucracy, and suc-
cesses and failures; about contradictions between theoretical and
applied feminism; and about women, femininities, the women’s
movement, and Balkan and postcommunism transitions.
After practicing feminism in Romania on a daily basis for so
long, I felt the need to critically review this period, to compare
organizational theories with the concrete experiences of creating
organizations and making them work, to understand my own feminism
in comparison with that of others I have met during this journey, and to
share my experiences.
This is how a book on the lived history of AnA was born (Grünberg
2008). It is a book about the private life of this ngo, officially registered in
Romania in 1993, very active, visible, and connected to the civic movement
of Romania until 2008. A private life should be, in my opinion, added to
the public, official history of any ngo. What follows are some reflections
and comments based on that book that I wrote and lived, presented in the
form of contextualized storytelling and analysis.

AnA in Context
AnA was one of many ngos created in Romania after 1989 that proved re-
liable at the national, regional, and international levels. It was committed
to acting as a bridge between academics and the activist women’s move-
ment in Romania; to contributing to the professionalization of gender
discourse and practice in Romanian ngos; to developing and providing
training and policy-�oriented research on gender issues for different target
groups; to developing and maintaining a multimedia resource center on
women’s and gender issues; to disseminating gender-Â�sensitive informa-
tion and data through various means, including the only feminist journal
in Romania, AnaLize: Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies; and to get-
ting involved in the national and international women’s movement.
AnA has an official, solid curriculum vitae (cv): good projects designed
and successfully implemented; a series of useful services offered (includ-
ing consultancy, trainings, publications, and documentation facilities);
international recognition; and important rewards. But just as important
as the official cv is the unofficial one. For more than fifteen years, AnA
was a school for learning democracy; a milieu for socializing, learning, and
growing up; a space for friendships; an environment that allowed women
to pursue their career ambitions and to stand out; and, especially, a con-
text for women’s solidarity, involvement, caring, and creativity. Unfortu-
nately, due to financial constraints, AnA had to close its center in 2007; it
is currently active mainly through the individual participation of its mem-
bers in projects implemented by other organizations and institutions but
has plans for a “come back.”
Only a combined story of both the private and public lives of an ngo
can offer a vivid image of that organization. Only a contextualized story—
one that pays due attention to the various economic, political, social, na-

Lived Feminism(s) in Postcommunist Romaniaâ•…249

tional, or global contexts in which an ngo develops—can be an authentic
account of its existence.
On a more general level, understanding feminism and the women’s
movement in Romania means, on the one hand, looking outward at the
circumstances in which they both evolved after 1989. That means having
an idea of pre- and post-�1989 Romania in general and its civil society in
particular. On the other hand, it suggests looking inside the movement
at the process of institutionalizing gender equality in Romania after 1989
and to the people involved in the movement—mostly women, whose daily
lives and personal biographies mixed with its daily existence.
I have been an activist in a particular postcommunist Eastern European
context—Romania—that is known in general for the totalitarian regime
imposed by Nicolae Ceauşescu and in particular for its “pronatalist poli-
cies.” Forty years of communism and another twenty years of transition
to capitalist society placed Romania in a profound economic, social, and
moral crisis. Over the past decade, Romania has been experiencing a tran-
sition, a process of transformation that involved changing the economic,
social, and political systems inherited from the communist era. Romanian
society has undergone basic and complex processes of transition: from
a closed society to an open one; from a nation in a military association
(the Warsaw pact) to a nation without guaranteed external security (until
November 2002, when it was invited to join the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization); from an all-�embracing state economy to a mixed economy;
from a society with a single political party to a pluralistic one; from an
isolated country to one included in the European Union (eu), since 2007;
and others. In our post-�1989 society, the market economy itself, Euro-
pean integration, the McDonald’s-Â�ization of cultural society, and femi-
nism have all been experienced as major risks. Confronted with those
risks, Romanians have proved to have, in Geert Hofstede’s (1998) termi-
nology, a strong uncertainty avoidance tendency (Interact, 2005).
I have been an activist in a country that, after 1989, also had to relearn
the meaning and practice of civil society. First we had to delegitimize the
collectivist, homogeneous discourse and start talking about individualiza-
tion and human rights. The discourse and implicit practices of civil society
somehow remained in the area of negative freedoms (“freedoms from”), to
the detriment of positive ones (“freedoms to”).
As the majority of studies of Romania indicate, even today the coun-
try has a weak network of associations, an underdeveloped ngo sector in
comparison with other former communist countries, and only tenuous

250â•… Laura Grünberg

involvement in voluntary work (Voicu 2005). A study from 2006 shows
that out of twenty-�three million inhabitants, only 6 percent were mem-
bers of an ngo and only 8 percent undertook any voluntary activities
(fdsc, 2006). As the 2007 Euro barometer on discrimination shows, only
7 percent of European Union members believe ngos have a role in com-
bating discrimination (EC, 2007). Romania, an acceding country at this
time, could not have been far from this tendency. The situation has im-
proved lately but the citizen’s confidence in public institutions and their
involvement in such organizations is still low. In 2012, 34% of the Roma-
nians declared a high level of confidence in ngos, 79% considered that
an ngo may influence decisions at local and regional level but only 20%
were members of such an organization (half of them being union mem-
bers) (fdsc, 2013).
Romanian society still has contradictory attitudes toward civil society.
On the one hand, it idealizes ngos: it expects too much from them, con-
siders them to be a sort of panacea for the hidden diseases of our young
democracy, or sees them as the promoters of democracy. As a conse-
quence, ngos end up being judged by idealistic standards that create a
gap between expectations and performance. On the other hand, for all
these years ngos have been a kind of institutional minority that has been
discriminated against. Companies looked at them with distrust, public
institutions despised them, and the state in general treated them like com-
mercial businesses. So if they are not idealized, then they are considered
as possible black markets—sites for nearly illegal, or at least personal, af-
fairs; a kind of comfortable refuge for people who are unwilling or unable
to have a normal job. The fact that some politicians created and used some
ngos for their own political agendas and especially for their own prag-
matic interests also deteriorated the public image of ngos.
The nongovernmental movement in Romania had neither the time nor
the favorable environment to become routine. If for other institutions
coming out of totalitarianism, routine was a handicap, for us it would have
been a sign of success. Romanian ngos were running a race for which
they did not have adequate breath, sports shoes, coaches, or psychological
trainers. Nor did Romanian ngos manage to finish that race or to rejoice
in their small victories because the rules were immediately changed. In
all those years they had no help settling down (finding a space, covering
higher and higher expenses, finding competent management). The global
economic crisis of the last period of time also negatively influenced the de-
velopment and sustainability of the sector. The bureaucratic constrains of

Lived Feminism(s) in Postcommunist Romaniaâ•…251

some of the national and international donors also discouraged creativity
and the creation of new ngos. As a result, an overabundance of sterile
seminars, round-�table discussions, conferences, and training courses ap-
peared. Meanwhile, new government institutions were created in order to
conform to the eu standards and demands, leaving the ngos with even
less support and without envisaging any sort of know-�how transfer be-
tween existing ngos and such new entities. Because of this atmosphere,
many of the once-�successful ngos did not find their way and many others
disappeared.
Financially dependent and manipulated, lacking an adequate environ-
ment and proper economic stimulus to support themselves (even though
they created jobs and paid taxes to a state that did little for them), the Ro-
manian activists adapted to the normative model imposed from abroad.
They used eclectic, foreign, copied-� and-�pasted, often impossible-� to-�
translate language, and they worked as hard as they could to represent
a significant alternative public voice. But in the long run, they have not
yet been able, in my opinion, to establish themselves in the country as a
powerful, stable social partner. With few exceptions, they are marginal.

Feminism and Women’s Movements in Postcommunist Romania

I developed myself professionally as a woman activist and gender expert
in a country where the totalitarian period had interrupted a good interwar
tradition of feminism. What followed after 1989 should be seen “not simply
as a break with the past but also in part a continuation of it” (Gal and Klig-
man 2000b, 6). After that year, feminism and the women’s movement re-
invented themselves, not on the basis of the close or distant past, but with
the help of a Western past. But this import had perverse effects, too.
Doing feminism in this period of postcommunist transition, and pro-
found structural change was difficult. People were having a hard time ab-
sorbing changes that they perceived as happening too quickly; achiev-
ing stability in their lives was far from easy, so they were inclined to just
rebuild what had existed. Feminism—as an effort to destabilize power
relations between women and men, demand equal-�opportunity policies,
and institute a gender-Â�friendly democracy—was perceived as dangerous
or useless.
A lot has been written about the East-�West partnership, essentially
based on relationships of domination and the imposition of priorities,
methods, and assessment criteria on the local democracies of former
communist countries. Can the “others” really understand who we are and

252â•… Laura Grünberg

what we have been going through? Can we and the “others” (even if they
are women like us) talk the same language and learn from each other’s
experiences? In 1995 I was part of the Romanian delegation at the Beijing
World Conference on Women. On the opening day, in an immense sta-
dium, an impressive ceremony involving thousands of beautiful Chinese
children was performed for us. Surrounded by American women, I could
clearly hear their enthusiasm and astonishment. For them it was just an
extraordinary, incredible parade. For me, having experienced throughout
my childhood weeks of stupid, military-�like instruction in order to pro-
duce similar shows for Ceauşescu, it was an awful moment of remem-
brance. They were smiling; I was angry. How can any communication be-
tween two different worlds start from such a point?
This is just one example I bear in mind each time I read or hear about
the West-�East gaps or communication tensions. My personal memories
could produce more examples like this. Immediately after the Romanian
revolution, at the end of 1989, my foreign relatives sent me some packages
of Pampers for my four-�month-�old son. Disposable diapers were new for
me. I decided to keep them for later, for emergencies, and to continue to
use cloth diapers that I washed with my mother. Later on, one Sunday, I
decided to use the Pampers. I tried to put one on my son, but it was much
too small for him. Reading the instructions more carefully, I saw that they
fit only children under a certain weight. I should have used them as soon
as they arrived, when my son was the right weight. I felt very “eastern” at
that moment.
In a way, this is what happened when feminism was first imported from
the West. It came with no clear instructions (for us) on how to use it. And
we, being in a hurry to make up for the time we had lost, sometimes mis-
used it or overreacted to it.
In a different research context (Grünberg 2000b) I pointed out the
lack of clear objectives, the collectivist and centralizing tendencies, and
the marginalization of the women’s movement inside the Romanian civil
movement. I noted tensions between activist and academic realms and
between generations, as well as regional discrepancies. With time, some of
the problems amplified, while others modified. Today for example instead
of the gap between an activist women’s movement and academic femi-
nism, I would say that in Romania there is an academic women’s activ-
ism, as the majority of those actively involved in ngos are highly educated
women. The marginalization of the women’s movement is not so visible
as before. Women’s organizations are more inclusive now, collaborating

Lived Feminism(s) in Postcommunist Romaniaâ•…253

more often with human rights groups or with ngos dealing with Roma,
sexual minorities or ecologist issues. Intersectionality as a strategic ap-
proach is present, gender being often treated (at least at the level of dis-
courses) as a multidimensional category of analysis.
For a long period of time after 1989 women and women’s problems
have reentered public discourse, but in ways that do not always favor the
emancipation policies that we hoped for. Women are often seen as victims
(of violence, trafficking, poverty, and sexual harassment) and helpless (as
single women, poor women, older women, or disabled women). They are
represented as a marginal group that needs support, or as glamorous, sexy
bodies that exist but do nothing significant with their heads. Governmen-
tal and nongovernmental institutions, along with the mass media, peddle
those images to the exclusion of positive figures: women as agents and as
involved, responsible, and competent social partners.
In 1989 the ngo activists in the women’s movement entered an ideo-
logically mined territory, full of stereotypes and unfavorable cultural cli-
chés and stuffed with imported terms, concepts, strategies, and experi-
ences—many of them lacking any significance in the space dominated by
the clones of Master Manole and his sacrificial Ana.3
Mihaela Miroiu, a leader of academic feminism in Romania, argues
that at that moment we failed to transfer our civic and academic femi-
nism into a political feminism, and now we are practicing a sort of timid
feminism, one that is marginal and camouflaged. Miroiu also talks about
a “room-Â�service feminism”4 (2004) that was copied and pasted, suggesting
that we are now witnessing a state feminism that lacks a solid foundation
and financial resources, one that appears as mere window dressing for
very European laws and policies (Miroiu 2006). Eniko Magyari-�Vincze,
another gender expert, argues that in postsocialist Romania,

the public thinking on equal opportunities for women and men has
been structured by two major mechanisms. On one hand, the idea of
equality for women and men was delegitimized by a permanent appeal
to communist memories and, on the other hand, equal-�opportunity
discourse was totally accepted as a requirement for entering the eu.
Thus, two extreme positions—either rejection or unconditional accep-
tance—marked the institutionalization of gender issues in Romania.
(2002, 7)

The integration of the country in the eu produced an interesting spe-

cial category of people—the “opportunist nonsexists”—those accepting

254â•… Laura Grünberg

formally the gender equality discourses because this was the new trend,
because being mysogin or sexist was no more socially desirable in the
civilized communities of the eu countries. I would add the cultural per-
spective to this type of critical analysis. It is clear that simply importing,
without adapting, successful models of gender equality from individualis-
tic cultures to collectivist ones, from cultures oriented toward the future
to cultures oriented toward their past5, between cultures with different
degrees of respect for the “written laws” (oral vs. written cultures) will not
work, producing distortions and perverse effects.
We could say that immediately after 1989 in Romania there was
a period of exaltation, of emotions, that attempted to make up for the
past—for women and the women’s movement in general (in the embry-
onic state it was in then). Our bodies had been politically and ideologically
invaded,6 and now we were happy that we could have as many abortions
as we wanted, and where we wanted them. We had had enough (at least
numerically speaking) women in positions of power, but the majority of
them had been incompetent, selected for their obedience and their un-
attractive appearance.7 So we refused this model and got involved with
others in a way that had been unfamiliar to us: civil society. I remember
the period of 1992–95 as one in which, apart from the suspicions among
us due to a latent generational conflict, there was a special organizational
unrest and idealistic approach that no longer exists today.
Later came a period of professionalization and latent accumulations.
The women’s movement initially rejected and then in various ways in-
terpreted and internalized the Western discourse on women’s issues,
women’s rights, gender, equal opportunities, feminism, and so forth. Ro-
manian society also had assimilated (with and without the help of the
women’s movement) new cultural codes connected to other types of social
partnerships, suggested by Western models. The activists started to speak
a common language. Books and articles were written, feminism and gen-
der studies began to be taught in schools, and gender experts appeared
on the scene. But investing time in acquiring knowledge and know-�how
about gender issues meant a period of more reduced public visibility. Only
recently this situation is slowly changing as a more self confident, playful,
tech savvy, eager to show off feminism, involving the young generation of
activists, could be noticed.
Since 1990 many things have happened all over Europe, including in
Romania, in the area of feminism and the women’s movement. Looking
at the Romania of today through the lens of gender, one can easily see a

Lived Feminism(s) in Postcommunist Romaniaâ•…255

series of initiatives to promote gender equality in Romania. The coun-
try’s constitution, penal code, and laws concerning work have been re-
vised; they now contain provisions for equal opportunities for women and
men. Important gender-�sensitive laws have been introduced (for example,
a parental leave law; a domestic violence law; legal provisions for address-
ing sexual harassment; and, very important, an equal-�opportunity law
that contains, in addition to other aspects, a reference to the concept of
multiple discrimination). In addition, new institutions and mechanisms
to support equal opportunities for men and women have been created:
the National Agency for Equal Opportunities, established in 2002 and
responsible for elaborating national strategies in the area (it was trans-
formed at a short period of time into a small department within the Min-
istry of Family and Social Protection); the National Council for Combating
Discrimination; the Parliamentary Commissions for Equal Opportunities;
and many women’s ngos, networks, and coalitions. It is also worth men-
tioning that important human resources have been created and mobilized
particularly to help develop careers and jobs in the field of gender equality,
hoping that the new market will absorb experts in this area. In 1998 the
National School for Political and Administrative Studies in Bucharest
started a master’s program in gender studies in the Faculty of Political
Sciences. Other major university centers (Cluj or Timişoara) have estab-
lished similar programs. One of the major printing houses in Romania
(Polirom) has, since 2000, published a special series in gender studies.
Consequently, locally trained gender experts have produced a significant
amount of national-�focused studies and research together with various
trainings in the area.8
From the perspective of academic feminism, development is obvious.
From the perspective of Romanian feminist activism and its impact on so-
ciety, the picture is different. Both quantitative and qualitative data show
that in spite of the positive results, gender equality is still more of a desire
than a reality. Data from the latest Gender Equality Index produced by the
European Institute for Gender Equality situates Romania on the hindmost
position among the 27 European countries in all areas investigated (work,
money, knowledge, time, power, health) (eige, 2013). Various national
data indicates also that there are still significant gender gaps in sectors
such as employment, health, and education, and, maybe more important,
a conservative cultural gender model still exists in society. According to
different statistics, the average life expectancy of women in Romania is
below that in Europe as a whole; women earn less money than men, and

256â•… Laura Grünberg

are victims of domestic violence and human trafficking, the balance be-
tween family life and career is just wishful thinking; less than 10 percent of
the members of the Romanian Parliament are women. Furthermore, there
are visible hierarchies and discrimination among women. Some groups of
women (Roma women, elderly and rural women, single mothers, adoles-
cents, and lesbians) face more problems than do other, more privileged
women.9

Some Glimpses into the Lived History of a Women’s NGO

Feminism in Romania coexisted uneasily with politics, inflation, corrup-
tion, preparing for and entering the European Union, the development
of Internet communications, and individuals’ changing life stories. In
this Romania, this specific civil society, and the women’s movement that
I briefly described above, in this world AnA lived for more than fifteen
years. So did I.
Everything started in 1992 as a game, in the pleasure of dialogue during
nice evenings of reading and discussion, during a specific period of post-
communism disorientation, and because of some feminist literature that
a very good friend of mine, Mihaela Miroiu, stumbled across during one
of her trips to the West.
Passionate about the domain she had discovered—feminism—Mihaela
gave me some books. She knew I had a degree in a field that I was not made
for (mathematics), and that I would have preferred to study in another de-
partment (sociology), which had been closed because of totalitarian reali-
ties. Mihaela was working toward a doctoral degree in feminist philoso-
phy, with my father as an adviser. She used to come by the house in the
afternoons and argue with style on issues like whether women did or did
not have an epistemic privilege; whether ecofeminist theories and radical
feminist epistemologies are valid; and whether men can be empathetic to
other beings, plants, and nature in general. I listened and got interested.
It’s hard to say how we became official from there, but we formalized
our chats under the name of “The Society for Feminist Analyses,” or AnA.
We chose the name for its various significations: for its visual symboliza-
tion of the classical A-�nonA dichotomy, so critically discussed in femi-
nism, and also for its reference to one of the fundamental myths of our cul-
ture that I have already mentioned: the legend of Master Manole, whose
wife’s name was Ana.
Then came twenty-�one signatures officially requested for the list with
“Founder members.” (I can’t remember today some of the people who

Lived Feminism(s) in Postcommunist Romaniaâ•…257

signed it. Some of them were involved in the movement at that moment
but some others were just friends, friends of friends, relatives who ac-
cepted to sign quickly “whatever” was needed). We hurriedly found out a
copy of an ngo status, one among other few that were informally circu-
lating around Bucharest (many ngos established at that time had almost
similar statuses. Nobody was paying much attention to the content of
these documents. Only later on we realized the importance of each para-
graph, as we needed to revise them). We quickly adapted the document
to our specific types of activities, submitted a dossier and then received
the official certificate from the Ministry of Culture. Then came our logo,
flyers, a website, employees, reports, and the implementation of differ-
ent programs focused on key words imposed by foreign financing bodies.
We learned activism by doing it. We started writing project proposals
for various donors. At the beginning, our programs fit their sections on
“women’s rights.” Then the word “gender” started appearing on the pri-
ority list. Then the magic phrase bringing potential financial support be-
came “community development,” followed by “sustainable development.”
After some time “social capital” appeared, and it became obvious that a
women’s program for women, with women, must be set up or at least
formulated so that it could be assessed from the perspective of its im-
pact on the development of social capital in Romania. Financial assis-
tance was then redirected to the area of “community acquis implemen-
tation.”10 After that, doing projects for “Roma women” became popular;
then “gender mainstreaming” became the ticket to funding. As I write
now, women- or gender-�focused programs are no longer so popular; now
ecology programs are the chief beneficiaries of financial support. At this
moment in the area of gender equality, Roma issues are still on the top of
the agenda. Other key words and concepts imposed by the donor com-
munity would nowadays be “hate speech,” “trafficking of women,” “sexual
minorities rights,” “intersectionality of gender” or “gender as a transversal
theme within projects.”
On this perpetual shifting ground, AnA, like any other ngo, lived its
life. First there was a period of infancy, full of credulity, naiveté, and child-
ish mistakes. It was a time of pure enthusiasm that was not yet clouded
over by pragmatism, but it was also a period when we were cheated and
even robbed. For example, at one point we discovered that a university
professor, a member of our organization, was collecting organization
“fees” in our name from young students, promising them scholarships,
and participation in international events. We expelled her from the orga-

258â•… Laura Grünberg

nization. Another time our first accountant—a man—used and misused
our funds, buying secondhand computers while claiming they were new,
and stealing our stamp to use for his own purposes, thus creating major
financial problems for all of us.
Then AnA grew up, became mature, settled down, found a “room of its
own”—an apartment where the Multimedia Resource Center for Women
was developed. Those were, formally, the glory days when we could boast
of important projects, good results, a stable financial situation, the expan-
sion of the organization, three to four full-�time employees, and interna-
tional visibility and rewards. It may seem paradoxical, but I consider this
period a time of failure because bureaucracy somehow killed us step by
step (Grünberg, 2003). Little by little, creativity was replaced with routine,
enthusiasm with “coming to work” out of a sense of obligation, to meet
deadlines, file reports, and fulfill other responsibilities. “Doing things” be-
came “implementing activities,” and showing results meant more stiffly
worded reports and complicated financial justifications for each small ac-
quisition, instead of keeping in touch with and being sensitive and em-
pathetic to gendered realities. The core group never truly accepted the
bureaucratization process. Because the majority of us had official bureau-
cratic jobs outside AnA, we could not bear to continue the same pattern
at AnA. Explicitly and implicitly we constantly protested the bureaucra-
tization of the organization, but unfortunately we found no alternative.
After a while, AnA became more virtual. Fewer meetings happened on
the spot; face-�to-�face discussions were less common; and more decisions,
even resignations, were made through e-�mail. AnA became less about
doing things together and more about networking with the national and
international community in an intangible world often rich in information
and financial resources. If and how clicktivism11 helps and breeds social
revolutions is a debatable issue. The virtual management of an ngo, vir-
tual activism itself, and the gendered dimensions of online communica-
tions are complex issues beyond the scope of this essay. But in brief, on-
line activism definitely means broader access, but it also implies a lack of
corporal dialogue; it means that accessibility replaces profoundness and
that people do communicate more but rarely meet (Breton 1995, 16). From
AnA’s point of view, human relations, not virtual relations, proved to be
more vital for group social cohesion. In the virtual space, AnA got lost.
During this time, each of our projects had its own history beyond offi-
cial evaluation reports and budgets. Each one was a complex mixture of
enthusiasm, idealism, concrete objectives, schedules, and activities, as

Lived Feminism(s) in Postcommunist Romaniaâ•…259

well as components of international agencies gender programmes and
moments in our own biographies and in national and global economic,
political, and social contexts.
In 1995 we launched a Phare12 program called Toward a Nonsexist
Education, which allowed us to, for the first time in Romania, analyze
textbooks, talk to professors, and design training modules for nonsex-
ist education. But when we wanted to continue it at the national level,
we could not get any more funding because international donors were
already moving from education to other key democratic topics. In 1998
we implemented the Together at Foişor Program for Community Devel-
opment, which got our neighbors who lived in the same district in Bucha-
rest involved with AnA. Although successful, the pilot project could not
be further replicated because the “community development” theme, in
two years, was no more a priority for donors. In 2006, we produced Car-
tea neagră a egalităţii de şanse între femei şi bărbaţi în România [Black
book on equal opportunities between women and men in Romania]—a
diagnosis of the state of affairs in the field in Romania (Borza, Grünberg,
and Văcărescu 2006). Contrary to the general enthusiasm for the entering
of the country in the eu (that happened in 2007) we were critical at that
moment with respect to the creation, over night, of some governmental
bodies only for fulfilling, on paper, certain European requirements, with-
out consultations or using the already existing expertise in the area of
gender equality. At first glance, there was sometimes a certain disconnect
between what we were doing and the realities outside the organization.
In the beginning of the 1990s, when Romania was confronted with strong
internal political tensions, we were analyzing textbooks from a gender
perspective. In 1995 my father died, and in 2004 a member of AnA had a
cerebral stroke. We had to deal with these types of political and personal
problems while also trying to manage deadlines and responsibilities at
AnA. Love, divorce, studying for graduate degrees, pregnancies, meno-
pause, and our children’s school exams, along with an unstable political
system, the 9/11 shock, and so forth formed the context in which projects
were implemented—in concordance or dissonance with the rest of the
world, out of step or in line with major events, and mixed with our own
daily existence and problems.
Explicit and implicit, gender has been part of what made this organi-
zation, and in this sense, in the spirit of Joan Acker’s definition of a gen-
dered institution (Acker 1999), we can say that AnA was not only a femi-
nine organization (with women in the majority or with a feminine attitude

260â•… Laura Grünberg

toward the instrumental and impersonal features of bureaucracy) but also
a gendered one.
As an insider, it is hard for me to decide what exactly AnA was and
still is. According to the Romanian Official Gazette, it is an ngo, which
means, by law, “a private or public Romanian legal entity of public inter-
est, nonpolitical, nonprofit, a legal person, not invested with state power,
and not part of the public administration system” (1997, my translation).
In conformity with our official statute, AnA is defined as “an autonomous
scientific cultural society, nonpolitical, nonprofit, which gathers together
philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, journalists, and students with
interests and activities in promoting women and women studies in Ro-
mania.” Experts would consider it a mediator of financial and human re-
sources that helps cultivate citizenship and develop what Amitai Etzioni
would call “democracy’s muscles” (Etzioni, 2002, 15, my translation).
However, like any organization, AnA was a cognitive community that
not only responded to certain social trends but had a special interest in
generating knowledge and self-�knowledge in a specific area. AnA was also
a “space” in all of the three dimensions that Henri Lefevre (1991) identifies:
a concrete physical space, a place of ideas and thoughts, and a lived space.
For many years we had a place, an address where computers, books, tele-
phones, files, employees, visitors, and so on could be found. With or with-
out this place we had ideas, plans, concepts, and strategies on how to pro-
fessionalize the discourse on women’s issues in Romania, how to support
a particular group of women, and how to make a difference in the area of
gender equality in Romania. AnA was a concrete and abstract space for ex-
periencing transition, democracy, and civil society. AnA meant Mihaela,
Anca, Cecilia, Laura, Ioana, Florentina, and others—many women whose
destinies crossed not because of duty but because of the pleasure of being
together and having a common interest in a special type of social program
that promoted gender equality in Romania.
AnA’s story should be read in context and in a multidimensional frame
of analysis in which individual, local, regional, and even global flavors
mixed. AnA—like the transition to democracy itself—has been, at indi-
vidual and collective levels, an educational project for its members and
its beneficiaries. Inside AnA we learned the art of democratic associa-
tion; we became not only spectators but players in the new political and
social environment after 1989. Outside AnA the beneficiaries of our ser-
vices were familiarized and confronted with issues linked to the gendered
dimension of society and were encouraged to promote, in their private

Lived Feminism(s) in Postcommunist Romaniaâ•…261

and public lives, the principles of equal opportunities for women and men
in Romania.
At this moment, due to a lack of resources, we no longer have “a room
of our own” or the minimal administrative staff to develop our depart-
ments and projects. Nevertheless, I could not say that AnA is dead. Be-
yond money, rooms, computers, files, an Internet connection, tables, and
chairs, the spirit of AnA is still out there. The majority of its members are
implicitly continuing the mission of the organization in other contexts. I
still constantly receive e-�mail messages from various members suggest-
ing ways to continue to do something. Many of us are teaching gender
studies, passing on our knowledge and experience. Under the umbrella of
AnA, certain collaborations and partnerships are still taking place, espe-
cially within eu-�funded projects, where gender expertise and sensitivity
to issues of equal opportunities are a must in terms of evaluation criteria.
This is an important lesson that I learned from AnA: death does not come
easily for an ngo.
In the context of the women’s movement in Romania, looking critically
at AnA’s destiny, which was also my destiny, I could present a fairly long
“black list.”13 At the level of discourse on women and gender, there was
and is still the perpetuation of unclear terminology and linguistic incon-
sistency; the usage of generalizations and overgeneralizations that lead
to the erasing (within specific policies and programs, legislative initia-
tives, and so on) of the diversity between and within women’s and men’s
groups; a copy-�and-�paste way of doing things; and quite often the use of
an almost magical, alienated, specialized language or the development of
a new wooden language within feminist discourse encouraged especially
by the wooden language requested by donors.
From the perspective of the institutions created, there is a human, insti-
tutional, legislative, financial, and conceptual dilution and segmentation
in the area of equal opportunities. There are some bureaucratic creations
but little to no content or funds. Gender-�sensitive politics exist on paper
but are not written into the budget. There is a lack of continuity; there are
good laws, but they are either not known or not applied! There is also a
lack of accountability in the field of equal opportunities for women and
men. And finally, there are still many more monologues (across institu-
tions, inside institutions, and by both women and men) than dialogues.
At the level of women’s ngos, one may see that the field of study and
research on gender issues is tolerated but not exactly recognized by the

262â•… Laura Grünberg

academic community in Romania. Gender knowledge is part of a sepa-
rated, somehow marginalized curriculum (gender studies programs) but
hardly mainstreamed in other disciplines (see Văcărescu 2011). There is
a “brain drain” instead of a “brain gain” at the level of local feminism.
Male involvement is low, due either to the marginalization of men in the
women’s movement or to cultural stereotypes of gender-Â�sensitive men,
especially those who declare themselves feminists. There is also an under-
developed collaboration and cooperation culture among the feminist
ngos and women’s organizations, and there are fewer and fewer women’s
ngos each year. To top it off, as I already mentioned before, there is less of
a grassroots women’s movement and more of an academic activist move-
ment.
The list could go on. The lack of powerful or trustworthy female role
models (in school manuals, newspapers, politics—Romania has never had
a female president!) is another deterrent to the development of a solid
women’s movement and the gender-Â�equal representation in politics.
What is probably needed at this moment, at least in Romania, for the suc-
cessful institutionalization of gender equality is exactly what is happening:
the emergence of a new generation of young feminists able and willing to
propose an all-�inclusive type of feminism, one that includes more than
it excludes without diluting its objectives.14 The much-�debated intersec-
tional approach to gender should be put into practice. Gender issues at
the theoretical and practical level should include age, ethnicity, sexual ori-
entation, living standard, and so on. By taking this approach on a larger
scale, we will better understand not only the general problems of women
(and men) but also the problems that are specific only to some of them.
In this way what we will know will not necessarily be better but it will for
sure be more.
It’s likely that some or many of the above-Â�mentioned dissatisfactions
are pertinent outside the Romanian context, too, because the country is
not an isolated island in Europe or the world. My black list shows in fact
that the women’s movement and feminism in Romania are searching for
a path, struggling with the endless chaos of transition, the lack of trust in
the role of civil society, the global economic crisis, the normal human at-
tempt to avoid any major cognitive discomfort (and feminism may pro-
voke that!), and the demands of daily existence on each woman (and man)
in our local and global economic crisis.
For more than fifteen years I have done and lived feminisms in Roma-

Lived Feminism(s) in Postcommunist Romaniaâ•…263

nia. In my opinion, a lived history is more instructive than a purely theo-
retical, historical approach. We learn more easily from what we live and
from the mistakes we make than we do from the abstract theories and
good practices presented by others. I read and learned about civil society
from Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, Habermas, Rawls, Arendt, and
Tocqueville, but, with all due respect, I learned even more from doing,
giving birth, mothering, and even burying AnA.
What I learned from this experience of life called AnA is that change
happens no matter what, but that you can push it in the right direction by
doing something instead of just endlessly criticizing what is happening.

Notes
1. For the rest of the article I will refer to it as AnA. See www.anasaf.ro.
2. www.analize-�journal.ro
3. The legend of Master Manole says that he was hired to build the most beautiful
monastery in the country. But everything he built each day crumbled the follow-
ing night, until he had a dream in which he was told that in order to succeed, he
had to wall in someone he loved very much. The next day he immured his wife
Ana in the walls of the church.
4. She defines “room-Â�service feminism” as the imposition of gender-Â�sensitive legis-
lation in Central and Eastern Europe through the authority of international po-
litical actors, including European ones, before the internal public recognition of
a need for such legislation.
5. I refer here to the well-�known Hofstede (2001) typology.
6. Four Weeks, Three Months, and Two Days (Mungiu, Cristian, 2007), the Roma-
nian movie that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival in 2007.
7. One unspoken criterion for promotion during those times was to be unattractive,
if possible uglier than Elena Ceauşescu, the powerful wife of the president who
was known for her lack of education and culture, for interfering in the decisions
of her husband, and for disliking any kind of feminine competition.
8. For details about the Polirom series, see www.polirom.ro, Colecţia Studii de gen
(gender studies series) and the recently created database http://www.fragen.nu
/aletta/fragen (database with digitized feminist texts from 27 eu countries and
Turkey).
9. In 2007 AnA, in collaboration with the National Institute for Scientific Research
in the field of Labour and Social Protection, (AnA/incsmps, 2008) produced the
Multiple Discrimination in Romania National Report.
10. Community acquis or acquis communautaire, sometimes called the eu acquis, is
the accumulated legislation, legal acts, court decisions that constitute the body
of eu law.
11. Term introduced by the journalist Micah White in 2010 in an article in the
Guardian.

264â•… Laura Grünberg

12. Phare is one of the major programs financed by the European Union to assist
countries in Central and Eastern Europe as they prepare to join the European
Union.
13. For an extensive discussion of the positives and negatives in the area of institu-
tionalizing gender in Romania, see Borza, Grünberg, and Văcărescu (2006). The
full “black list” can be found in English on www.anasaf.ro. Extracts and com-
ments are also published in (Grünberg, 2009).
14. There are some good signs of a revival. I mention only the Filia Center-�www.cen
trulfilia.ro; front Association; Feminism in Romania-�www.feminism-�romania
.ro, Association for Liberty and Gender Equality-�aleg-�www.aleg-�romania.eu,
and other powerful feminist web platforms or blogs, such as Meduza-�blogul
-�medusei.blogspot.ro.

Lived Feminism(s) in Postcommunist Romaniaâ•…265

╉CHAPTER 10 Sabine Lang

Women’s Advocacy Networks

The European Union, Women’s NGOs, and the Velvet Triangle

Introduction
The European Union (eu) is considered to be one of the more
gender-�friendly governance bodies of the early twenty-�first cen-
tury. With the Amsterdam Treaty of 1999, gender equality policy
was established as a mainstreaming strategy to be included in
all eu decision making (Vleuten 2007; Kantola 2010; Abels and
Mushaben 2011). Equality directives for labor markets and work-�
life balance, inclusion of gender-�equality norms in accession
negotiations with new member states, and the recent establish-
ment of the European Institute for Gender Equality in Vilnius
speak to some success in putting gender on the eu agenda. Yet
these measures have not been conceived strictly within the con-
fines of the European Commission or Parliament. Instead, they
can be attributed to women’s advocacy networks, in which dif-
ferent constellations of feminist actors from inside and outside
eu institutions joined forces to achieve policy goals. Developing
a theoretical understanding of these advocacy networks has be-
come one of the challenges of recent feminist research (Zippel
2006; Roth 2007; Montoya 2008; Lang 2009a and 2009b; Ahrens
2011). Earlier studies focused on classifying the types of actors in-
volved in these networks. Alison Woodward has coined the con-
cept of the “velvet triangle,” in which eu-Â�level femocrats, feminist
academics, and experts, as well as women’s movement activists,
collaborate (2004; see also Locher 2007). Use of the term “velvet
triangle” highlights routinized communication and interaction among
institutional and civil society actors in the European gender arena. It pro-
vides frequent formal and informal contexts for discussion, for developing
strategic alliances, and ultimately for more inclusive decision making. In
contrast to Theodore Lowi’s notion of an “iron triangle” (1979), in which
politicians, bureaucrats, and interest groups monopolize political power
behind closed doors, the term “velvet triangle” suggests a more fluid, less
rigidly shielded exercise of power among feminist institutional and non-
institutional political actors. One important aspect of this fluidity is bio-
graphical: members of velvet triangles often share parts of their profes-
sional biographies. They might have moved from movement activism into
academia and then into the eu bureaucracy, or they might join the board
of a women’s nongovernmental organization (ngo) after serving in the
eu Directorate for Employment, Social Affairs, and Inclusion. They tend
to be critical of closed corporatist political processes and prefer instead
to work in networks of trusted relationships that allow them to develop
pragmatic alliances across institutional affiliations and positional power.
The strength of the “velvet triangle” concept was that it—quite early in
the eu policy network debate—identified the win-Â�win relationship in the
“patterned dance of needy bureaucrats, dedicated activists and eager aca-
demics” (A. Woodward 2004, 76). Bureaucrats gain access to academic
and ngo expertise and can feel the pulse of their imagined constituen-
cies. Activists acquire material and insider procedural knowledge and thus
might gain more institutional leverage. And academics profit from inter-
actions in which their academic work is being valued, which makes them
part of an applied research process and allows them to acquire insider
knowledge.
The “velvet triangle” concept has been pathbreaking in mapping the
exchange-�based relationships between different actors in eu policy
making; yet it has also been challenged. The triangulation frame has been
criticized as too static and limiting for policy network analysis. Some ar-
gue for an expansion of the existing policy triad of bureaucrats, movement
actors, and academics to include other actors such as the media (Gode-
mont and Motmans 2006) and professionalized gender consultancy firms.
Others challenge the stability that the velvet triangle suggests and insist
that women’s policy networks are spatially and temporally unbounded,
leading in effect to much broader—and thus more unruly—network con-
cepts such as “women’s cooperative constellations” (Holli 2008, 169) or

Women’s Advocacy Networksâ•…267

“women’s fields of advocacy” (Bereni 2011, 1). Still others sharpen the dis-
tinction between actors who participate in formal or informal policy net-
works (Ahrens 2011), highlighting the difference between official and regu-
larized forms of interaction and loose, unofficial, and irregular networking
occasions among women’s equality actors in the European Union. Finally,
research points to the power asymmetries in these networks and their
effects on policy (Montoya 2008).
This is not the place to fully explore different iterations or alterations
of the “velvet triangle” concept. Instead, the argument here focuses on
one set of players that remains a constant in all documented shapes of
women’s advocacy networks: the coalitions of women’s ngos that tend
to represent women’s movements in the early twenty-Â�first century. Al-
though feminist research in recent years has emphasized the collabora-
tive structure of successful networks (McBride Stetson and Mazur 2008)
and the central role of insider-�outsider coalitions in pursuing an equality
agenda (Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2010), what has remained under-
explored is the organizational form and the ties that bind its actors. Or-
ganizational structure influences rules, norms, behavior, and ultimately
collective action. This essay examines the connection between the organi-
zational form and scope of action of ngoized women’s advocacy networks
in the European Union.
I argue that the political opportunity structure of eu governance tends
to give an advantage to specific formalized kinds of women’s movement
actors: those formally organized as ngos. I have called this earlier an
ngoized movement structure (Lang 1997; see also Lang 2013). This is
not a normative claim but an empirical observation, and it should not be
understood as proclaiming the selling out of a feminist agenda. It points
to the fact that while eu institutions provide formal and informal venues
for women’s advocacy networks, they also shape actors and their choice of
actions. In particular, operating within a specific network creates oppor-
tunities for some modes of advocacy while sidelining others. In the case
of the European Union, I argue, one of the main filters of advocacy con-
cerns the kinds of public engagement options available to women’s advo-
cacy networks.
The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I submit that the ngoiza-
tion of European women’s movements has altered the movements’ form,
mission, and means of engagement. This point critically engages with
voices that take these changes merely as indicating a period of “abeyance,”
in which movements “sustain themselves in non-Â�receptive political envi-

268â•… Sabine Lang

ronments” (Taylor 1989, 761; see also Valiente 2009). Instead, I show that
the European Union during the past decade has indeed presented quite a
receptive environment for gender agendas. Therefore, the women’s move-
ment’s lack of visibility in public affairs across Europe cannot be attrib-
uted to the need for a period of abeyance. Instead, I point to some more
principled and long-�term consequences of changes in form, mission, and
strategies of women’s activism in relation to supranational governance.
Second, I argue that nonprofit legal stipulations as well as the political
economy of women’s ngos fuel preferences for institutional advocacy as
well as for topics and engagement venues prefigured by the goals of the
European Commission. In effect, legal and economic challenges serve as
barriers against effective public engagement by channeling the energy of
movement activists toward institutional advocacy. Third, I engage with
Sonia Alvarez’s argument that some women’s movements have moved
“beyond ngoization” (see Alvarez’s chapter in this volume) in order to
reinvigorate their political presence and increase their public outreach. I
submit that for European women’s movements in 2011, such efforts were
few and far apart, yet they indicate resistance among some women’s move-
ment actors against joining the mainstreamed paths of influence in the
Brussels beltway.

The European Union, Civil Society, and the Nongovernmental Sector

The European Union, like most states and other transnational governance
bodies, is a relative newcomer to the processes of interacting with civil
society and European publics. As recently as a decade ago, the European
integration literature as well as eu practitioners did not even refer very
often to civil society (Smismans 2006, 4). Yet willingness to incorporate
consultation processes with civic actors into the eu governance structure
has increased in recent years (Warleigh 2003). Some attribute this open-
ness to the “advocacy void” created by weak European political parties
(Aspinwall 1998, 197). Others highlight the necessity to convince rather
than regulate since in the past decade, much eu policy making has shifted
from strict regulations to soft norms, from so-�called hard law to soft law
(Locher 2007). Soft law relies on discursive means of communication and
on forming alliances that promote and disseminate eu intentions within
member states, regions, and localities. Who would be better equipped to
perform such tasks than civil society actors who draw legitimacy from
having close ties to grassroots constituencies? It is “precisely the promo-
tion of such informal practices and norms” in which civic actors are “most

Women’s Advocacy Networksâ•…269

influential” (Checkel 1999, 554). ngos are seen as key transmitters of soft
law into society.
The European Union has come to rely on ngos for communication
with civil society in two ways: First, ngos are perceived to be transmitters
of institutional norms; they carry eu policy into the arenas of civil society
where they operate. Second, they are seen as aggregates of citizens’ voices
and serve as a proxy for the European public (Lang 2009a and 2009b). This
dual dimension of eu–civil society relations has been acknowledged in the
European Commission’s The Commission and Non-Â�Governmental Orga-
nizations: Building a Stronger Partnership (2000). Cooperation between
eu institutions and the nongovernmental sector is encouraged in order to
foster a “more participatory democracy both within the European Union
and beyond” (ibid., 4). ngos are perceived as ideal partners because they
are able “to reach the poorest and most disadvantaged and to provide a
voice for those not sufficiently heard through other channels” (ibid., 5).
By stimulating the formation of European ngo networks, the European
Commission intends to foster the formation of a European public opin-
ion (ibid., 5). Hence, ngos and their networks are perceived to be prima
facie expressions of civil society and key players in an emerging European
public sphere (ibid.).
However, it is not clear whether European ngos can live up to these
wide-�ranging expectations. Neither of these claims takes into account the
specific and often complicated situatedness of ngos between grassroots
involvement and transnational action, between highly professionalized
expertise and community outreach, and between insider status and out-
sider voice. Women’s ngos face these challenges in more pronounced
ways than ngos in other eu policy sectors. They operate with fewer re-
sources than advocacy organizations in most other fields; they work in
intersectionally complex policy environments; and they are confronted
with increasing gender fatigue by politicians, bureaucrats, and European
societies at large (Foundation Women in Europe 2010).

Women’s NGOs in the European Union

There are at least four obvious ways in which women’s ngos engage with
the European Union. Some get directly funded through various eu pro-
grams. Some are linked via national representatives to a transnational
women’s network such as the European Women’s Lobby.1 Some are part
of policy networks that want to influence eu policy. Some shape national
policy by using eu-�level governance arenas, thus creating the boomer-

270â•… Sabine Lang

ang (Keck and Sikkink 1998) or ping-�pong (Zippel 2006) effect that fuels
transnational advocacy. A common denominator of all four relationships
is that they reward institutional communication skills and consultation
and prefer organized to loosely networked activists. Women’s ngos can-
not apply for eu funds if they are not incorporated legally as charitable
organizations. If they seek to influence policy, they are increasingly being
asked to prove the representativeness of their claims. Thus, in contrast to
second-Â�wave feminist movements’ promotion of an antibureaucratic form
that valued “informality, spontaneity, low degrees of horizontal and verti-
cal differentiation” (Offe 1987, 73), eu governance attracts actors who have
established organization, formal processes, and division of labor between
horizontal and vertical units. Formally organized public interest repre-
sentation within the European Union relies overwhelmingly on confed-
erated structures, meaning associations of associations that generally do
not even admit individuals as members. But even in less formal contexts,
women’s activists gain recognition primarily by exhibiting expertise and
institutional communication skills rather than principled normative posi-
tions and public advocacy skills (J. Greenwood 2007). Movement actors
turned ngos are endowed with a specific set of insights and perspectives
related to what Birgit Locher calls “testimonial knowledge” (2007, 91).
Feminist ngos are generally credited with providing institutional actors
with the perspective of authentic experiences that are drawn from their
base in grassroots movements and local organizations (Keck and Sikkink
1998, 19–20).
Women’s ngos have altered their formal and informal structures not
just in order to adapt to eu governance. Yet whereas the ngoization pro-
cess from the late 1980s up to the mid-�1990s was primarily provoked by
a mix of personal-�biographical, economic, and national political stimuli
(Lang 1997 and 2013), the political opportunity structure of the European
Union added considerable impetus to pursue vertical integration, organi-
zational transparency, institutional competence, and financial account-
ability.2 These trends have been also significant in Central and Eastern
European countries, where much of the women’s movement’s civic infra-
structures in the 1990s developed during the period when national gov-
ernments prepared their applications for joining the European Union.
Bozena Choluj (2003) has argued that in Poland, about 300 women’s
groups—most of which were created in the 1990s—were ignored by state
actors until eu accession negotiations demanded the creation of a national
council of women’s organizations as an advisory body for gender matters

Women’s Advocacy Networksâ•…271

in the negotiations. Moreover, the greater access to eu funds after 2000
strengthened the position and political agency of Polish women’s ngos,
solidifying their institutional structures, and opening up possibilities for
transnational cooperation (Regulska and Grabowska 2008). At the same
time, access to eu funding contained its own set of limitations, favor-
ing large and well-Â�organized women’s ngos over smaller groups without
matching funds and limited grant writing skills and capacities (Roth 2007,
473; see also Graff 2009). In effect, Silke Roth (2007) claims that about
90 percent of smaller Central and Eastern European women’s groups
did not have access to eu funds, thus producing new lines of exclusion
among women’s movement actors.3 As a result, local and regional move-
ments’ visibility has shrunk across Europe. Among feminist academics
and movement actors, this has been fueling renewed debates about the
consequences of European governance for women’s movement building
and politicization strategies (Fodor 2006; Outshoorn and Kantola 2007;
Squires 2007), the central question being whether the specific form of in-
clusion of women’s advocacy in the European Union does not in fact con-
tribute to downsizing the scope and fervor of feminist activism.
Marian Sawer and Sarah Maddison (2009) have argued that the present
global restructuring of the women’s movement is an indicator of abeyance
rather than of substantial and enduring shifts in mobilization capacity.
The concept of abeyance goes back to Verta Taylor’s analysis of the US
women’s movements between the 1920s and the 1960s, in which she rec-
ommends a less natalistic approach (“movements are born and they die”
[1989, 761]) to movement research. Abeyance refers to a period in be-
tween other periods of strong movement visibility. It represents a time
when a movement contracts but still provides “continuity from one stage
of mobilization to another” (Taylor 1989, 761). In abeyance periods, social
movement activity is generally low. It can either be carried on by surviv-
ing organizations (Taylor 1989) or, as Celia Valiente (2009) has shown for
Spain under Franco, by new organizations or individuals with a formerly
low feminist profile. Thus, one could potentially interpret the predomi-
nance of institutional modes of eu advocacy by women’s ngos as an indi-
cator of an abeyance period for movement building and public advocacy.
I am not convinced that the ngoized European women’s movement is
in abeyance. Instead, my argument highlights the degree to which Europen
women’s movements actually adapted their form to become partners in
European governance. Moreover, there is no earlier period of mobiliza-
tion among European women that abeyance could have interrupted. Even

272â•… Sabine Lang

though European women’s groups engaged in international cooperation
as early as the nineteenth century, organizing in Brussels within an inte-
grated economic and increasingly interdependent political space poses a
new and untested challenge to women’s activism. It calls for activism that
addresses existing cleavages and fosters new transnational and transversal
solidarities. Hence, it calls for new mobilization repertoires that cannot
rely on activating past iterations of mobilizations. Evidence of the struggle
with crafting such new transnational and transversal mobilization reper-
toires is omnipresent in the current eu economic crisis. While women in
Greece and Spain have taken to the streets to protest the gendered effects
of austerity policies, feminist publics in Northern member states appear
subdued and ill equipped to give voice to the critical juncture that the gen-
der equality agenda in the EU currently faces.
Developing “citizen practice” (Wiener 1998) in the European Union
demands establishing a refined set of skills and adapting to the highly
scripted openings that the eu governance structure creates. At this time,
there is much evidence that it systematically produces disincentives to
public advocacy while establishing preferences for institutionalized action
(Lang 2013). In addition, today’s women’s advocacy networks operate with
a completely new communication repertoire, whereas abeyance indicates
a lull between two relatively similar protest cultures. The US women’s
movement in the 1920s and in the 1960s used similar repertoires: street
protests and boycotts, consciousness-�raising and solidarity groups, and
acts of civil disobedience. The later movement could reactivate traditions
and practices that seemed time-�tested and effective, while adapting them
to its own political and social contexts. Today, any smooth adaptation of
older movement repertoires seems questionable, as technology has radi-
cally altered mobilization (Bennett and Iyengar 2008). European engage-
ment patterns are increasingly defined by the Internet and social media
(Bennett, Lang, and Segerberg 2013), relying less on common organiza-
tional backgrounds and more on spontaneous and fluid forms of web-�
mediated action. The highly professionalized advocacy that European in-
stitutions endorse clashes with this new repertoire and its user networks.
eu institutions demand fast and structured input that is aligned with pre-
set agendas, and in general they favor the expertise of large advocacy orga-
nizations over input from diverse and loose alliances. Margot Wallstrom,
a former commissioner for institutional relations and communication
strategy and a staunch advocate of bringing more nonorganized women’s
voices into eu civil dialogue, has seen her agenda sidelined since she left

Women’s Advocacy Networksâ•…273

office. In sum, ngoized European women’s movements operate under
governance conditions that tend to discourage public voice. Economic
and legal constraints compound the problem.

Economic and Legal Constraints of Women’s NGOs

Women’s ngos rely on organizational continuity, and continuity in turn
depends on sustainable legal and economic frameworks. Gender activists
form an ngo because they assume that legal incorporation will give their
concerns public recognition and legitimacy, that private donors as well as
governments will treat the organization as a professional entity, and that
its status as a charity will enhance their ability to raise funds. Yet both the
economic and legal implications of ngoization pose challenges for move-
ment actors.
Even though gender equality has been identified as key to democratic
participation and economic sustainability, women’s ngos in the European
Union and worldwide still operate at the periphery of the international
donor community. A report issued by the Association for Women’s Rights
in Development (awid) explores the difference in finances between well-�
established, large, international ngos and women’s ngos with a telling
example: “In 2005, World Vision International, the world’s largest Chris-
tian international development organization, and one with no mandate to
support emergency contraception and abortion, had an income of almost
USD 2 billion. In that same year, 729 of the leading women’s rights organi-
zations worldwide had a collective income of a paltry USD 76 million, not
even 4 percent of World Vision’s budget” (Kerr 2007, 20). And whereas
women’s ngos in the global North somewhat improved their funding
situation early in the new millennium as compared to the 1990s,4 women’s
organizations in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, the Carib-
bean, and Central and Eastern Europe had more difficulty raising funds
between 2000 and 2005 than in previous years (awid/Kerr 2007, 15).
The European Union is the largest donor agency in Europe. It defines its
financial situation in framework programs that span several years. From
2001 to 2005, the European Union financed the Fifth Community Action
Program for the implementation of gender equality with a total of fifty
million Euros. The main objectives of this framework strategy on gender
equality were to raise awareness, to improve analysis and evaluation, and
to develop the “capacity for players to promote gender equality” (Euro-
pean Commission 2001, 2). Yet it would be far from the truth to envision
the bulk of these funds as going to women’s ngos. As a matter of fact,

274â•… Sabine Lang

actors who have access to these program funds are explicitly mentioned in
the initiative, and ngos are fifth in a list of institutional actors that begins
with: (1) member states (meaning the governments of member states);
(2) local and regional authorities; (3) bodies promoting gender equality;
and (4) social partners (European Commission 2001, 6).5 The final report
on the fifth framework states that in the category of “raising awareness,”
only 7 percent of these funds went to ngos; in the category of “transna-
tional cooperation,” only 25 percent of the funds did (European Commis-
sion 2008). The majority of funds for raising awareness about gender were
made available to government actors (30 percent) and social partners,
such as business associations and large welfare associations (22 percent).
This indicates that the European women’s nongovernmental sector re-
ceived a very small portion of the funding of the central eu program on
gender equality. In this area, funding of established political and social
institutions trumps funding for women’s ngos. In effect, specific project
missions are defined and structured to a large degree by government
actors, and if ngos participate, they often must do so under predefined
conditions that were set by institutional politics. The primacy of institu-
tional funding sets agendas and employs frames that women’s ngos need
to adapt to.
This bias toward institutional funding continued in the next program
period, called Progress, which lasted from 2007 to 2012. Progress reserved
a total of 433 billion Euros to spend on sustainable development goals and
projects, including research programs, education, and social and labor
market policy initiatives. Within these parameters, Progress merged sev-
eral key programs of the social agenda of the European Union for the pur-
poses of synergy effects and mainstreaming gender equality. The part of
Progress that explicitly funds activities related to gender equality received
about the same amount of funds as those activities had been given in the
Fifth Community Action Program, and the program design as well as the
kinds of activities it promoted continued to cater to institutional actors
such as governments, universities, and unions (Progress 2007).
Not only specifically gender-�oriented eu funds are awarded with an
institutional bias. The funding situation for women’s ngos in other eu
policy domains exposes similar pulls. In 2007, for example, the largest
women’s fund in Europe, the Netherlands-Â�based Mama Cash, called for
signatures to petition the European Commissioner for Development and
Humanitarian Aid, demanding an increase in support by the European
Commission for women’s projects (Mama Cash 2007). At the time, ac-

Women’s Advocacy Networksâ•…275

cording to Mama Cash, the European Union was spending just 0.04 per-
cent of its aid funds for women’s projects (ibid.). In the same spirit, the re-
port issued by awid recommended that European women’s projects pay
more attention to their funding situation and “join forces to lobby for in-
clusion of women’s rights in the development budget lines at country level
and in the European Commission” (Kerr 2007, 77). Overall, awid found
the advocacy of European women’s ngos to be too focused on policy
issues while the groups disregarded budget matters (ibid.). Moreover, the
kind of policy issues addressed seem to be set by the institutional agenda
of the European Union, which prioritizes trafficking and labor market
issues. These are the policy issues that receive the most funds; it is much
more difficult to get financial support for women’s organizing or for con-
troversial policies like sex workers’ rights (Kerr 2007, 36). The awid re-
port substantiates the finding above that the European Union prioritizes
larger women’s ngos, noting that “it is easier for them [the European
Union] to administer fewer big grants” and that “proposals to the eu are
extremely onerous and therefore cut out most women’s rights groups”
(ibid., 36). Thus, European women’s ngos must be professionalized if they
are to receive funds from the European Union. They compete with estab-
lished actors from unions, business associations, and the field of women’s
policy. Very few women’s ngos have the resources and means to match
those of these solidly funded institutions.
This already difficult financial situation for European women’s ngos
becomes even more precarious during times of economic crisis. awid
found that over half of the ngos it surveyed received less funding in 2005
than in 2000 (Kerr 2007, 17). Across Europe as well as North America,
roughly two-Â�thirds of surveyed women’s ngos found fund-Â�raising to be
much harder in 2005 than in 2000 (awid and Kerr 2007, 24). More than
half of these ngos increased their staff and resources for fund-�raising in
the past five years (awid and Kerr 2007, 25). During the global economic
crisis, it is likely that this downward trend will persist. In sum, economic
constraints produce donor-�friendly agendas and encourage professional-
ized, nonagonistic behavior among women’s ngos. Public advocacy and
politicization take a back seat and are counterproductive if economic sur-
vival is paramount.

Defining the Political

Besides economic constraints, women’s ngos in the European Union face
a set of legal restrictions that—even though not specific to women’s orga-

276â•… Sabine Lang

nizations—affect their role as movement actors engaging in public ad-
vocacy.6 Women’s movement actors will argue that both advocacy and
politicization of gender issues are necessary, and that both lobbying and
public engagement are ultimately essential for lasting policy success. Ad-
vocacy and politicization are twins in their orientation toward mobili-
zation. Whereas advocacy means acting on behalf of someone or some-
thing, politicizing points to two interrelated, but different dimensions of
inclusion. First, it implies raising political awareness or involvement and
thereby the salience of issues—that is its participatory dimension. Sec-
ond, it refers to the agonistic dimension of the political process, indi-
cating conflict and debate (Mouffe 2005). ngoized women’s movements
across Europe struggle with both dimensions of politicization: with a lack
of salience of gender issues that go beyond the eu-�sanctioned labor mar-
ket focus and correspondingly a lack of involvement of eu citizens in the
overall inequality agenda; and with a lack of agonistic public debate about
what gender equality in Europe means in the first place. Not being able
to politicize gender equality on a larger scale has its roots in a number of
realms, such as the media and political parties—both of which are still
dominated by men. But it is also the result of the legal restrictions on
ngos’ political activity.
ngos receive a charitable tax status through national tax laws or not-�
for-�profit laws. In the European Union, there is no overarching legal struc-
ture in place. The tax status of the charitable sector falls in the purview
of each member state. Of specific interest to ngoized movement actors’
mobilization repertoire is the definition of what constitutes acceptable
activities, which generally involves both adherence to constitutional prin-
ciples and the exclusion of political activities.
Adherence to constitutional principles means accepting not just a nor-
mative order, but also specific behaviors. In Germany, for example, a 1984
ruling by the Federal Finance Court established that an ngo could have
its charity status revoked if it publicly announced nonviolent resistance in
public spaces or refused to comply with policy orders during a demonstra-
tion.7 All eu member states have laws that prevent ngos from engaging
in political activities if they want to keep their charitable status. Yet what
constitutes a political activity is defined differently from country to coun-
try. The common denominator is that support for political parties is not al-
lowed. Beyond that, Hungary prohibits involvement in all direct political
activities, without specifying what is deemed political, whereas Latvia re-
stricts only political activities that “are directed to the support of political

Women’s Advocacy Networksâ•…277

organizations (parties)” (Moore, Hadzi-Â�Miceva, and Bullain 2008, 12). All
across Europe, the legal definitions of “political activity” are hazy. German
law stipulates that an occasional attempt to influence public opinion is ac-
ceptable for a charity, but involvement in “daily politics” is not.
In effect, even though most countries’ charity laws allow a certain de-
gree of political activity, it is the unclear margins combined with severe
repercussions for transgressions that make public mobilization a poten-
tially hazardous activity for ngos. Research on the nonprofit sector has
shown that these restrictions on political activity tend to promote a cul-
ture of extreme self-�censorship and ultimately limit the capacity of ngos
to advocate for social change and engage publicly with public policy
(Berry and Aarons 2003). The hazy definitions of acceptable speech and
action pose problems for women’s ngos interested in more than merely
representing issues within governance contexts.
In some European countries, ngo status is causing debate. At the fore-
front of a movement to alter political restrictions on ngo activity is the
United Kingdom, where the discrepancy between the encouragement of
democratic participation by community organizations and the restric-
tions on their public voice is attracting much criticism. The traditional
focus in the United Kingdom, as across Europe, has been to encourage
“volunteering or grassroots community work rather than ‘upward’ activ-
ism through . . . forms of advocacy” (Dunn 2008, 53). English legislation on
charities before the 2006 Charities Act defined activities of public benefit.
Political aims clearly do not fall within this list. Political activities, accord-
ing to the Charities Act, are “broadly defined and will cover any activity or
purpose which furthers the interests of a political party or cause or which
seeks to change the laws, policies, or decisions of uk or other govern-
ments” (quoted in Dunn 2008, 54). Again, the Charities Act leaves some
territory undefined: consultative functions could be seen as nonpolitical
activities. But, as noted above, vague language on what constitutes politi-
cal action tends to lead ngos to tread very cautiously around political
issues in public. Moreover, it disproportionately tends to affect smaller
ngos that have fewer resources to withstand possible legal tax challenges
(Dunn 2008; Berry and Aarons 2003; Lang 2009a, 2009b and 2013).
In 2007 a Government Advisory Group on campaigning and the volun-
tary sector was formed in the United Kingdom. It issued a report in which
it called for “clarification of the law and for an opening up of the legal rules
to allow all political activities save support of political parties” (quoted in
Dunn 2008, 57). The report highlighted the relationship between engage-

278â•… Sabine Lang

ment of the public and liberalized rules for political advocacy of ngos. It
concluded that the mission of the law should not be to protect the public
from political activity by ngos—in contrast, “the law should encourage
the public to participate in democratic processes through such organiza-
tions” (ibid.). In new guidelines for the existing law issued in March 2008,
the uk Charities Commission supported the Advisory Group’s recom-
mendations. It is noteworthy that no change was made in the overall legal
framework for ngos. Only the guidelines for interpreting what consti-
tutes acceptable political activity in the United Kingdom have been clari-
fied, thus allowing the ngo sector to speak with a stronger voice in pub-
lic. To my knowledge, no other European country has followed suit so far.

Women’s NGOs and Public Engagement

The European Union offers large and professionalized women’s ngos
and their networks more participatory venues than most national gov-
ernments do. Women’s advocacy coalitions are involved in a substantial
number of policy debates; ngos are invited to participate because they
are experts and are seen as representatives of wider eu civil society. This
process is giving women’s advocacy networks considerable clout. Yet one
consequence of the focus on institutional advocacy is that policy success
can be achieved to a large degree without public participation. As several
case studies of gender policy campaigns have shown, they did not de-
pend on public involvement or public voice. Analyses of successful Euro-
pean women’s campaigns, such as Kathrin Zippel’s (2006) study of the
campaign to include sexual harassment in the 2002 Equal Treatment Di-
rective and Barbara Helfferich’s and Felix Kolb’s (2001) research on the
introduction of gender mainstreaming in the Amsterdam Treaty, present
evidence of institutional ngo activism producing gender-�sensitive out-
comes. Neither of these cases included strong public advocacy campaigns.
The lesson for gender activists in Europe could thus simply be that mobi-
lizing gender for European women’s ngos means developing the exper-
tise and insider knowledge to gain access to and remain included in formal
and informal contexts of institutional eu advocacy.
I have documented elsewhere that major European-Â�based women’s
networks devote most of their time and energy to staying on top of policy
developments, consulting with fellow stakeholders in the area of women’s
issues, and carrying their demands to the institutions of the European
Union (Lang 2009b and 2013). Their capacity for public outreach, in con-
trast, is limited. In an analysis of five major European women’s networks

Women’s Advocacy Networksâ•…279

between 2006 and 2007, I established that they provided relatively few
opportunities for interested citizens to interact with them through online
means. The data I collected pointed to the dominance of informational
over activating web content in all of the networks. Whereas most of them
offered information about how to subscribe to newsletters, become a
member, and make a donation, they very rarely gave voice to members and
interested parties through such means as blogs and discussion forums.
Comparatively low-�cost means of public outreach remained thus under-
used (Lang 2009b). Within the scope of institutional advocacy, being able
to activate large constituencies does not seem to be very important.8 In-
stead, network identity was constructed on the basis of being gender ex-
perts and of providing information platforms. A newsletter analysis of the
same set of eu-Â�based women’s networks corroborated these earlier find-
ings. Only 5 percent of all newsletter coverage of the networks presented
itself as “actionable,” meaning coverage that invited citizens to participate
in a future action taken by a network (ibid.). The vast majority of the news-
letter content was devoted to purely informational accounts of past events
and actions taken solely within the professional confines of the network.
Yet some women’s networks seem to have become wary of the institu-
tionally confined advocacy of European ngos. This has prompted efforts
to move “beyond ngoization” (see the chapter by Alvarez in this volume)
and to the search for alternative venues for mobilization. The most visible
attempt to create a European feminist movement outside or alongside
existing women’s ngos was launched in 2006. The European Feminist
Forum (eff) was founded on grounds that “feminists in Europe are not
acting as a movement to effect necessary changes” (European Feminist
Forum 2007, see also European Feminist Forum 2009). The focus of the
eff was to “re-Â�politicize the feminist movement in Europe” (European
Feminist Forum 2009, 10) by establishing an ongoing dialogue, culmi-
nating in a face-�to-�face meeting; building new alliances and networks;
and specifically fostering more East-�West communication. Initial fund-
ing from the Open Society Institute and Mamma Cash, among others, al-
lowed the eff to develop an extensive and input-�oriented online presence
in four languages. Affinity groups were created, and a “travelling circus”
(Lohmann 2009, 49) provided contacts between eff activists and local
projects across Europe. It is not as though the eff was operating with-
out ngo support; in fact, among the founding members of the eff were
karat, a network of Central and Eastern European women’s ngos, and
Women in Development Europe, a large umbrella network of women’s

280â•… Sabine Lang

ngos working in development. Yet it is indicative of the disenchantment
of many members of these established European women’s networks that
they helped launch an initiative that was clearly directed at activities out-
side of their regular business and that was more interested in public en-
gagement than their own organizations were, or could be.
Initially, over 3,000 activists subscribed to the eff’s newsletter, joined
affinity groups, and contributed to the debate it sponsored. But what
looked like an impressive start came to an abrupt end in 2008. Due to
financial difficulties, the core event for European activists, planned to take
place in Poland, had to be canceled and the project was terminated. In
its final assessment of the project’s end, the organizers stated: “karat
Coalition, the host organization in Poland, and the iiav where the Euro-
pean Feminist Forum secretariat is housed, invested extensive personal
and institutional resources in the fundraising efforts, which included visit-
ing potential funders in Scandinavia, Poland and Brussels. . . . Funder after
funder made clear this activity could not be funded from their limited
budgets. It was not fundable by local or State governments (because it
went over State boundaries), it was not a priority for many development
aid budgets and it did not fit in to European Union tenders and calls. The
lack of funds for this type of new initiative is an indication of the current
difficult context in Europe for the feminist movement” (European Femi-
nist Forum 2008).
Even though European women’s ngos and their networks are pulled
into arenas of institutional advocacy, the search for new forms of move-
ment building and cooperation indicates their discontent. The launch of
the eff on a European scale as well as of nationally focused initiatives
like the UK feminista network in the United Kingdom9 indicates ambiva-
lence about tailoring advocacy solely toward institutional women’s net-
work strategies. Yet moving “beyond ngoization” also poses risks. Lack
of public attention and of funds for the development of public advocacy
repertoires inhibits these attempts.

Conclusion
The road signs directing women’s movement activity across Europe seem
to be pointing toward institutional advocacy. Incentives to participate in
institutional governance by far outweigh those found in public advocacy
contexts. It is not just the European Union that has opened its doors to
civil society actors and that offers formal and informal access to selective
women’s movement actors; national governments have also discovered

Women’s Advocacy Networksâ•…281

the value of civic consultations and ngo-�driven expert forums. With their
participation in institutionalized settings, European ngoized women’s
movements gain recognition, legitimacy, and knowledge they can use to
acquire grants, and they can point to some impressive policy successes.
Economic and legal constraints contribute to the attraction of institu-
tional advocacy arrangements. Since restrictions on ngos’ political ac-
tivity are largely restrictions in regard to public political activity, women’s
ngos’ focus on advocating in institutionalized venues presents itself as
a rational choice. Jutta Joachim and Birgit Locher, in their comparative
work on ngos in the United Nations and eu institutions, point to the
potentially deradicalizing consequences of becoming institutional in-
siders: “ngos rely on personal contacts and alliances with like-Â�minded
states for access, prefer lobbying strategies to symbolic or polarizing
action, and make consensual proposals backed up by scientific expertise
instead of engaging in radical criticism” (2009, 171).
In sum, the concentration of eu women’s advocacy networks in the
European Union on institutional governance has its costs. First, it dimin-
ishes the capacity for advocacy on behalf of underrepresented constitu-
encies and issues and tends to sideline the public politicization of gender
equality. The creation of the eff was a testimony to this lack of empha-
sis on movement building, and its demise is a testimony to the difficulty
of movement building without being able to rely on politicized feminist
publics.
Second, the lack of public mobilization capacity at times endangers
the forceful pursuit of institutional gender agendas. Since participation of
women’s ngos in eu governance is organized around institutional needs
and defined by institutional priorities, it will be employed only selectively.
Several studies have pointed to a tendency within the European Union
since about 2005 to subsume and sidetrack gender-�equality issues under
the broader markers of mainstreaming and diversity. Maria Stratigaki
(2005) has analyzed the replacement of enforceable community action
programs with a road map that lacks resources and remains vague. Jane
Jenson (2008) has pointed out how the European employment strategy
has slowly altered equality from a central pillar to a footnote. In both
cases, ngoized women’s advocacy networks have not been able to pro-
tect feminist agendas.
A third effect of ngoized advocacy networks is an increasing gap be-
tween insitutitional insiders and outsiders as well as between transnational

282â•… Sabine Lang

actors and local constituents. This “division of political labor whereby the
professional feminist—the gender expert—has arrogated the global ter-
rain to themselves without a clear basis of legitimation from local con-
stituencies” (Mendoza 2002, 309)—is not just a European phenomenon; it
has been observed by researchers from Latin America to Africa (Mogha-
dam 2005; Adams 2006). And it can, as recent examples on the stages of
the European Union have shown, lead relatively quickly to the formalized
question of civil society actors’ legitimacy.
The case of the European Union indicates that women’s movements
are not just coping with a period of abeyance, but that they face a set of
institutional and structural shifts in mobilization capacity that are char-
acterized by a focus on institutional governance, disincentives to public
advocacy, and an increasing distance between insider status and public
engagement. Women’s movement actors demand that ngos move toward
a “conceptual shift from fundraising to agenda setting and movement
building (Kerr 2007, 102). As advocacy becomes institutionally depoliti-
cized and as selective ngoized movement actors become part of a policy-�
making process that has not been defined in participatory scenarios with
affected communities, movement building and creating feminist publics
across the European Union seems to be the most pressing task for the
near future.

Notes
1. This is the umbrella organization for European women’s ngos. Its headquarters
is in Brussels.
2. The United Nations and other governance bodies, as well as private foundation
and donor funding, add to the pull toward ngoization. See, for example, Bagic
(2006) for post-�Yugoslavian, Mendoza (2002) for Latin American, and Jad (2007)
for Arabic women’s movements.
3. This is not to dispute the fact that some grant-Â�savvy women’s groups on the
local level are well equipped to successfully apply for eu grants (see, for example,
Guenther 2010).
4. The data are based on Joanna Kerr’s survey of women’s rights organizations world-
wide in 2006. Over 1,400 organizations responded to the survey. The sample in-
cluded 84 organizations from Western Europe and North America as well as 128
organizations from Central and Eastern European countries. Fifty percent of the
organizations were founded in the 1990s and 39 percent after 2000 (Kerr 2007, 23).
Two-�thirds of the ngos in this sample had budgets of less than $50,000 per year.
Over two-�thirds work primarily at the national (69 percent) and/or local levels (49
percent). Only 14 percent work at the international level.

Women’s Advocacy Networksâ•…283

5. The Council decided in 2004 to extend the fifth framework into 2006 in order to
accommodate the accession of the ten new member states. The budget was in-
creased to 61.5 million Euros.
6. Restrictions on political activities for ngos are not unique to liberal democracies.
In fact, such restrictions are much more severe in managed democracies like Rus-
sia and are used extensively to silence ngos’ voices in autocratic states.
7. Bundesfinanzhof 1984. Decision 29.08.1984, BStBl 1984 II p. 844.
8. Tatjana Pudrovska and Myra Marx Ferree (2004) add to this picture with their
web-Â�based analysis of women’s networks, suggesting that European networks tend
to refrain from a feminist agenda and use a more integrationist language.
9. See its website, at http://www.ukfeminista.org.uk; see also Banyard 2010.

284â•… Sabine Lang

╉CHAPTER 11 Sonia E. Alvarez

Beyond NGOization?
Reflections from Latin America

This essay revisits what I referred to as “the Latin American femi-

nist ngo boom” of the 1990s and offers some reflections on how
and why, at least in that region of the world, we may be moving
beyond it. As we know, ngos became the subject of considerable
controversy among feminists across the globe in the 1990s. While
states, intergovernmental organizations (igos), and international
financial institutions (ifis) embraced ngos as a “magic bullet” of
which “nothing short of miracles” was to be expected (W. Fisher
1997, 442; Edwards and Hulme 1996), critical feminist discourses
of the late 1990s, my own work included, problematized a pro-
cess that feminists in both activist and scholarly circles dubbed
“ngoization” (Alvarez 1998, 1999; Lang 1997; Silliman 1999; Schild
1998).
In Latin America, the debate over ngos was particularly
heated and often acerbic. In the eyes of their staunchest critics,
ngos were veritable traitors to feminist ethical principles that
depoliticized feminist agendas and collaborated with neoliberal
ones. Some contended that feminist ngos were “institutionalized
branches of the movement” that had been summarily “co-Â�opted
by the powers they once criticized (such as the state and transna-
tional capital and their agents)” (Castro 2001, 17). ngos’ most stri-
dent detractors, the feministas autónomas, maintained that “to
demand, reform, negotiate, and lobby,” common practices among
late-Â�twentieth-Â�century feminist ngos, were “actions based on a
liberal ‘ethic’ that make social movements as a whole into lifeless
entities, subsidiaries and legitimators of the politics of domination and op-
pression” (Galindo 1997, 11). They vehemently condemned feminist ngos
for having “institutionalized” the women’s movement and “sold out” to the
forces of “global neoliberal patriarchy” (Bedregal 1997; Monasteiros 2007,
2008; Mujeres Creando 2005; Pisano 1996; see also Alvarez, Friedman,
et al. 2003; Ríos Tobar, Godoy Catalán, and Guerrero Caviedes 2003).
I want to stress, however, that “blanket assessments of feminist ngos
as handmaidens of neoliberal planetary patriarchy” or development do-Â�
gooders failed to capture the ambiguities and variations in and among
ngos (Alvarez 1999, 200). The Good ngos–Bad ngos binary doesn’t do
justice to the dual or hybrid identity of feminist ngos, their two facets,
as technical-�professional organizations that are at once integral parts
of feminist movements (Alvarez 1999, 196). In this essay, I join scholars
such as Julie Hemment (2007), Donna Murdock (2008) and Millie Thayer
(2000, 2010) in moving beyond binary representations of ngos. As Hem-
ment rightly insists, in most feminist ngos “the good and the bad are
intertwined and interdependent” (2007, 68). She cautions, moreover, that
“the critique of ngos has resonated with anti-Â�democratic and anti-Â�human
rights forces and led to the withdrawal of funds from rights-�promoting
projects” (2007, 142). Indeed, in contexts like Colombia, ngos even be-
came the targets of paramilitary forces who dubbed them “parasubver-
sives”; former President Uribe himself accused human rights groups of
being “defenders of terrorism” (Murdock 2008, 210), for instance. And
feminist ngos are not always spared harassment at the other end of the
political spectrum, as Nicaraguan activists have learned since abortion
was recriminalized under Daniel Ortega’s reign and several ngo leaders
have been charged with “illegal association to commit delinquency, apolo-
gia for the crime of abortion, complicity with the crime of sexual abuse,”
among other offenses.1
We need to move beyond unilateral condemnations of ngos that have
fed these kinds of antifeminist arguments and obscured the potential for
agency and “wiggle room” even among those ngos most beholden to
global neoliberal gender agendas (Hemment 2007, 12–13; Sommer 2006;
Alvarez forthcoming). In joining the critique of the 1990s critique of femi-
nist ngos, and therefore engaging in self-�critique, I will first revisit the
notion of ngoization, then review the crucial “movement work” per-
formed by ngos that was often obscured by that notion, and finally offer
some reflections on how and why Latin American feminisms and other
social movements may be beginning to move “beyond the Boom.”

286â•… Sonia E. Alvarez

NGOization Revisited
I must begin by clarifying that my original use of the term “ngoization”
was not intended as a synonym or shorthand for the proliferation of ngos
during the 1990s. ngoization during that decade was not simply about an
increase in the numbers of more formally structured feminist organiza-
tions with paid, professional staff and funding from government, multi-
lateral and bilateral agencies, and foreign donors. Rather, ngoization, in
my view, entailed national and global neoliberalism’s active promotion
and official sanctioning of particular organizational forms and practices
among feminist organizations and other sectors of civil society. And it was
state, igo, and ifi promotion of more rhetorically restrained, politically
collaborative, and technically proficient feminist practices that triggered
what I’ve called the “ngo Boom” of the 1990s in Latin America.
A number of national, regional, and global forces fueled ngoization
in Latin America. As the region’s neoliberal governments sought to ad-
minister the enormous social costs of draconian structural adjustment
policies while cutting back state expenditures and social programs, many
increasingly turned to those ngos they deemed technically capable and
politically trustworthy to assist in the task of “social adjustment.” Since
many of those programs targeted poor urban and rural women, govern-
ments enjoined feminist ngos to “partner” with the state—often in the
name of enhancing “women’s citizen participation” in the policy pro-
cess—and to lend their expertise in “gender matters” in executing (though
rarely in formulating) them. As we know, donors also had a strong hand
in pushing feminist organizations toward more professionalized, formal
structures (Lebon 1998, 2006, 2010; Maier and Lebon 2010; Thayer 2000,
2010). Finally, the process of ngoization was further accentuated when
the United Nations summoned feminist ngos to participate in the Cairo
Summit on Population and Development, the Beijing Women’s Confer-
ence, and others in the string of Social Summits and the follow-Â�up “+5”
and then “+10” conferences it sponsored during the 1990s and 2000s
(Alvarez 1998; Friedman 2000).
These trends unsettled the hybrid identities of many feminist ngos in
the region, leading some to place empowerment goals and a wide range of
movement-Â�oriented activities “on the strategic ‘back burner,’ ” as Murdock
suggests, and to put “demonstrable impact (or more bang for the develop-
ment buck), garnered through short-�term projects, large-�scale workshops
and forums, and more overt participation in the policy arena” on the “front

Beyond NGOizationâ•…287
burner” (2008, 3). By the late 1990s, ngoization had resulted from the
confluence of three trends. First, as states and igos increasingly turned
to feminist ngos as gender experts rather than as citizens’ groups advo-
cating on behalf of women’s rights, feminist cultural-Â�political interven-
tions in the public debate were often reduced to technical ones. Second,
as neoliberal states and igos viewed ngos as surrogates for civil society,
feminist ngos began to be (selectively) consulted on gender policy mat-
ters on the assumption that they served as “intermediaries” to larger soci-
etal constituencies. While many ngos retained linkages to such constitu-
encies, however, other actors in the expansive Latin American women’s
movement field—particularly popular women’s groups and feminist or-
ganizations publicly critical of the neoliberal status quo—often were de-
nied direct access to gender policy debates and thereby effectively politi-
cally silenced. Finally, as states increasingly subcontracted feminist ngos
to advise on or carry out government women’s programs, ngos’ ability
to critically monitor policy and advocate for more thoroughgoing femi-
nist reform was sometimes jeopardized (Alvarez 1999, 183). Many orga-
nizations found themselves “caught up in the . . . ngo Boom—becoming
more hierarchically organized, governed by corporate business manage-
ment principles [becoming empresas sociales, or social companies], and
increasingly focused on creating knowledge and policy” (Murdock 2008,
26, 48).

Feminist NGOs’ Oft-Â�Neglected “Movement Work”

What was often overlooked in scholarly and activist critiques of ngoiza-
tion was the fact that, even at the height of the Boom, many if not most
professionalized ngos remained “true to their feminist roots” (Murdock
2008, 34) and often played a critical role in grounding and articulating
the expansive, heterogeneous Latin American feminist fields of the 1990s
and 2000s. As feminism was diffused among diverse subjects and into a
wide range of spaces and places, it was reconfigured as discursive fields of
action (Alvarez, Baiocchi, et al., unpublished manuscript). “Trickling up,
down and sideways,” as in Fiona Macaulay’s (2010) apt depiction of Bra-
zil’s “multi-Â�nodal women’s movement” and “gender policy community,”
feminism in many, if not most, countries in the region today not only has
been “mainstreamed” so that it extends vertically across different levels
of government, traverses much of the party spectrum, and engages with a
variety of national and international policy arenas; feminism also has been

288â•… Sonia E. Alvarez

“sidestreamed,” if you will, spreading horizontally into a wide array of class
and racial-�ethnic communities and social and cultural spaces, including
parallel social movement publics. By producing feminist knowledges, dis-
seminating feminist discourses, and serving as nodal points in the mul-
tiple political-�communicative webs and networks that link diverse and
dispersed feminist actors, ngos—with their permanent headquarters, siz-
able budgets, functionally specific departments, specialized publications,
and paid administrative, research, and outreach staff—Â�became mainstays
of feminist fields, helping to interweave disparate feminist actors and ar-
ticulate them discursively.
First, many ngos, as Vera Soares (1998) suggests, have been important
producers of feminist knowledge. Some of the larger and better-�resourced
feminist organizations boast research departments that rival those of
many university women’s studies programs in the region. They churn out
scores of position papers, monographs, and edited collections on topics
ranging from gender and ethnic discrimination suffered by indigenous,
peasant, and rural women workers to the poor quality of gynecological
care offered by public health facilities and the widespread incidence of cer-
vical cancer among working-Â�class women to the courts’ shoddy record in
adjudicating domestic violence cases. The data and analysis generated by
ngos have provided vital foundations for more effective feminist advo-
cacy in a variety of settings—from un summits and national legislatures to
local schools, neighborhood groups, and trade unions. And feminist ngo
texts also often offer theoretical interpretations and conceptual innova-
tions that contribute directly to that “fluid and continually evolving body
of meanings that feminists think of when they ask themselves, ‘Am I a
feminist?’” and thus help forge what Jane Mansbridge has theorized as the
“discursively created movement . . . that inspires activists and is the entity
to which they feel accountable” (1995, 29).
A second critical way that ngos have been central to sustaining move-
ment fields, then, is as disseminators of feminist discourses. Though much
of their knowledge production is explicitly aimed at influencing the policy
process and is distributed widely to legislators, government bureaucrats,
and other public officials, a good deal is also self-�consciously directed at
“the movement” and is often tapped and redeployed to a variety of ends by
feminists active in other civil society organizations and social and political
institutions. Embedded in feminist frameworks even when translated and
tailored to suit particular audiences, the vast array of electronic and print

Beyond NGOizationâ•…289
journals, newsletters, training manuals, pamphlets, and other educational
and audiovisual materials produced circulate widely among variously situ-
ated feminist activists through a range of media.
Feminist ngo products are also often used in educational and con-
scientización activities mounted by other (nonfeminist) social movements
and civil society organizations, including many trade unions and grass-
roots groups. Moreover, as the vast constellation of knowledge prod-
ucts generated by ngos wind their way through feminisms’ multilay-
ered political-�communicative webs, they also often cross over into other
(overlapping) networks of social movements, civil society organizations,
and social and political institutions. Feminisms’ discursive “baggage”
thus sometimes travels “unaccompanied,” so to speak. That is, even where
there may be no bona fide “feminist activists” in sight, the communica-
tive webs that ngos help sustain work to disseminate feminist discourses
indirectly into a variety of other publics. The multiple, if sometimes un-
charted, routes traveled by feminist products and discourses, then, partly
accounts for why “a diffuse feminism” has spread among a good number
of popular women’s organizations in many countries in the region (Feijoó
2000, 26; Di Marco 2006, forthcoming). That is, feminist ngos work to
mobilize ideas, not just people.
The discourses that inform feminist practices across a wide range
of sites, moreover, flow through what Colombian feminist sociologist
Magdalena León once referred to as a veritable “tangle of networks” (“un
enredo de redes”)—both formal and informal. Indeed, Peruvian feminists
Cecilia Olea Mauleón and Virginia Vargas describe “the movement” itself
as a kind of “meganetwork” (Olea Mauleón and Vargas 1998, 147). The now
pervasive feminist practice of “enredarse” or “getting entangled” consists
of more formalized and institutionalized territorial, thematic, advocacy-�
focused, and identity-�centered networks organized on a local, national,
regional, or global scale, as well as more fluid, reticulated, and informal
webs of interpersonal and interorganizational communication and inter-
action (Shepard 2003, 2006).
The 1990s was “the premier period” for the creation of new national
and regional networks, fueled in part by Latin American feminists’ un-
precedented involvement in national consultation processes for the string
of un social summits that took place in the first half of that decade. Be-
yond Latin American feminisms’ growing international entanglements in
the 1990s and early 2000s, two further factors helped foster the spread of

290â•… Sonia E. Alvarez

this more structured form of feminist “enredos.” First, the decentering of
feminisms itself seems to have prompted activists to devise more stable
and predictable forms of articulation and collaboration across ever more
diverse and dispersed organizational and geographical locations. The fact
that networks became international donors’ vehicle of choice for allocat-
ing funds in presumably more efficient and effective ways was a second
crucial factor fueling the creation of numerous formalized feminist net-
works throughout the region. Throughout the 1990s, there was a veri-
table frenzy of donor funding for networks—particularly for un-Â�related
women’s rights advocacy networks—even as support for other types of
ngo activities and for less institutionalized expressions of feminist activ-
ism dwindled in much of the region (Shepard 2003, 2006; Thayer 2010).

Movements Beyond the Boom?

The above outlined movement/field-�sustaining work of ngos was often
obscured in critiques of ngoization prevailing during the Boom years.
Moreover, in more recent times, growing numbers of ngos arguably have
again placed “movement work” on the front burner. Throughout Latin
America, many are seeking to rearticulate local, national, regional, and
global movement fields, engaging more vigorously in outreach and linking
to other social movements and broader noninstitutional publics.
Several developments—internal and external to feminist fields—help
account for the visible shifts under way among feminist ngos and net-
works. Internally, there has been growing critical introspection and recog-
nition of the limits of what Christina Ewig (1999) dubbed the “ngo-Â�based
social movement model.” Not only had ngoization exacerbated power
imbalances among feminists and sometimes dulled feminisms’ more radi-
cal edge, but—many ngo professionals now maintain—that “model” also
revealed limits for actually implementing hard-�won policy gains, which
requires public pressure, secured through changes in public opinion, not
just through policy monitoring.
As the various “+ 5” conferences revealed that feminist and other pro-
gressive movements’ project of influencing international policy arenas
had yielded meager concrete results, many ngo activists grew ever more
disillusioned with the fruits of their “expert” advocacy work (Vargas 2010).
In a critical retrospective on feminist involvement in national and inter-
national policy monitoring, Peruvian activist Virginia Vargas, who headed
the ngo preparatory process in the mid-�1990s, argued that 2000 repre-

Beyond NGOizationâ•…291
sented a critical turning point when “we reexamined ourselves, our con-
ceptions and our political practices since the Beijing conference.” Though
there “undoubtedly were advances,” she maintained,

after our initial enthusiasm about everything that could be achieved

with the fulfillment of the recommendations of the Platform, we moved
to a much less seductive reality, not just because of what had not been
fulfilled, but also because everything that we had achieved had been
flattened and left doors open for retrogression. (2004, email correspon-
dence)

Indeed, if it had been possible to incorporate some elements of feminist,

human rights, or environmentalist agendas into the international accords
and platforms of the 1990s, it also became increasingly apparent to many
that any possibility for more significant changes in the rights and life con-
ditions of most women and men was in effect blocked by the intensifica-
tion of neoliberal globalization, the ever more dramatic rolling back of
the state, structural adjustment processes, and the concomitant erosion
of citizenship and social policies during that same decade (Alvarez, Faria,
and Nobre 2004).
The obvious deficiencies of neoliberalism unleashed innovative and dy-
namic resistance movements at the turn of the present century. Involving
an impressively broad array of nonstate actors, this revitalized “antisys-
temic” resistance spanned from mass mobilizations in Bolivia and Ecuador
and novel forms of organizing among immigrants, indigenous, and Afro-�
descendant peoples to the innovative modalities of politics developed by
Brazil’s mst, Argentina’s piqueteros, hip hop, and alternative media move-
ments emergent throughout the region, and multiscalar networks growing
out of the World Social Forum (wsf) and other recent national, regional,
and global organizing processes (Alvarez, Baiocchi, et al. forthcoming;
Johnston and Almeida 2006; Prashad and Ballvé 2006; Souza Santos 2007;
Stahler-Â�Sholk, Vanden, and Keucker 2008). If the un-Â�focused “global civil
society” of the 1990s had mirrored the hegemonic international system
and operated well within its discursive parameters, the 2000s witnessed
the rise of counterhegemonic global social forces that found their point
of articulation precisely in their radical opposition to the reigning global
neoliberal regime—the antiglobalization movement or, as others would
have it, the global justice and solidarity movement. Many feminist activ-
ists and networks were, from the very beginning, part of these ample, yet

292â•… Sonia E. Alvarez

diffuse, new regional and global movements that found their most endur-
ing expression in the wsf (Eschle 2005; Harcourt 2006; Alvarez 2012).
Engagement with these counterhegemonic spaces has prompted grow-
ing numbers of ngos to move away from the “project-Â�centered logic”
fueled by ngoization—in which feminist cultural-Â�political interventions
are “results-Â�driven” and have clear beginning, middle, and end points—
and (back) toward a “process-Â�oriented logic,” which is more fluid, open-Â�
ended, and continuous, though not linear (see L. Phillips and Cole 2009).
ngoization has been further rattled by factors external to movement
fields: changes in national, regional, and global political economy and
forms of governance now place political premiums and offer rewards for
activist practices and organizational forms distinct from those that fueled
the Boom. As anthropologist William Fisher predicted in an influential
1997 essay, “development has been a fickle industry, first embracing and
then casting off a long series of enthusiastically touted new strategies.
ngos, now so widely praised, can anticipate becoming victims of the
current unrealistic expectations and being abandoned as rapidly and as
widely as they have been embraced” (443). The evident crisis of neoliber-
alism, which has swept much of Latin America since the late 1990s and
has now enveloped the globe, could well shake the foundations of ngoiza-
tion as new modalities of “development” are promoted to address crisis-Â�
riddled social formations.
Neoliberalism’s crisis helped spark the current turn toward the left
and center-�left and the resurgence of the national-�popular (or, according
to some, the rise of neopopulism) which pose new challenges and offer
fresh opportunities for feminist interventions in institutional and extra-�
institutional political arenas (Friedman 2007, 2010; Gago 2007). Govern-
ments of the so-Â�called “Pink Tide”—spanning more or less intense shades
of leftist “red” governments from Venezuela to Paraguay to Brazil to Chile
and those backed, as in the cases of Bolivia and Ecuador, by previously
marginalized ethno-Â�racial majorities—are now often seeking and reward-
ing different sorts of ngo partners, those with stronger links to and capa-
bilities for serving as intermediaries with broader civil society, especially
popular-Â�class-Â�based, constituencies (on Latin America’s turn to the left,
see Hershberg and Rosen 2006; Prashad and Ballvé 2006; Ramírez Galle-
gos 2006; Castañeda and Morales 2008; Lievesley and Ludlam 2009; Wey-
land, Madrid, and Hunter 2010). ngos still often provide “gender exper-
tise” to governments of the Pink Tide, as has apparently been the case in

Beyond NGOizationâ•…293
Chávez’s Venezuela (Rakowski and Espina 2006; Espina 2007) and has
certainly been true in Lula’s Brazil and Bachelet’s Chile, but they are less
likely to serve as “surrogates for civil society” in such contexts.
As Elizabeth Monasteiros maintains is the case in Bolivia, indigenous
women’s groups (both rural and urban), women in neighborhood coun-
cils, and the mass-�based Bartolina Sisa National Federation of Bolivian
Peasant Women “have come to be perceived as the legitimate representa-
tives of large women’s majorities” while the legitimacy of “the technocratic
middle class, particularly the ngos” is being seriously questioned, thereby
“changing who gets to represent women’s interests and demands” (2007,
33; 2008, 181). Regaining that legitimacy might well entail a (re)transforâ•‚
mation of ngoized ngos into twenty-Â�first-Â�century variants of the “popu-
lar movement-Â�assistance ngos” of yesteryear (Alvarez 1993, 1997; Lan-
dim 1993; Teixeira 2003)—like the many ngos that today specialize in
advising participatory budget councils in pt-�led cities throughout Brazil,
for example. Particularly in the case of “more red” or mass-Â�mobilization-Â�
based governments like those of Venezuala or Bolivia, moreover, ngos
that work with a demonstrable “mass base” are likely to fare better politi-
cally (and perhaps materially, in terms of government funding) than those
that expend their energies in the corridors of the United Nations. And
in Brazil under the PT governments of Lula and Dilma Rouseff, the pro-
portion of ngo budgets coming from federal government sources nearly
doubled, with more than 60 percent of ngos reporting in 2007 that they
had accessed federal funding, up from 36.6 percent in 2003 (Gouveia and
Daniliauskas 2010, 29).
Even in a government on this “more pink,” social democratic end of
the Pink Tide, then, ngos appear to have been rewarded for engaging in
more “activist,” movement-Â�focused practices such as “popular education”
and “conscientização,” even as they continue to be summoned or subcon-
tracted for the more technical, project-�execution, and advisory activities
that fueled the Boom of the 1990s. A new “participatory” brand of state
feminism, inaugurated under Lula and continued under President Dilma
Rousseff, helped tilt the political momentum within the feminist field
in the favor of more activist practices (Sardenberg and Costa 2010). The
feminist ngo Sempreviva Organização Feminista, or sof, a key player in
the global and national “anticapitalist camp” analyzed below, for example,
was awarded a major contract by the Ministry of Agrarian Development’s
(mda) Special Advisory Unit on Gender, Race and Ethnicity (Assessoria
Especial de Gênero Raça e Etnia—aegre), for 2008 through 2010, which it

294â•… Sonia E. Alvarez

implemented in eighteen states and fifty “territories of citizenship,” poorer
rural zones mapped out by the federal government for targeted interven-
tion. Aimed at “contributing to the strengthening of [rural women] as
political, social and economic subjects,” as well as at “expanding and im-
proving [their] access to the policies implemented by the mda,” the pro-
gram employed “feminist methodologies” and deployed dozens of young
feminists across Brazil’s rural landscape, especially trained for the purpose
of promoting the “training and articulation of rural women,” strengthen-
ing their organizations, and bolstering their “productive economic activi-
ties based on a solidary and feminist economy” (Sempreviva Organização
Feminista 2011).

Beyond NGOization?
Despite these recent trends, “ngoized” ngos show few signs of going
away in the near future. In fact, the 2000s also witnessed the consolida-
tion of a sizable regional cadre of project- and policy-Â�focused “gender ex-
pert” ngo professionals, bingos (big international ngos), and networks
that continue to specialize in policy monitoring and service delivery. In
some cases, some of the most ngoized have actually morphed into pri-
vate consultancy firms.
Still, by the turn of the 2000s, the increasing recognition of the limits
of ngoization had led growing numbers of feminists to what Wendy Har-
court refers to as a “third moment” in their engagements with the global,
regional, and national development discourses (2005, 34). “This third mo-
ment, which began in the late 1990s and continues to the present day,”
Harcourt suggests, “is marked by disengagement, or at least significant
problematizing by the women’s movement of the development discourse
and apparatus and a decided shift toward interest in other sites of power
and knowledge production.” The growing recognition of the limits of
ngoization has triggered revisioned advocacy strategies to expand those
limits and renewed activist efforts to overcome them. The former have
been taken on by people one of my interviewees facetiously referred to
as “the orphans of the un,” products of the widespread disillusionment
with the “postsocial summit” era; the latter, by activists I will call “the
stepdaughters of neoliberalism,” products of more recent forms of resis-
tance to neoliberalism’s reign. I want to stress that this distinction is not
intended as a dichotomy; instead, these sometimes represent two facets
of the same activist, organization, or network, two sides of the same femi-
nist coin.

Beyond NGOizationâ•…295
 A number of the feminist ngoers most involved in the region’s pro-
tracted engagement with the un process have turned to alternative advo-
cacy strategies more focused on intervening in cultural representations
and the broader public debate, rather than centering their efforts more
narrowly and technically on policy-�making arenas. Disheartened by the
limited effectiveness of transnational advocacy processes aimed at influ-
encing igos and ifis and critical of neoliberal and other “fundamental-
isms,” many have invested heavily in the World Social Forum process as
an alternative arena for transnational activism, for example.
Several of the core feminist ngos that spearheaded the Latin American
parallel preparatory processes for the Cairo and Beijing un conferences
and their respective +5 “sequels,” now grouped in a coalition called Ar-
ticulación Feminista Marcosur (afm, or Marcosur Feminist Articulation,
a wordplay on Mercosur), have directed many of their energies toward
participating in and influencing the wsf process, viewing it as an indis-
pensable space of action for feminisms (Alvarez 2012; on feminist partici-
pation in the wsf, see León 2002; Faria 2003; Vargas 2003; Alvarez, Faria
and Nobre 2004; Eschle 2005; Eschle and Maiguashca 2010; Phillips and
Cole 2009). For the afm, the wsf is a logical “world public” in which to
pursue several of its core goals: “to strengthen the articulation between
social movements, and in particular, to use the feminist presence estab-
lished within these joint spaces to empower and influence the whole of
society” (Articulación Feminista Marcosur 2002, 7). It views the wsf as
“a plural space with proposals for an alternative globalization, where many
new strategies and concerns of globalized social movements, such as femi-
nism, converge” (afm 2002, 14). But feminist pressure in the wsf process,
the afm insists, is crucial because “it is . . . a complicated site of alliances
with other movements whose orientation to feminism is not always one
of acknowledgement” (ibid.).
New ways of doing politics have grown out of feminist involvement
in world summits, their preparatory and implementation processes, and
the growing recognition of their limitations. One such innovation is the
spread of national and transnational “campaigns” aimed as much at un-
settling dominant cultural codes as they are at reforming legal ones, such
as the Campaign for an Inter-�American Convention on Sexual Rights and
Reproductive Rights—launched in mid-Â�2001 by a consortium of sixteen
feminist ngos, research institutes, and national and regional networks,
including the afm.
Uruguayan feminists Lucy Garrido and Lilian Celiberti—who formed

296â•… Sonia E. Alvarez

part of an informal “web” of prochoice, reproductive rights activists from
across the region who originally came up with the idea for this cam-
paign—explained that, though it was in principle modeled after the 1994
Inter-�American Convention on Violence against Women, they hardly ex-
pected the Organization of American States (oas) to readily embrace
the idea of a Sexual and Reproductive Rights Convention, much less that
most national governments would endorse it in the short-�to-�medium
term.2 Instead, they said they wanted to “shake things up,” to use the
Inter-Â�American system in “subversive” ways, to “provoke debate” in both
activist and policy circles about “bodily and sexual rights” as core dimen-
sions of democratic citizenship. The campaign also evinces an emphasis
on “countercultural struggle”: it declares that “the changes to which we
aspire are both material and symbolic in nature. . . . It is in the cultural
dimension where the right to have rights takes root, on the basis of dif-
ferences and particularities of human beings” and advocates “a reconcep-
tualization of the body in its political dimension” (Campaña por la Con-
vención de los Derechos Sexuales y los Derechos Reproductivos 2006, 17).
Also in evidence is a “postliberal” emphasis on the conditions that enable
the exercise of rights:

Rights cannot be conceived as something static nor can they be won

once and for all. Historically, their development has taken place in an
inconclusive and exclusionary manner. This was not a linear process
but a process marked by fractures, setbacks, restoration of lost con-
tent, and the broadening and permanent invention of new dimensions.
Today these new contents are restoring those aspects of human life and
citizenship, which have been historically devalued or absent, silenced,
naturalized, and prescribed for centuries. The most significant of these
rights, in terms of their absence, are economic, social, and cultural
rights and the rights that have faced the most resistance from conser-
vative forces are sexual and reproductive rights. (Campaña 2006, 13)

Many of the Latin American feminists most invested in addressing the

material consequences of globalization identify with what some have
come to call “the anticapitalist camp” of the wsf and are among the folks
I’m calling “stepdaughters of neoliberalism.” The Brazilian branch of the
World March of Women against Violence and Poverty (wmw), headquar-
tered at the above-Â�mentioned Sempreviva Organização Feminista (sof),
was centrally involved in the Forum process from the outset, for instance.
In a flyer distributed during the 2003 wsf, the wmw declared that they

Beyond NGOizationâ•…297
were participating in the Porto Alegre event because they had “supported
demonstrations that have taken place all over the world, which have been
against militarism and the neoliberal politics denoting a commodifica-
tion of life, because we believe feminism is fundamental to renew[ing] the
sense of those fights. And it is within the process of fighting for everyone’s
freedom, that feminism rejuvenates [itself] each and every day.”
New forms of “popular feminism” have taken shape among the various
recent grassroots, anti-�neoliberal movements, and often also engage with
antiglobalization movements. Graciela di Marco has suggested, for ex-
ample, that women piqueteras, workers in recovered enterprises ( fabricas
recuperadas), mothers who struggle against police brutality, and others
in the popular movements that have blossomed since the economic de-
bacle of late 2001 in Argentina, have found “their channel for expression
in the Encuentros Nacionales de Mujeres [which attract close to 20,000
women each year], and in the marches, in the struggle for legal abortion
and for freeing women imprisoned for participation in these movements”
(di Marco 2006, 255). She maintains that the articulation of feminism
and other social movements, “a contingent articulation of heteroge-
neous elements, of diverse demands that constitute the multiplicity of the
movements (piqueteras, obreras de empresas recuperadas, asambleístas,
campesinas, indígenas, and feministas) gave rise to a chain of equivalences,
hegemonically represented in sexual rights, especially the right to abor-
tion” that has led to the appearance of a collective identity, which, follow-
ing Laclau, she dubs a “pueblo feminista” or “feminist people,” based on
the discursive construction of a common adversary, in this case the “car-
riers of traditional and patriarchal values” (di Marco, unpublished manu-
script; see also Laclau 2005). Manifestations of that feminist pueblo are
also amply evident at the wsf and other local and regional articulations of
the “anticapitalist camp” such as the Vía Campesina—a global network of
small agriculturalists in which popular feminism is arguably hegemonic.
And the expanding feminist pueblo is also apparent in the pronounced
visibility and expressive expansion of what contributors to a recent an-
thology of the region’s feminisms variously refer to as “Third Wave femi-
nism,” “complex identity feminisms,” or “feminism of shifting identities”
(Maier and Lebon 2010). The very women whom the “hegemonic femi-
nism” of the so-Â�called Second Wave viewed as “others”—poor and working-Â�
class women, Afro-Â�descendant and indigenous women, lesbians—have
translated and radically transformed some of its core tenets and fashioned
“other feminisms,” “feminismos con apellidos” (Ríos Tobar, Godoy Cata-

298â•… Sonia E. Alvarez

lán, and Guerrero Caviedes 2003), that are deeply entwined, and some-
times contentiously entangled, with national and global struggles against
all forms of inequality and for social, sexual, and racial justice. These di-
verse feminisms—together with young women from all social groups and
classes who proclaim themselves “feministas jóvenes” with agendas dis-
tinct from earlier generations—have produced effervescent movement
currents that proffer trenchant critiques of enduring inequalities among
women, as well as between women and men of diverse racial and social
groups, thereby expanding the scope and reach of feminist messages and
revitalizing women’s cultural and policy interventions across the region.

By Way of Conclusion
At the height of neoliberal entrenchment, many feminist ngos in Latin
America, as elsewhere, were pulled into serving as surrogate representa-
tives of civil society, developing gendered expertise in policy monitoring
and project execution, and carrying out a variety of social programs for
states. Professionalized, formally structured ngos also abound among the
diverse expressions of feminism that have flourished since the 2000s, in-
cluding among some firmly rooted in the “anticapitalist camp.” Yet many
of the activities that get “frontburnered” today, I’ve tried to suggest, differ
from those that prevailed at the height of the Boom.
Like most ngos in feminist and other movement fields, those estab-
lished by young women or black feminists typically engage in a range of
cultural, educational, outreach, research, political, and other activities,
and these may include policy- as well as movement-�focused work. Thus,
though professionalization and institutionalization (in the sense of rou-
tinization) represent their own vexing challenges for internal democracy
within and among movement groups, they do not in themselves determine
the types of feminist practices that are prioritized by ngos. As discursive
fields of action, feminisms are dynamic, always changing, on the move.
They are continually reconfigured by a mix of internal and external forces
and have shifting centers of gravity. Which actors, discourses, practices,
and organizational forms prevail or are most politically visible at any given
time in a given sociopolitical context therefore necessarily vary. There is,
in short, no twenty-�first-�century Iron Law of ngoization.

Notes
This chapter is reproduced by permission from Development 52, no. 2 (2009): 175–
84. A more succinct version of this essay was presented at the eleventh Interna-

Beyond NGOizationâ•…299
tional Forum of the Association for Women in Development, Cape Town, South
Africa, November 14–17, 2008. My thanks to Andrea Cornwall and the Pathways to
Women’s Empowerment project for inviting me to join their panel on “The ngoiza-
tion of Women’s Movements.”
All Spanish and Portuguese language original texts were translated by the au-
thor.
1. Quoted from [email protected], e-Â�mail, October 13, 2008. On Nicaraguan
feminists’ response to Sandinista assaults, see Kampwirth (2006, 2010), Gago
(2007).
2. Personal communication during the Eighth Latin American and Caribbean Femi-
nist Encuentro, held in Juan Dolio, Dominican Republic, November 1999.

300â•… Sonia E. Alvarez

╉conclusion Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal

Feminisms and the NGO Form

Neither what we have called “the ngo form” nor any other form is
or will be sufficient to contain feminist activism or to pursue femi-
nist agendas in the coming decades. Feminist ideologies, agen-
das, and activism arise and are deployed in response to the en-
during and emerging conditions of women’s gendered lives. Today
ngos are a fact of women’s lives around the globe. Furthermore,
as the essays in this volume demonstrate, ngos that are engaged
with women or women’s issues are part of the social context that
constructs and defines “women.” As such, ngos are not simply
vehicles for serving women or empowering them (however well
or inadequately) but rather are themselves fields of gendered
struggles over power, resources, and status. ngos are simulta-
neously local and transnational, and ambiguously located in re-
lation to states. ngos may collaborate with, compete with, and
sometimes act in place of states. The terrains of feminist struggles,
thus, run through and across ngos. The research in this volume
has revealed the ambiguous and unstable synergies between femi-
nisms and the ngo form.
As this body of research shows, ngos themselves are not static.
Within ngos there is increasing awareness of many pitfalls and of
the critiques leveled at ngos as having been co-�opted by power-
ful interests, including states, donors, corporations, and elites of
various kinds. ngos are growing more sophisticated in their col-
laborations with states, donors, and other ngos. Although there
remain ngos that seem to be unconcerned with the dangers of
agenda-�setting by corporate, state, or donor sponsors, there are
also ngos that are developing strategies for maintaining independence
even as they seek funding from powerful sources. For feminists, ngos
have brought new collaborations and uneasy partnerships with states and
other institutions that are distinctly not feminist. ngos’ relationships to
social movements are also variable and evolving, much as the links of ad-
vocacy networks are dynamic rather than stable. ngos, moreover, often
pursue complex agendas in projects that are not simply about gender but
are also about class, race, religion, health, or environmental issues. As
ngos take on a number of issues along with addressing gender inequali-
ties, such collaborations inevitably change the nature of feminist organiz-
ing. The results of these processes do not necessarily weaken feminism,
but can serve to sustain it and extend its reach to wider constituencies
and contexts.
In this anthology we started from the assumption that the prolifera-
tion of ngos is deeply connected to the neoliberalism and privatization
that emerge from the premise that “the welfare of the population and the
improvement of its condition can best be served by ‘non-Â�state’ actors”
(S. Jackson 2005, 169). Lenders like the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund and development agencies and experts often have deemed
states corrupt and inefficient, representing ngos as more honest and di-
rect providers of welfare. As Analiese Richard notes, “development ex-
perts have lauded ngos as efficient conduits for aid, and pointed to the
ngo ‘boom’ as an indicator of democratizing civil societies” (2009, 166).
But, as the authors in this collection show, the operations of ngos cannot
be understood as separate from the travails of the state in the neoliberal
present. ngos are pliable and adaptable in some ways that government
institutions are not, but this also makes ngos highly manipulable, espe-
cially since they often depend on the resources of states and donors to
sustain their activities. Furthermore, the proliferation of ngos means that
ngo activities can be disparate, piecemeal, and often rivalrous. At best,
their interventions are often uncoordinated with those of other ngos that
are addressing the same or related issues; in the worst cases, they compete
with one another for the same donor funds, constituencies, media atten-
tion, and other resources.
In terms of democracy and empowerment it is also important to re-
member that states, at least in principle, are held accountable to their citi-
zens, and many states claim to be so. It is not always clear to whom ngos
are accountable. In practice, their most obvious accountability often is to
their funders (these can be individuals, foundations, states, or corpora-

302â•… Conclusion
tions), since ngos must report (for the most part) on how they used funds
in order to sustain their funding. ngos continue to proliferate and, as in-
dicated by the expression “briefcase ngo,” often require very little to get
started. This fact also explains the appeal of the ngo form to women who
may lack financial and social capital. At the same time, the low threshold
for entry into the ngo field is countered by the pressures associated with
growing state regulation of ngos as well as the expansion of audit culture
(Strathern 2000), oversight, and transparency promoted by donors. As a
result, NGOs move closer to state-�like bureaucratic practices.
Feminist struggles inside and outside of ngos are ongoing, and our
contributors reveal multiple unfolding stories based on their diverse re-
search settings. Sonia Alvarez sees hopeful possibilities for Latin Ameri-
can feminisms through ngos, whereas Sabine Lang sees ngos as main-
streaming European feminisms in ways that may cut off more radical
possibilities. These divergent perspectives reveal that the object of study
and its context changes the view of the relationship between states, ngos,
and wider feminist constituencies, and these relationships indeed oper-
ate differently in the European Union’s bureaucracy, for example, than in
Latin American feminist circuits. Geopolitics and histories of colonial-
ism have a role to play in these differences, even as new centers of power
emerge globally. ngos are often seen as innovators, forging new paths to
development and democratization, but they are also constituted by their
insertion into specific contexts and wider circuits. Often their personnel
speak the language of international development or of Western corporate
managerial practices. In fact, in order to successfully gain and maintain
funding, ngo leaders must become fluent in these powerful discourses
and attuned to shifting global trends (Merry 2001; J. Clark and Michuki
2009).
The emergence of the ngo form in relation to gender issues and
women’s empowerment suggests that feminism is indeed normalized in
some institutional forms, yet feminism remains contentious and is neither
fully integrated into nor contained by institutional boundaries of ngos or
states. The feminist activities of ngos may provide the state with a justi-
fication for what it may not be able or want to accomplish. Feminist ide-
ologies and practices, outside of statist, nationalist or organizational re-
lations, may be ignored or repressed. At the same time, ngos may have
a significant role in advocacy, putting new problems and issues on the
public agenda.
As the chapters in this volume reveal, ngos work in concert with other

Conclusionâ•…303
institutions or in the spaces created by privatization, and in that sense
they are partners of states, as much as they stand in opposition or contrast
to states. States create the spaces within which ngos operate, whether
through the gaps created by state failure, retreat, privatization, and down-
sizing; through the regulations states impose on ngos; or through the
gongoization process, whereby states and ngos collaborate in ways that
blur the meaning of “nongovernmental.” States certainly remain powerful
entities despite neoliberalization, although state power operates unevenly
across regions and locations. In some sites, the state can seem invisible
while ngos may be active and ubiquitous. This may be the case where
ngos are present in locations that are rural or distant from the metro-
poles where state power may be most visible.
It is clear by now, however, that ngos cannot serve as a substitute for
the state, even in places where the state is in disarray. Jenny Pearce puts
it succinctly: “It must be recognized, though, that increasing numbers of
ngos, however dedicated and efficient, could never offer rapid solutions
to a problem on the scale of global poverty or even alleviate it sufficiently
to ensure relative social stability” (2000b). The organization and reach of
the state are significant, as is its putative accountability to citizens, even
if practice often falls short of principle. ngos may be held accountable
by their donors, in practice, whether or not they feel accountable to the
populations they seek to serve. In many cases, there is little tracking and
accountability of ngos, which means they can become corrupt or act for
private gain. NGOs, thus, cannot in themselves provide the solution to
the flaws of the state. It is clear, moreover, that we cannot analyze ngos
as separate from the state or from the global rise of neoliberal ideologies
and privatization.
The ngo form has become so widespread because it is stable in appear-
ance yet flexible in goals, internal organization, and in its constituencies.
The ngo form is powerful because it easily serves as an intermediary, a
bridge, and/or a translation across scales and forms, between levels of in-
stitutionalization, and between wider publics (particularly populations of
political outsiders such as “grassroots” communities and women) and the
political inside represented by state authorities and formal institutions.
The gaps bridged by ngos and the ways they translate between and across
institutional and social boundaries are various, uneven, and shifting. To
the degree that ngos offer a low threshold of entry for women, they offer
opportunities to advance feminist agendas in wider political arenas and
to claim legitimacy and resources for women’s demands.

304â•… Conclusion
 We expect that state-�ngo-�private partnerships, whether or not they
are named as such, will become more common. But this does not neces-
sarily spell the demise of ngos’ potential for feminist organizing. Rather, it
may suggest the need for a critical reassessment of the fetishism of “grass-
roots” and the gender politics associated with this construct, as well as
the romanticization of private institutions as compared with government
institutions. The professionalization of a class of women and gender “ex-
perts” is an achievement of ngos that has not received the attention it is
due, in part because of the focus on assessing ngos’ performance in rela-
tion to “grassroots” women. The proliferation of ngos and their enmesh-
ment in complex partnerships with other institutional forms may offer a
means for women to enter more centrally into circuits of power and to
integrate feminist concerns into government institutions. Scholars such
as Janet Halley (2006) and Lang (in this volume) have documented ex-
amples of where this has happened.
In the absence of a feminist perspective, the emergence of this class
of gender experts and technocrats within ngos tends be viewed only in
negative terms, as a sign of the increased distance of some women from
the grass roots and as part of the production or reproduction of inequality
(Schuller 2009, 85). What seems clear is that ngos have provided em-
ployment for many women in both the global North and South. If many
of these women are middle class or become middle class through this
work, that fact should not only be a cause for criticizing ngos. It may not
be realistic to expect that all women will rise equally and simultaneously
as result of any form of feminist activity. This emerging middle class may
contribute to (re)producing inequality in society or within their organi-
zations (Vasan 2004), yet their ngo work may be effective in advocating
and securing greater rights and resources for women.
Gendered inequalities are persistent and entrenched yet subject to
change, and ngos are now often a catalyst of or a factor in such changes.
As feminist research makes clear, gender can best be understood as rela-
tional and as always in process, and ngos now play a role in the processes
through which gender is constructed and reimagined. ngos focused on
gender issues or women are engaged in the process of constructing gen-
der and producing certain kinds of “women” and “men” (ngos focused
on lgbtq issues might produce other genders as well) in the course of
doing and defining their work. Through these relations, some groups are
produced as beneficiaries or recipients of resources and training, and their
characteristics and needs are defined through these relations. Projects of

Conclusionâ•…305
modernity and development have long histories of creating and consoli-
dating gendered categories, as have nationalist and postcolonial struggles
(Bernal 2001, 1994). In particular, the construct of “grassroots women” has
emerged as a powerful category in local and transnational contexts. More
recently, interventions in development discourse by Amartya Sen (1999)
and the work of Martha Nussbaum (2000) have produced new parame-
ters for development in which notions of “capabilities” replace the concept
of “modernization” as the goal and project of development. As a result,
the “woman in development” has now become the subject of capability
associated with particular characteristics, roles, and outcomes. This sug-
gests that a new universal norm of the woman of the global South is being
produced. Clearly ngos are not simply addressing women or mobilizing
them but are engaged in constructing ‘women,’ whether as victims, bene-
ficiaries, or as people with potential capability—or, most significantly for
feminism, as agents, organizers, and professionals.
Alongside the work of ngos in producing “women” as a transnational
category of subordination, the project of making women into leaders and
professionalized experts is also taking place through ngo work. ngos
collectively constitute a huge sector of employment. Neoliberal policies
have created spaces for ngos to proliferate that offer employment and
self-Â�employment opportunities to subjects defined as “women.” Clearly
ngo work is not the same as state employment in terms of state pensions
or job stability—a difference that also contributes to the growth of ngos
under neoliberalism. But the fewer obstacles facing women entering the
ngo sector and the fluidity of movement across job descriptions are offer-
ing new opportunities for many women. The close connections between
states and ngos may make it possible for some women to move from
being gender advocates within ngos to filling more influential official
positions of authority or at least to find more stable employment within
the state.
The field of engagement with gender is, moreover, elastic, fluid, and
flexible, and it is common for women to move to different jobs and insti-
tutions within this field—from working as an independent consultant to
holding a staff position in an ngo, to a position at the gender desk of a
donor agency or embassy, and so forth. This has brought into being a new
class of individuals who are “gender experts” and who possess professional
experience and expertise that are legible and marketable in a variety of
national and transnational circuits. In terms of gender, ngos in many

306â•… Conclusion
locales may have given rise to a new class of experts and helped create a
group of skilled, organized, and professional middle-�class women who are
the leaders and arguably the main beneficiaries of the ngo sector. These
women, in fact, may be the women who are most empowered by ngos,
rather than the recipients or targets of ngo interventions. This reveals
that ngos may be “empowering” women in unanticipated ways—and very
differently from Lauren Leve’s example in Nepal (in this volume). This is
a new level of professionalization that may help move some agendas as
“women’s causes” forward—or of some particular groups of women. If we
look just at whether ngos “empower” the “grass roots,” as many ngos
claim to do, we may not be able to understand many of the consequences
of the rise and spread of ngos. ngos not only are diverse, but contain
contradictory processes. Thus, Ngos are reproducing class and gender
hierarchies, even as they are also significant platforms of advocacy and
organization.
One of the accomplishments of the ngo form is creating a sector of
“empowered” middle-Â�class women workers in the first world and the
global South. This sector is gendered in some quite recognizable ways.
Women working in the ngo sector get respect and prestige, they feel
empowered by their work, and they command a new language of inter-
national gender work. These women gain a wider network of relation-
ships, and often participate in transnational networks that enable cosmo-
politanism and provide opportunities for mobility. These women produce
knowledges about “the grass roots” and “women,” as well as about gov-
ernment, governance, and development. They become experts, in part,
by claiming their difference from state bureaucracies, corporations, and
profit-�making organizations and in this way they also construct the NGO
form as superior.
ngos may in some cases represent a professionalization of activists but
ngos may also create activists, as they draw more women into new en-
tanglements with states, donors, and other groups of women. These local
and global encounters give rise to new collaborations and conflicts. The
constraints of ngo work may temper the radicalism of some feminists,
while it serves to foster the development of new feminist perspectives
among other women.
Quite often, ngos have come to provide an institutional site from
which women are not simply addressing “women’s issues” but are helping
to formulate what these issues are in a given context and articulating or

Conclusionâ•…307
demonstrating how conditions and policies might be improved. They may
serve as “gender experts” or “policy experts” in the context of state policy
as well as in transnational governance regimes within the United Nations
or the European Union. Of course, in such situations, “gender” has be-
come synonymous with “women,” rather than with the broad range of
genderings that the term might allow. In these processes of professional-
ization, ngos are drawing different kinds of women into political partici-
pation and into relations with one another, so that within ngos, inequali-
ties may be reproduced, yet the ngo also serves as an arena in which these
power relations (such as those between elite and subaltern women) come
to be challenged. We see that relations among feminists and within ngos
are often hierarchical or contentious because “women” are not a natural,
unitary interest group.
Feminists and women are not simply acting through ngos or being
served by them. The ngo as a transnational institutional form now par-
ticipates in the processes that produce women as gendered subjects, and
these processes also produce feminists. We suggest that, based on the evi-
dence of the essays in this volume, feminist activism is flourishing across
multiple agendas but may not always be recognized as such because the
ngos involved are not solely feminist in their membership or goals, nor
do the ostensible purposes of the ngos necessarily define the outcomes
of their efforts. ngos’ collaborations with states and funders (national
and foreign states, foundations, or corporations), as well as the processes
of networking and professionalization, continue to generate new conflicts
and struggles.
As we write this conclusion, we note an interesting shift away from
the technocratic discourses of development and empowerment that char-
acterized so many initiatives related to women in the past two decades
toward new discourses that rely on moral terms in order to make emo-
tional appeals on behalf of women. This is most evident in the salience of
“sex trafficking” and the “trafficked woman” as contemporary global con-
cerns. Nicholas Kristoff ’s one-Â�man moral crusades are a good example
of the new framing of women’s subordination as a moral crisis. The “sub-
altern woman” or woman of the global South, in particular, is being writ-
ten into a rescue narrative, allowing the global North to find redemption
in new kinds of interventions of various sorts in the South.
This moral panic about women may be arising now, in part, as a response
to the failure of neoliberal policies that promised to alleviate poverty, dis-

308â•… Conclusion
enfranchisement, and inequality through the extension of market logics
into every region and facet of life. But at the same time, the extension of
the privatization logic of neoliberalism has created the spaces in which
religious and secular moral claims have gained new traction in political
arenas worldwide (Fassin 2012). The rise of moral arguments and emo-
tional appeals seems to represent a turn away from the instrumental and
technocratic rationales that underlay much of the ngo activity and the
funding that sustained it in the recent past. In feminist terms, this moral
turn poses particular new challenges since women’s social and economic
mobility have often been constrained on moral grounds, and women’s
access to the public sphere and their participation in politics have often
been restricted in order to “protect” women who are constructed as easily
victimized and vulnerable.
At the same time, the world has recently seen a series of struggles of
antiauthoritarian, anticorporate, anti-�neoliberal protest, including the so-�
called Arab Spring and Occupy movements. These suggest that the neo-
liberal paradigm and the states that adopted it will face increasing chal-
lenges from disparate sources. It seems unlikely that popular protests will
vitiate the role of organizations, including ngos, as vehicles for waging
political struggles and promoting social welfare or will eliminate the need
for feminist activism, in particular. The new political openings created by
these mass actions cannot be acted on effectively without more-�enduring
structures of organization and coordination. For feminists the protests
reveal that women’s participation in public politics, whether official or
alternative, remains fraught. Women in Egypt, most notably, continue to
struggle to make their presence and their concerns felt within the Arab
Spring and its aftermath. As the work of establishing democratic practices
and of holding democratically elected governments accountable to the
people continues, ngos and feminist activism within and beyond ngos
will have significant roles to play.
Surveying the outcomes of feminist engagements with ngos, we find
no clear, unilinear line of progress, since the histories and configurations
of struggle are diverse in different parts of the world. But, the nuanced ana-
lyses presented here reveal that the advocacy and advancement of feminist
causes are taking place in varied ways on various fronts through ngos,
driven by a number of factors. ngos have come to be strongly associated
with women’s issues and are themselves heavily populated by women
members, workers, and constituencies. Feminists have a continued stake

Conclusionâ•…309
in engaging with ngos and continuing to critique and strategize around
the ngo form as women respond to the gendered politics of protest and
to new discourses surrounding “women.” Feminism in many forms, per-
haps especially the ngo form, continues to be critical to geopolitics and
to women’s lives in the twenty-Â�first century.

310â•… Conclusion
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Contributors

Sonia E. Alvarez is the director of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and
Latino Studies and Leonard J. Horwitz Professor of Political Science at the Univer-
sity of Massachusetts, Amherst. Before coming to UMass, she taught politics and
Latin American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Alvarez has
written extensively on social movements, feminisms, ngos, transnational activism,
and democratization. She has taken part in Latina/women of color feminist, social
justice, international solidarity, and antiracist activism since the 1980s and since
then also has maintained manifold connections with Brazilian, Latin American,
and global feminist movements, while theorizing with and about them.

Victoria Bernal is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Califor-

nia, Irvine. Her interests include feminist theory, African Studies, diasporas, Islam,
war and militarism, civil society, citizenship, and new media. Her book, Nation as
Network: Diaspora, Cyberspace, and Citizenship exploring transformations of sov-
ereignty and citizenship associated with migration and digital media will be pub-
lished by the University of Chicago Press in 2014. She is the editor of an anthology
designed for teaching anthropology, Contemporary Cultures, Global Connections:
Anthropology for the 21st Century.

LeeRay M. Costa is director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and an asso-
ciate professor of anthropology and of gender and women’s studies at Hollins Uni-
versity. She is currently working on a project exploring feminist pedagogies of civic
engagement.

Inderpal Grewal is a professor in and chair of the program in Women’s, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her research concerns feminism and postcolo-
nialism, transnationalism, cultural studies, and South Asia.

Laura Grünberg is president of a Romanian nongovernmental organization, AnA

Society for Feminist Analyses, and an associate professor at the Faculty of Soci-
ology and Social Work at the University of Bucharest. She has published in the
area of sociology of gender, sociology of the body, gender and education, and
women’s movements. She has also written children’s books.

Elissa Helms is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies

at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Her research, publi-
cations, and teaching focus on the gendering of nationalism, ngo activism and
donor aid, gender and ethnic violence, and gendered dynamics of social change
after significant ruptures such as war or the collapse of state socialism. She is the
author of Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in
Postwar Bosnia-�Herzegovina and coeditor, with Xavier Bougarel and Ger Duijzings,
of The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-�War
Society.

Julie Hemment is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the

University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests include gender and
postsocialism, ngos and global civil society, youth, social welfare, and citizenship.
She is the author of Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and ngos; her
articles have appeared in journals such as Signs, Slavic Review and Anthropologi-
cal Quarterly and in anthologies. She is currently working on a book that explores
themes of youth, gender, and nationalism in postsocialist space by examining Rus-
sia’s new state-Â�run youth organizations.

Saida Hodžić is an assistant professor of anthropology and of feminist, gender, and

sexuality studies at Cornell University. She received a PhD in medical anthro-
pology from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco. Her publi-
cations explore global inequalities that constrain the work of African feminists;
the theoretical pitfalls of framing the struggles over women’s rights in terms of the
binary between liberal impositions and popular resistance; and the discursive and
performative fields on which Ghanaian activists wage their battles over expertise
and legitimacy.

Lamia Karim is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon.

Her research interests include globalization, gender, human rights, and social
movements. She has published numerous scholarly articles in anthropology jour-
nals (Cultural Dynamics, PoLAR, and Contemporary South Asia) on gender and
globalization, and chapters in edited volumes.

Sabine Lang is an associate professor of international studies at the Henry M. Jack-

son School of International Studies of the University of Washington. Her research
on multilevel governance and women’s advocacy has appeared, among others,
in the journals Social Politics and German Politics. Her latest book, NGOs, Civil
Society, and the Public Sphere, has been published by Cambridge University Press
in 2013.

Lauren Leve is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Buddhist Art of Living in Nepal:

354â•… Contributors
Ethical Practice and Religious Reform and various articles and book chapters focus-
ing on development, gender, human rights, and religious innovation in Nepal.

Kathleen O’Reilly is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Texas

A&M University. She studies the social and environmental impacts of develop-
ment projects, especially those working on drinking water, sanitation, poverty,
and gender. She is interested in the ways that development interventions restruc-
ture social, environmental, and spatial relations in rural communities in India. Her
work has been published in major geographical, women’s studies, and anthropo-
logical journals, including the Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
Geoforum, Economic Geography, Signs, and Human Organization.

Aradhana Sharma is an associate professor of anthropology and feminist studies at

Wesleyan University. She is the author of Logics of Empowerment: Development,
Gender, and Governance in Neoliberal India and coeditor of The Anthropology of
the State: A Reader. Her work, focusing on gender, development, neoliberalism, the
state, governance and activism in India has also appeared in the journals Cultural
Anthropology, Current Anthropology, and Citizenship Studies.

Contributorsâ•…355
Index

abantu for Development, 234–36 straints on women’s ngos for, 276–

abeyance in ngos, global restructuring 79. See also transnational advocacy
of feminism and, 268–69, 272–74 networks
abortion: Latin American feminist affinity groups, women ngos and cre-
activism for, 296–99; in postcommu- ation of, 280–81
nist Romania, 255–57; recriminaliza- Afghanistan, ngo activity in, 38
tion in Nicaragua of, 296 African feminism, Ghanaian Women’s
academic feminism: in Bosnia-Â� Manifesto analysis of, 234–36
Herzegovina, 19, 21–46; critiques of, Afro-Â�descendant groups, mass mobiâ•‚
227; in Romania, 253–57, 263–64; in lization in Latin America of, 292–95
Russia, 125–28 Aga Khan Foundation, 13
Achievements 2002, 148–49 agency: women’s empowerment in
Acker, Joan, 260–61 Nepal and, 65–74; of women’s ngos
activism: impact of ngos on, 304–10; in EU, 271–74
Latin American feminist ngos and, Agency for Gender Equality (Bosnia-�
288–91; ngoization paradigm and Herzegovina), 47n8
nostalgia for, 227–32; perceptions agriculture, in rural Nepal, 56–60
in Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina of, 29–37; in Ahearn, Laura, 66–67
Romania, 257–62; of Thai women, aktiv žena (women’s activities) groups,
167–68; unofficial gongo participa- in Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, 32–33, 43,
tion in, 101–6. See also elite activism; 47n13
social justice movements; women’s alternative media movement, 292
movements Alvarez, Sonia, 1, 46, 220, 224–28, 230,
activist mothering movement (Thai- 245n4, 269, 285–99, 303
land), 178–81, 191n14, 191n16 American Bar Association, 119
Adult Literacy Centers, Nepalese estab- Amnesty International, 119
lishment of, 59–60 Amsterdam Treaty of 1999, 266, 279
advocacy: by Bosnian women’s ngos, AnA Society for Feminist Analyses
36–37, 40–43; European Union dis- (AnA), 248; history of, 257–64; post-
incentives to, 272–74; political con- communist creation of, 248–52
AnaLize: Journal of Gender and Femi- “banking” learning method, in Nepalese
nist Studies, 248–49 literary program, 58–60
Andric-Â�Ružicic, Duška, 36 Banskota, Amrita, 52
Anti-Â�Fascist Women’s Front (Antiâ•‚ Bartolina Sisa National Federation of
fašisticki Front Žena, afž), 32, 48n16 Bolivian Peasant Women, 294–95
anti-Â�institutionalism, ngoization para- Basu, Anrito, 12–13
digm and, 244–45 Batra, Seema, 100–101
Appadurai, Arjun, 193–94 battered women’s movement, local ini-
Arab Spring, 309 tiatives in, 122–25
Argentina, women’s movements in, 292, Bebbington, Anthony, 163
298–99 Begić, Aida, 40
arranged marriages in Nepal, women’s Beijing Women’s Conference. See World
empowerment and role of, 67–68, Conference on Women in Beijing
76–81 Bennett, Lynn, 76
Articulación Feminista Marcosur Bernal, Victoria, 1–18, 301–10
(afm), 296–99 Bhattarai, Baburam, 85
Asad, Talal, 74–76 “bikās” (development) in rural Nepal,
Asia Foundation, 169 66–67, 70–74, 81–86, 90n42
Asia Pacific Forum for Women, Law, Bolivia, movement mobilization in,
and Development, 170 292–95
Assessoria Especial de Gênero Raça boomerang effect in women’s advocacy
Etnia (aegre) (Brazil), 294–95 networks, 270–74
Association for Social Advancement Bordia, Anil, 96, 108–9
(asa), 215n1, 217n21 Bosanka (Bosnian ngo), 30–37, 39
Association for Women’s Rights in Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina: “claim-Â�bearing
Development (awid), 274–76 label” of ngos in, 27–29; effects of
“association of women,” in Bosnia-Â� ngo boom in, 43–46; postwar femi-
Herzegovina, 32–37 nist organizing in, 19, 21–46; post-
autonomy: in feminist scholarship, war ngos established in, 21–24; rape
90n49; in Indian activism, 96–98 camps in, 123; uncertainty of support
for ngos in, 37–43
“Babylution” demonstrations (Bosnia), Bosnian League of Women Voters, 39–43
41 Bosnian Women’s Initiative, 26–27
Bachelet, Michelle, 294 Bowie, Katherine, 190n3
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 55, 153–54, 163–64 Brazil: neopopulism in, 293–94;
Bangladesh: microcredit program in, women’s movement in, 288–92,
193–215; ngo activity in, 215n3; 297–99
political history of, 199–201; power/ breastfeeding, Thai government
knowledge institutions in, 213–15; promotion of, 191n16
sexual politics and regulation in, “briefcase ngos,” 303
207–9; women moneylenders in, British Embassy, 119
210–13, 217n26 Brown, Wendy, 110, 226
Bangladesh Rural Advancement Com- Buddhism, Thai women’s activism
mittee (brac), 215n1, 216n16, 217n21 and influence of, 180–81

358â•… Index
bureaucratization: Indian gongo Chiang Mai University, Women’s
subversion of, 101–12; Latin Ameri- Studies Center, 184
can “movement work” and, 289–91; Chile, neopopulism in, 293–94
ngoization paradigm and, 224–27; Choluj, Bozena, 271–72
in Romanian ngos, 259–64; state/ Chorigaon region (Nepal), 55–60;
non-Â�state work identities in hybrid empowerment and agency in, 65–74
gongo/ngo structure and, 99–106; Christianity, ngos and promotion of,
velvet triangle concept and, 267–69; 87n13
women’s ngos in EU and, 270–74, citizenship: in European Union gov-
303 ernance structure, 273–74; neolib-
Burma Women’s Day, 177–78 eral concepts of, 194–96; Romanian
women’s cultivation of, 261–64
Cairo Summit on Population and civil society: in Bosnia-�Herzegovina,
Development, 287–88 25–27, 33–37; European Union poli-
Campaign for an Inter-Â�American Con- cies and, 269–70; framing of gen-
vention on Sexual Rights and Repro- dered violence issues and, 138–40;
ductive Rights, 296–99 global and local aspects of, 119–40;
capability concept of development, 306 Indian gongo-�n go partnerships
capitalism: as catalyst for revolution, and, 94–95, 109–12; international
62–65; Latin American feminists’ advocacy for, 12; neopopulist move-
campaign against, 296–99; micro- ments in Latin America and, 293–95;
credit systems and influence of, 193– ngoization paradigm and role of,
96, 214–15; ngoization paradigm and 231; ngo promotion of, 4–6, 8–18;
role of, 231–32 in postcommunist Romania, 250–52;
Cargo cults, 46n2 in postsocialist countries, 47n7; Thai
Cartea neagră a egalităţii de şanse între women’s activism and discourses of,
femei şi bărbaţi în Romănia (Black 175; women’s advocacy networks and
book on equal opportunities between development of, 266–69
women and men in Romania), 260 “claim-Â�bearing label” for ngos, in post-
caste system, Indian gongo subversion war Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, 27–29
efforts concerning, 102–6 class hierarchies: cultural preservation
Ceauşescu, Elena, 264n7 initiatives and, 176–78; Ghanaian
Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 250, 253 Manifesto critique of, 240–44; Indian
Celiberti, Lilian, 296–97 caste system and, 113n12; in micro-
Center for Social Work (Bosnia-� credit programs, 216n20; ngoization
Herzegovina), 43 and, 168–72, 228, 230, 305–10; Thai
Central Europe, women’s groups in, feminist discourse and, 181–86; Thai
271–74 women’s activism and, 172–74, 180–
Charities Act of 2006 (United King- 81; transnational feminist solidarity
dom), 278–79 and, 187–90
charity laws, political constraints on clientilistic networks: hybrid gongo/
women’s ngos as result of, 277–79 ngo structure and, 100–106; postwar
Chatterjee, Partha, 109–10 Bosnian ngos and, 48n22
Chávez, Hugo, 294 Clinton, Bill, 215

Indexâ•…359
Clinton, Hillary, 215 Comprehensive Peace Agreement
coalition building: activist mothering (2006) (Nepal), 83–86, 91n52
and, 179–81; feminist critique of, 219– confederated structures, women’s ngos
20; Ghanaian ethnography of inclu- in EU and, 271–74
sion and, 236–44; Ghanaian Women’s conscientization theories, 60–65; em-
Manifesto project and, 221–23; Thai powerment model and, 88n33; Latin
women’s activism and, 169–72 American “movement work” and,
Coalition on the Women’s Manifesto 290–91, 294–95; Mahila Samakhya
for Ghana, 221–23, 234–36 project design and, 96–98
Cockburn, Cynthia, 40 Convention on the Elimination
coercion, hybrid gongo/ngo struc- of All Forms of Discrimination
ture and risk of, 99–106 Against Women, 12, 141n5; Bosnia-Â�
collective empowerment strategies: Herzegovina as signatory on, 24
feminist activism in postliberal India Cook, Nerida, 172–73
and, 106–12; feminist critique of, Cooke, Bill, 146–48
219–20; Latin American feminist Cornwall, Andrea, 147–48
movements and, 289–91; in Mahila corporate sector: as ngo donor re-
Samakhya project, 96–98; ngoiza- source, 10–11; ngoization paradigm
tion paradigm as shift from, 224–27; and, 223; ngo structure in relation
in postcommunist Romania, 250–52; to, 7, 15–18; in postcommunist Roma-
in Romanian women’s organizations, nia, 251–52; structural violence of de-
261–64 velopment and, 60–65; Third World
collective transformation, Thai feminist economic sovereignty and hegemony
solidarity and, 189–90 of, 196–97
Collins, Chik, 161 corruption in government: in Bangla-
Colombia: Latin American “movement desh, 199, 216n10; Nepalese rural
work” and, 290–91; ngos in, 286 revolution and role of, 51
colonialism, ngos in context of, 303–10 Costa, LeeRay, 116, 166–92
Comaroff, Jean, 232 Credit Development Forum, 204–6
The Commission and Non-�Governmental crisis center model: economic discrimi-
Organizations: Building a Stronger nation priorities and, 129–32; gen-
Partnership, 270 dered violence in Russia and rise of,
“community aquis” (acquis commu- 125–28, 141n15; Russian vs. western
nautaire) implementation, 258–59, concepts of, 133–38
264n10 critical development geography, Indian
community-Â�based integrated rural women’s ngos and, 147–48
development (cbird), in Nepalese cross-�cultural commonality: transna-
literacy program and, 58–60 tional advocacy and costs of, 123–25;
community development: Our Water women’s activism and, 119
project in India, 148–65, 165n1; in Crothers, Thomas, 47n7
Romania, 260–64; Thai women’s cultural preservation and production:
programs for, 170–78; women’s asso- educational reforms and, 177–78;
ciations in Bosnia-�Herzegovina and, Ghanaian regional inequalities and
27–29, 32–37, 43, 47n13 issues of, 239–44; ngoization para-

360â•… Index
 digm and, 232; in postcommunist De Souza, Karen, 223
Romania, 250–52; rural activism and, development programs: alternatives to,
175–78; Thai feminism and challenges 144–45; attitudes in Nepal towards,
of, 182–86 91nn50–51; gender equality issues
cure (Girls), arts in Bosnia-Â� and, 305–10; in Ghana, 237–44,
Herzogovina of, 40–42 246n11; global and political changes
cyborg metaphor, ngoization paradigm in, 293–95; growth of women’s par-
and, 231–32, 245 ticipation in, 160–65; microcredit
systems and, 213–15; Nepalese rural
Das, Veena, 90n48 revolution and failure of, 50–86; ngo
Dayton Peace Agreement, impact on integration in, 4–6, 10–11; ngoiza-
ngos of, 24 tion paradigm and, 224–27; in post-
debt-Â�related dependency, microcredit war Bangladesh, 199–201; Thai femi-
systems and, 198–99 nist discourse in, 184–86; in Thailand,
defaults in microcredit systems, group feminist solidarity and, 186–90;
responsibility for, 206–9 transnational advocacy and costs
democratization: Bosnian ngos and of, 124–25, 186–90; violence against
interest in, 33–37; empowerment women as issue in, 122–25; violence
and agency and role of, 68–74; gen- as result of, 60–65, 88n26; women’s
der equality linked to, 124–25, 140n4, political activism as result of, 52–55
274–76; Nepalese state failure and dharma, Hindu concept of, 76, 80–81
absence of, 81–86, 89n38; in postwar dialogic exchange: growth of women’s
Bangladesh, 200–201; in Romania, participation through, 160–63; in
249–52, 261–64; state accountability Indian women’s ngos, 143–65;
and, 302–3; structural violence of de- micropolitics of, 152–54; spatial prac-
velopment and, 61–65; Thai women’s tices and, 154–60
activism and, 169–72, 181–86 difference: rural Thai women activist
dependency: in Bangladesh, depen- and, 187–90; Thai women’s activism
dency on ngos, 201; chain of, in and politics of, 166–90; transborder
microcredit systems, 207–9; of ngo feminist solidary in face of, 188–90
donor funding in Bosnia and, 37–43; domestic violence: ngos in Bosnia for
of Romanian ngos, 251–52; strategies combatting, 31–37; Russian vs. West-
for avoiding, 302–10 ern crisis center models and role of,
depoliticization of ngos: in Bosnia-Â� 129–32, 134–38; in Soviet-Â�era Rus-
Herzegovina, 32–37, 48n14; economic sia, 126–28; transnational campaigns
development and, 138–40; feminist against, 121–25
critique of, 219–20; future of women’s donor institutions: Bangladeshi ngos
advocacy and role of, 282–83; in Gha- and, 195–96; Bosnian ngos’ depenâ•‚
naian Women’s Manifesto, 234–36, dency on, 37–43; Bosnian women’s
240–44; ngoization paradigm and, ngos and initiatives of, 33–37;
223–27; in Russian women’s organi- “claim-Â�bearing label” of ngos in
zations, 245n1 Bosnia and, 27–29; credibility of
Desai, Manisha, 181 women’s groups with, 28–29; develâ•‚
Desjarlais, Robert, 77 opment agendas of, 144–45; Gha-

Indexâ•…361
donor institutions (continued) education: Indian hierarchies of, 113n12;
naian Manifesto coalition and obliga- Indian women’s ngos and role of,
tions to, 237–44; Ghanaian women’s 150–51; Maoist movement suspicion
movement critique of, 234–36; of, 91n53; marriage in Nepal as inter-
microcredit operations and, 204–6; ruption of, 78–81; Nepalese women’s
ngoization paradigm and agendas empowerment and, 63–74, 88n21;
of, 10–18, 225–27; in postwar Bosnia-Â� ngos in, 19–20; Romanian nonsex-
Herzegovina, 24–27; Russian crisis ist education program, 260; Thai
center models and, 125–28, 137–38; women’s activism concerning, 177–
spatial practices and influence of, 78; transnational feminist solidarity
157–60 and, 187–90
Dorsey, Ellen, 132 electoral politics: Bosnian ngos’ activ-
dukka (suffering), Nepalese concept of: ism concerning, 39–43; Thai femi-
empowerment among women and, nism and, 185–86, 192n22. See also
71–74; marriage in context of, 76–81 political agendas
electrification, in rural Nepal, 56
Eastern Europe, women’s groups in, elite activism: ngoization paradigm
271–74 and, 222–23; in Thailand, 172–74
East-�West communication: public en- employment: in Bangladesh ngos,
gagement issues for women’s ngos 201; in Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina ngos,
and, 280–81; Romanian feminism and 30–31, 36–37, 47n11; discrimination
issues of, 252–53 in Romania and, 255–57; European
economic issues: in Bangladesh, 199– Union gender equality policies in-
201; depoliticization of, 138–40; eco- volving, 266; opportunities in ngos
nomic constraints of women’s ngos, for, 14, 305–10; in rural Nepal, 56–60;
274–76; future of women’s advo- Russian discrimination of women in,
cacy and, 281–83; gendered violence 129–38; in Thai women’s activism,
and, 124–25, 142n22; Ghanaian re- 180–81. See also labor migration
gional inequality and, 236–37; Gha- empowerment: feminist discourses on,
naian Women’s Manifesto analysis 175; governmentalization of, in post-
of, 234–36; Indian women’s ngos liberal India, 107–12; political con-
and, 150–65; Latin America women’s sciousness and rethinking of, 81–86;
movements and, 287–88, 298–99; subversion of state repression and,
microcredit and political economy 95; theoretical evolution of, 62–65.
of shame, 197–99; Nepalese literacy See also women’s empowerment
program as tool for, 57–60; Russian “Empowerment with a Twist” (Man-
women’s groups prioritization of, chanda), 52
129–32, 142n22; Thai women’s activ- Encuentros Nacionales de Muheres,
ism and, 176–78, 182–86, 192n12; 298
Third World economic sovereignty “enredarse” practices, Latin American
and, 196–97; women’s marginaliza- feminist movements and, 290–91
tion from, 120–21 equality: economic equality, lack of
Ecuador, mass mobilizations in, 292– prioritization for, 129–32; gender
95 equality in Bosnia-�Herzegovina,

362â•… Index
 43–46, 47n8; gender equality in exchange-Â�based relationships, velvet
Romania, 256–57, 260–64; lack of triangle concept in, 267–69
prioritization in ngos for, 123–25
Equal Treatment Directive, 279 “failed development” thesis: political
Escobar, Arturo, 226 consciousness and, 81–86; rural revo-
ethnic identity: in Nepal, 56–60, 87n11; lution in Nepal and, 52–55, 86n4; vio-
in postwar Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina insti- lence and development and, 60–65
tutions, 24–27 failed states: Bangladeshi ngos and,
ethnic minority returnees, Bosnian 195–97; ngos and, 10–11
ngos for, 33–37 “false consciousness” paradigm, rural
ethnographic research: on Maoist revolution and, 82–86
movement in Nepal, 53–55; method- female genital mutilation, campaigns
ologies of, 216n7; ngoization para- against, 122–25
digm and, 223 feminismos con apellidos (other femi-
Etzioni, Amitai, 261 nisms), 298–99
Europe, battered women’s movement feministas autómas, 285–86
in, 122–25 feministas jóvenes, 299
European Commission, 269–70 feminist organizations: academic femi-
European Commissioner for Develop- nism and, 221–28; Bangladesh rural
ment and Humanitarian Aid, 275–76 credit systems and, 214–15; in Bosnia-Â�
European Feminist Forum (eff), 280– Herzegovina, 26–27, 31–37, 45–46,
81 48n16, 48n20; coalition building and,
European Institute for Gender Equality, 168–72; gendered personhood con-
256–57, 266 cept and, 90n45; in Ghana, 221–23,
European Union (EU): Bangladesh aid 232–34; Indian state partnerships
from, 215n3; economic power of, 274– with, 95; indigenous groups’ exclu-
76; feminists and governance struc- sion from, 172–74; international
ture of, 219–20; funding priorities policy monitoring by, 291–99; Latin
and biases of, 274–76, 281–83; gender American critique of, 285–86; Latin
politics and, 14, 281–83; nongovern- American “movement work” and,
mental sector relations with, 269–70; 287–91, 294–95; neoliberalism and,
norms and regulations of state duties 10–11; ngoization paradigm cri-
under, 38–43; Phare programs of, tiqued by, 221–23, 285–88; ngos as
260, 265n12; political constraints on catalyst for, 1–11, 19, 301–10; profes-
women’s ngos within, 276–79, 303; sionalization of, 30–31, 36–37, 170–
postwar Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina and aid 72, 180–86, 224–27, 246n10; public
from, 25, 44–46; public engagement engagement issues for, 279–81; in
and women’s ngos under, 279–81; Romania, 248–64, 265n14; Russian
Romanian membership in, 250, 252, crisis center proliferation and role
254–55, 260, 262; women’s advocacy of, 125–28; Russian economic crises
networks and, 266–83; women’s in competition with, 120–21, 129–32,
ngos in, 270–74 141n13; social movements and, 219–
European Women’s Lobby, 270–74 20; spatial practices and agenda of,
Ewig, Christina, 291 157–60; Thai women’s activism and,

Indexâ•…363
feminist organizations (continued) gay rights, activism in Bosnia-�
166–68, 175, 181–86; “third moment” Herzegovina concerning, 40–43,
development in, 295; women’s advo- 48n21
cacy networks, 266–83 Gender Center of the Federation
Ferguson, James, 226 (Bosnia-�Herzegovina), 47n8
Ferree, Myra Marx, 228, 230, 284n8 Gender Center of the Republika Srpska,
Fifth Community Action Program, 47n8
274–76, 284n5 gender equality: Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina
film, Bosnian women directors in, 40 ngos, lack of involvement in, 25–27,
Finland, activities in postwar Bosnia-Â� 31–37; Bosnian feminist perspec-
Herzegovina, 25 tives on, 40–43, 47n8; community
Fisher, William, 293 development/cultural preservation
Ford Foundation, 119, 141n6 discourses and activism on, 176–78;
foreign intervention agencies: Ban- conscientization theory and role of,
gladeshi ngos and, 195–96; Bos- 63–65; democratization’s impact on,
nian ngos and role of, 24–27, 41–43, 124–25, 140n4; economic context
45–46; terminology and definitions, for, 129–32, 274–76; European Union
46n4; Thai women’s activism and, 174 policies concerning, 266–83; femi-
Foucault, Michel, 94–95, 112n4; ngo- nist discourse on, 303–10; gender
ization paradigm and power/knowl- mainstreaming, 14, 96, 143, 225, 231,
edge theory of, 225–26; participatory 243, 258–62, 279; Ghanaian Women’s
research and, 147–48; productivity Manifesto analysis of, 234–36; Indian
theory of, 232 micropolitics and, 152–54; Indian
Frederich Ebert Stiftung, 169–72 women’s ngos and paradox of,
freedom: development and promotion 143–65; Latin American ngoization
of, 61–65; in feminist scholarship, and, 287–88; legal context for, 274–
90n49; Nepalese women’s concepts 76; Maoist movement agenda and
of, 74; in postcommunist Romania, inclusion of, 70–74; microcredit and,
250–52 193–96; Nepalese rural revolution
Freire, Paolo, 58–60, 62–65 and role of, 52–55; ngo agendas for,
fundamentalist Islam: Bosnian women’s 302–10; ngoization paradigm and,
critique of, 40; freedom and au- 3–11, 225–27, 231; personhood con-
tonomy concepts in, 90n49 cepts and, 74–81; political constraints
funding strategies of ngos: economic on women’s ngos concerning, 276–
equality as focus for, 132; political 79; post-�Cold War politics and, 14;
motivations and, 6; Russian crisis in Romania, 250–52, 255–59, 262–
center models and, 125–28, 137–38; 64; in Russia, 120–21, 125–28; spatial
women’s ngos in EU and, 270–74 practices and women’s empower-
Funk, Nanette, 44 ment and, 156–60; Thai feminist
discourse on, 181–86; transnational
Gandhi, Indira, 96–97 anti-Â�violence campaigns and, 122–
Gandhi, Rajiv, 96–97 25
Garrido, Lucy, 296–97 Gender Equality Agency (Bosnia-Â�
Gautam, Shobha, 52 Herzegovina), 25

364â•… Index
Gender Equality Index, Romanian dered violence in, 122–25; economics
development and, 256–57 for women’s ngos in, 274–76; ngo-
generational changes: Bosnian femi- ization paradigm in, 224–25; ngo
nism and, 41–43, 49n23; in Latin structure in, 7–11; subaltern woman
American feminism, 299; in Roma- in, 308–10; Third World feminism in
nian feminism, 263–64 discourse of, 192n23
geopolitics: Indian women’s ngos and, Gold, Ann, 151
143–65; ngos in context of, 8–11, Gorbachev, Mikhail S., 125
303–10; transnational feminist soli- Gorkha district (Nepal): literacy rate
darity and, 187–90 in, 66–67; population statistics for,
German feminism: political constraints 87n11; unification in, 87n10; women’s
on women’s ngos and, 277–79; in empowerment in, 52, 55–60
postunification Germany, 230; Rus- governmentality and governance struc-
sian feminists and, 129; support for tures: deradicalization of Indian
Bosnian women’s organizations from, gongo/ngo activism, 109–12; femi-
26, 28, 31–37, 39–40, 42–43 nist activism and, 219–20; Foucault’s
Ghana: coalition building and ethnog- concept of, 112n4; future of women’s
raphy of inclusion in, 236–2344; ngo advocacy and role of, 282–83; Gha-
historicization and feminist organiz- naian Women’s Manifesto demands
ing in, 232–34; regional economic for, 235–326; Latin American “move-
inequality in, 237–44; women’s coali- ment work” and, 289–91; ngoization
tions in, 221–23 paradigm and influence of, 283n2;
ghuunghat practices, Indian women’s ngos and, 5–6; women’s NGOs in
ngos and role of, 151 EU and, 270–74; work identities in
globalization: abeyance of women’s Indian gongo/ngo structure and,
movement and, 272–74; feminist acâ•‚ 99–106
tivism and, 128, 219; Latin American Government Organized Non-�
movement work as response to, 292– governmental Organizations
99; microcredit in Bangladesh and, (gongos): anthropological research
193; ngo as shadow state and, 196– on, 112n7; in Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, 20;
97; ngoization in Latin America and, in Ghana, 233–34; in India, 94–95;
287–88; Thai feminist discourse work identities in, 98–106
and, 184–86; Thai women’s activism Grameen Bank, 193–215; Bangladeshi
and issues of, 176–78; transnational women moneylenders and, 212–13;
advocacy and, 119–40; women’s activ- critiques of, 214–15; Grameen II
ism and, 120–21 model, 217n21; payment schedule
global North: campaigns against gen- in, 217n22; political economy of
dered violence in, 122–25; economics shame and, 195–99; restructuring
for women’s ngos in, 274–76; ngo- of, 215n1
ization paradigm and role of, 244–45; Gramsci, Antonio, 195
ngo structure in, 7–11; Third World grassroots activism: feminism and,
feminism in discourse of, 182–86, 11–18; Ghanaian regional inequality
192n23 and role of, 237–44; governmentaliza-
global South: campaigns against gen- tion of, in postliberal India, 107–12;

Indexâ•…365
grassroots activism (continued) hiv/aids activism, productivity con-
microcredit systems and, 193–96; cept and, 232
neoliberal ideology and, 94–95; Hodžić, Saida, 16, 219, 221–45
ngoization paradigm and shift from, Hofstede, Geert, 250
200–201, 223–27; in Romania, 263– homosexuality: ngos for sexual rights
64; state involvement in, 97; Thai and, 15–18. See also gay rights
class hierarchies and, 172–74, 183–86, honor codes, political economy of
190n2, 191n8; in United Kingdom, shaming and, 198–99
278–79; women’s ngos in EU and, horizontal integration, Latin American
271–74 feminist movement and, 288–91
grassroots organizations (gros), 46n3 hotline systems, Russian vs. Western
Greece, women’s organizations in, crisis center models and, 135–38
273–74 house breaking (ghar bhanga): Bangla-
Grewal, Inderpal, 1–18, 301–10 deshi women moneylenders and, 213;
group responsibility, in microcredit Bangladesh practice of, 208–9
operations, 206–9, 217n21 housewife groups, in rural Thailand,
Grown, Caren, 182 170, 178–79, 191n7
Grünberg, Laura, 220, 248–64 housing crisis, gendered violence in
guerrilla groups (Nepal), women’s Soviet-Â�era Russia and, 126–28
participation and leadership in, 52 “How to Create a Women’s Crisis
Guha, Ranajit, 65 Center,” 128
humanist feminism, ngoization para-
Hague Tribunal, 123 digm and, 227–32
Halley, Janet, 305 humanitarian ngos, local efforts in
Haraway, Donna, 50, 231–32 Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina and, 30–31
Harcourt, Wendy, 295 human rights organizations: ge-
health services, in rural Nepal, 56–60 neric humanity and, 74–81; in Latin
Hegel, G. W. F., neoliberal and conscien- America, 286; ngo structure and,
tization models and, 65 12–18; in Romania, 250–52, 254; Thai
Heinrich Böll Foundation, 184 women’s movements and, 175, 181–
Helfferich, Barbara, 279 86, 191n18; women’s rights linked to,
Helms, Elissa, 19 123
Hemment, Julie, 115, 119–40, 223, 230, human trafficking issues: ngo involve-
245n1, 246n6, 286 ment in, 308–10; women’s advocacy
Hickey, Samuel, 146–48, 162–63 programs against, 37, 40, 44, 137, 254,
Hilhorst, Dorothea, 27–28 257–58, 276
Hindu culture: dharma in, 76; in Nepal, Hungary, political constraints on
56–60; women moneylenders in, women’s ngos in, 277–79
217n26 hybridity in ngos: feminist critique
hip hop movement, 292 of, 219–20; Ghanaian Women’s
Hirshman, Mitu, 182 Manifesto and, 234–36; Ghanaian
historicization of ngos, Ghanaian femi- women’s organizations’ embrace
nist organizing and, 232–34, 244–45, of, 232–34; Latin American ngoâ•‚
246n7 ization and, 285–88; Mahila Samaâ•‚

366â•… Index
 khay project as both ngo/go, Inter-�American Convention on Vio-
93–98; work identities in, 98–106 lence against Women, 297
hypermasculinity of state institutions, interest rates, in Bangladeshi micro-
Indian gongo resistance to, 103–6 credit systems, 207–9
intergovernmental organizations
immigrants, mass mobilization in Latin (igos): in Latin America, 285–86;
America by, 292–95 ngoization paradigm and, 287–88
imperialism: ngos as agents of, 4–6; internal refugees, in Nepal, 51, 86n2
structural violence of development International Conference on Thai
and, 60–65 Studies, Women’s Forum of, 166–67
inclusion, ngoization paradigm and international financial institutions
ethnography of, 236–44 (IFIs): ngoization in Latin America
Independent Russian Women’s Move- and, 285–86; ngoization paradigm
ment, 125–28 and, 287–88, 302–10
India: dowry deaths campaign in, 122; international institutions: in Bosnia-�
feminist activism in postliberal Herzegovina of, 24–25, 29–37; em-
era, 106–12; gongo advocacy for ployment discrimination of women
women’s empowerment in, 93–106; and, 130–31; EU funding bias in favor
Our Water project in, 148–65; state-Â� of, 274–76; eu-Â�n go civil society
civil society partnerships in, 93–95; initiatives and, 269–70; future of
women’s ngos in, 20, 143–65, 171–72, women’s advocacy within, 281–83;
189–90 Ghanaian Manifesto coalition and,
indigenous groups: cultural preserva- 237–44; lack of public engagement
tion and developmental impact for, in, 279–81; ngoization in Thailand
177–78; mass mobilization in Latin and, 169–72; ngos and, 16–18; Rus-
America of, 292–95 sian vs. Western crisis center models
individual responsibility: group respon- and policies of, 137–38; Thai feminist
sibility vs., 206–9; neoliberal dis- discourse in, 184–86; transnational
course on, 203; political discourse on, women’s advocacy and, 266–83; vio-
178, 180–81; in postcommunist Ro- lence against women as priority for,
mania, 250–52; in Romanian women’s 122–25; women’s ngos in EU and,
organizations, 261–64; spatial prac- 270–74
tice and, 153–55; Thailand social hier- International Monetary Fund (imf), 131,
archy and, 174; women’s participation 302; Thai economic crisis and, 176;
and, 145–46 Third World economic sovereignty
inequality: Ghanaian coalition build- and, 196–97
ing and regional inequalities, 237–44; International Women’s Day, Bosnian
transnational advocacy and disregard women’s groups’ celebration of,
of, 123–25 32–34
Infoteka, 31, 36, 42–43 Internet, transnationational advocacy
ingo, Nepalese women’s political activ- and role of, 142n21
ism linked to, 52–55 intersectionality: in Romanian femi-
institutional credit, ngos in Bangladesh nism, 263–64; Thai women’s activism
as source of, 200–201 and, 168

Indexâ•…367
intervention agencies: credibility of knowledge production: Latin Ameri-
women’s groups with, 28–29; di- can feminist movements and, 289–91;
versity of, in Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, ngoization paradigm and, 225–
43–46; gendered intervention, 26; power and, 213–15; Romanian
women’s empowerment and, 160– women’s organizations generation of,
65; in postwar Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, 261–64
25–27, 42–43, 47n6 Kolb, Felix, 279
Iraq, ngo activity in, 38 Kosovo, ngo activity in, 38
“iron triangle,” Lowi’s concept of, 267 Kothari, Uma, 146–48
Islamic ngos: in Middle East, 13; ngo- Kristoff, Nicholas, 308
ization paradigm and, 228, 230; sup- Kumari, Gyan, 66
port of Bosnian women from, 33, Kvinna til Kvinna (Women to Women),
44–46, 47n5 47n9

Jad, Islah, 228, 230–31 labor migration: from Gorkha district

jana andolan (People’s Movement), (Nepal), 57–60; microcredit systems
failure of democratization follow- and, 194–96; in Third World coun-
ing, 51 tries, 215n6. See also employment
jana yuddha (“People’s War”) (Nepal), Laclau, Ernesto, 298
50–51 land issues, Indian gongo activism
Jansen, Stef, 46n4 concerning, 102–6
John, Mary, 106–7 Lang, Sabine, 1–2, 14, 219, 224–28, 230,
Joshi, Varsha, 151 266–83, 303, 305
Latin America: factors in ngoization
kanyadān (obligation), Nepalese con- in, 287–88; movement work as alter-
cept of, marriage and, 78–81 native to ngoization in, 291–99;
karat Coalition, 280–81 “movement work” of feminist ngos
Karim, Lamia, 116, 193–215, 247n13 in, 288–91; ngoization of women’s
Kataleeradabhan, Nitaya, 170 movements in, 220, 230, 285–99;
Keck, Margaret, 12, 122 post-Â�ngoization feminism in, 295–
Kerr, Joanna, 283n4 99; state-�sanctioned violence in, 122
Kesby, Mike, 162–63 Latvia, political constraints on women’s
keyword techniques, in Nepalese liter- ngos in, 277–79
ary program, 58–60 Lefevre, Henri, 152–54, 261
Khan, Tasneem, 150 legal constraints of women’s ngos,
kinship structures: formal vs. practi- 274–76; charity and tax laws and,
cal practices of, 90n48; microcredit 276–79
operations and, 204–6, 216n18; Thai legislative reforms: Bosnian ngo in-
women’s activism and, 169–72, volvement in, 39–46; “community
190n3 aquis” (acquis communautaire), 258–
Kishore, Prabha, 98–99 59, 264n10; in postcommunist Roma-
Kissinger, Henry, 214–15 nia, 256–57
knitting projects, of Bosnian women’s legitimacy issues, hybrid gongo/ngo
ngos, 35 structure and, 99–106

368â•… Index
León, Magdalena, 290–91 Lowi, Theodore, 267
Ler-Â�Sofronić, Nada, 48n20 Lula da Silva, Ignacio, 294
Leve, Lauren, 5, 19–20, 50–86
Lewis, David, 163–64 Macaulay, Fiona, 288–91
liberal theory: gendered violence in Maddison, Sarah, 272
Russia and skepticism of, 126–28; Magyari-Â�Vincze, Eniko, 254
ngoization paradigm as retreat Mahila Samakhya project (ms), 20, 93;
from, 224–27; ngo scholarship and, gongo structure of, 95–98; neolib-
5–11 eral theory and goals of, 106–12; rela-
Lind, Amy, 245n4 tive obscurity of, 112n8; state/non-�
linguistic practices: Ghanaian Mani- state work identities in, 98–106
festo coalition and issue of, 238–44, Mahmood, Saba, 90n49
246nn8–9; power/knowledge dis- mai-Â�baap (mother-Â�father), Indian state
semination and, 213–15; Romanian institutions classed as, 100, 112n10
gender equality issues and, 262–64; majjā (fun), Nepalese concept of, 79
Thai women’s activism and, 179–81 Majstorović, Danijela, 40
literacy programs: empowerment and Mama Cash, 275–76, 280–81
agency Chorigaon (Nepal) and, Manchanda, Rita, 52–54, 60, 62–65
65–74; in Gorkha district (Nepal), Mani, Kaveri, 97
56–60, 88n21; marriage practices and Maoist movement (Nepal): criticisms
impact of, 89n37; Nepalese women’s of, 89n39; developmental failure and
empowerment and, 63–65; political role of, 50–86; emergence of, 19–20;
activism linked to, 52–55 empowerment and agency and role
local feminist movements: battered of, 68–74; Forty Point Demands of,
women’s movement initiatives, 122– 71, 86n1; political consciousness and
25; community-Â�level associations social identity in, 81–86; political de-
in Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina as, 27–29; mands of, 91n52; structural violence
competing economic issues in Rus- of development and, 61–65; violence
sia with, 129–32; Ghanaian regional against teachers by, 91n53; women’s
inequality and role of, 237–44; global participation and leadership in, 52
civil society and, 119–40; Indian Our March, Kathryn, 73–74
Water project and, 149–65; Indian Marco, Graciela di, 298
women’s ngos and, 146–48; in markets: Nepalese literacy program
Latin America, 293–94; ngos and and ideology of, 57–60; ngoization
emergence of, 12–18; in post-Â�Soviet paradigm and role of, 7–11, 15–18, 231;
Russia, 126–28; in postwar Bosnia-Â� rural activism as tool for, 200–201
Herzegovina, 23–24; Russian vs. marriage: Indian women’s ngos and
Western crisis center models and, role of, 150–51; Nepalese women’s
133–38; transnational advocacy net- subjectivization as result of, 76–81,
works and, 119–21; women’s ngos 89n37, 90n40; rituals and customs
in EU and, 271–74 in Nepal for, 90nn46–47
local governments, suspicion of ngos Massey, Doreen, 152–54
in Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina by, 28–29 mass mobilization, as alternative to
Locher, Birgit, 271 ngoization, 292–95

Indexâ•…369
Master Manole (Romanian legendary Monasteiros, Elizabeth, 294
figure), 254, 257, 264n3 moneylending in Bangladesh, women’s
maternalism in women’s movements, involvement in, 210–13, 217n26
178–81, 191n14 moral arguments, ngo activism and,
Mauleón, Cecilia Olea, 290 308–10
meaning creation, micropolitics and, Moser, Annalise, 187
153–54 movementization of ngos, in postwar
Medica Mondiale, 35, 38 Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, 22–24, 38–42
Medica Zenica, 26, 28, 31–37, 39–40, Msimang, Sisonke, 246n10
42–43 Multimedia Resource Center for
Merjem (Bosnian ngo), 33–37 Women (Romania), 259
Merry, Sally Engle, 12 multinational corporations, Third
microcredit schemes: of Bosnian ngos, World economic sovereignty and,
33–37; critiques of, 214–15; demystifi- 196–97
cation of, 193–215; in Ghana, 239–44, Murdock, Donna, 286, 287–88
247n13; Grameen Bank model, 201–6; Muslim moneylenders, 217n26
group responsibility model, 206–9,
217n21; kinship structures and, Nagar, Richa, 171–72, 188, 189–90, 224
204–6; Nepalese women’s empower- Naples, Nancy, 176, 179
ment and, 63–65; political economy Naš Most (Our Bridge), 32–33, 39
of shame and, 195–99; in postwar National Agency for Equal Opportuni-
Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, 26–27; in rural ties (Romania), 256–57
Nepal, 56–60; surveillance mecha- National Council for Combating Dis-
nisms in, 206–9; usury expansion crimination (Romania), 256–57
linked to, 210–13; violence as result National Front of the Working People,
of, 88n26; women as scapegoats in, 48n16
216n16 nationalism: in Nepal, 55–60; ngo
middle-�class women: activist Thai formation in Romania and, 220;
women as, 181–86; in ngos, 14 postcolonial feminism and, 17–18; in
Middle East, Islamic ngos in, 13 postwar Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, 26–27;
military counterinsurgency campaigns, Thai women’s activism and, 175,
Nepalese rural revolution and role 177–78
of, 51 “Naya Goreto” (New Path) curriculum,
military service, Gorkha district (Nepal) 63; in Nepalese literacy program,
enrollment in, 57–60 58–60
milk song, Thai women’s activism and neoliberalism: feminist critique of ngos
double meaning in, 179–80, 191n16 and, 219–20; Ghanaian Women’s
Mills, Mary Beth, 183 Manifesto critique of, 235–36; hybrid
Miroiu, Mihaela, 254, 257, 264n3 ngo/go structures and, 94–95, 106–
Mitchell, Timothy, 7 12, 113n11; Latin American movement
mjesna zajednica (neighborhood-Â�level work and crisis in, 292–99; Latin
administrative units), 47n13 American ngoization and, 285–88;
Mohan, Giles, 146–47, 162–63 microcredit in Bangladesh and, 193–
Mohanty, Chandra, 171–72, 186–87 215; Nepalese literacy program and,

370â•… Index
 57–60; ngoization paradigm and, Nicaragua, women’s ngos in, 286
4–6, 8–11, 169–72, 224–27, 302–10; Nobel Peace Prize, 197–98, 215
participation in development projects nonformal adult education (nfe):
linked to, 146–48; postcolonial para- empowerment and agency and role
digms of, 115–17; postwar Bosnia-Â� of, 65–74; in rural Nepal, 57–60
Herzegovina ngos and influence of, nongovernmental organizations
25–27, 37, 44–46, 48n18; structural (ngos): as agency for activism, 16;
violence of development and, 61–65, class and group marginalization and,
88n26, 88n33; “third moment” femi- 16; cooptation of feminist move-
nism and resistance to, 295–99; trans- ments by, 219–20; debates over future
national advocacy and hegemony of, of, 16–18; disbursement statistics
124–25, 141n10 for, 1; European Union policies and,
neopopulism, rise in Latin America of, 269–70; feminism and structure of,
293–95 301–10; feminist activism integrated
Nepal: failed development and rural into, 8–18; feminist research concern-
revolution in, 50–86; feminism and ing, 1–2; feminist social movements
ngos in, 19–20; rural social networks and, 219–20; form of, 6–11; global-
in, 87n8; unification of, 87n10 ization and shadow state status of,
Network of East-Â�West Women listserv, 196–97; normalization of, 1; postcolo-
142n21 nial neoliberal paradigms and, 115–17;
ngo Affairs Bureau (Bangladesh) in postcommunist Romania, 250–52;
(ngoab), 195–96 proliferation of, 2; regional trends in,
ngoization paradigm: anti-� 3; scholarship divisions concerning,
institutionalism and, 244–45; critical 3–6; structure and form of, 3–18, 301–
research on, 245n4, 246n5; current 10. See also women’s ngos
research involving, 287–88; femi- nonprofit status, political constraints on
nist coalition building and, 168–72; women’s ngos and, 276–79
genealogy of, 224–27; Ghanaian ngo North Atlantic Treaty Organization
historicization and feminist organiz- (nato), 250
ing and, 232–34; Ghanaian transcen- nostalgic feminism, ngoization para-
dence of, 221–23; humanist feminism digm, 227–32
and, 227–32; inclusion and coalition Nussbaum, Martha, 306
building and, 236–44; lack of public
engagement as result of, 280–81; in Occupy movement, 309
Latin America, 220, 285–99; political Office of the High Representative, 24,
constraints on women’s ngos and, 47n6
276–79; posthumanist critique, 221– Omu, Kisang, 77
45; process-Â�oriented logic as alterna- Ong, Aihwa, 123–24, 194, 200–201
tive to, 293–95; transborder feminist online communications, Romanian
solidarity and, 186–90; velvet triangle women’s organizations and, 259–64
concept and, 267–69; women’s ngos Open Society Institute, 119, 280–81
in EU and, 270–74 O’Reilly, Kathleen, 116, 143–65
“ngo-Â�speak,” “claim-Â�bearing label” of organicist discourse, ngoization para-
ngos in Bosnia and, 27–29 digm and, 230–32

Indexâ•…371
Organization for Security and Coopera- police intimidation and brutality:
tion in Europe (osce), 24, 47n6 Indian gongo resistance to, 103–6;
Organization of American States (oas), Latin American feminism and, 298–
297 99; microcredit systems and use of,
Ortega, Daniel, 296 208–9, 217n24; Nepalese rural revo-
Other: rural Thai women activist and, lution and role of, 51
187–90; Thai women’s activism and Polirom (Romanian publisher), 256
politics of, 166–90 political agendas: “claim-Â�bearing label”
Our Water project, Indian women’s for ngos as separation from, 28–29;
participation in, 148–65 depoliticization of Bosnian ngos
and, 32–37, 48n14; deradicalization
Parliamentary Commissions for Equal of Indian gongo/ngo activism
Opportunities (Romania), 256–57 and subversion of, 109–12; electoral
participatory action research (par), activism of Bosnian ngos, 39–43;
142n23; dialogic exchange and, 160– empowerment in context of, 81–86;
63; gendered paradox of, in Indian EU-Â�based women’s ngos and restric-
women’s ngos, 145–48; spatial prac- tions on, 276–79, 284n6; in Ghanaian
tices and, 154–60 Manifesto, 240–44; Indian state and
participatory goals of ngos, Nepalese women’s empowerment and, 93–112;
literacy program and, 57–60 Indian women’s ngos, micropolitics
Pathak, Sunita, 93–94, 97 and, 152–54; of Latin American femi-
Peake, Linda, 223 nists, 296–99; ngoization paradigm
Pearce, Jenny, 304 and shift from, 225–27; of ngos, 6,
pedagogical theory: empowerment 13–18; in postwar Bangladesh, 200–
framework and, 94–95; in Nepalese 201; Thai feminism and, 184–86,
literary program, 58–60, 88n21 190n3. See also electoral politics
People’s Army (Nepal), 53, 55–56 political economy of shame, micro-
personhood, gendered concepts of, credit systems and, 195–99
74–81, 90n45 Pongsapich, Amara, 170
Peru, feminist organizations in, 290 “popular feminism,” in Latin America,
Pettigrew, Judith, 83–84 296–99
Phare program (EU), 260, 265n12 postcolonial neoliberalism: citizenship
Phillips, Sarah, 46n1, 223, 232 in context of, 194–96; nongovern-
Pigg, Stacy, 66–67 mental organizations and, 115–17
ping-Â�pong effect in women’s advocacy post-Â�Enlightenment political theory:
networks, 270–74 neoliberal and conscientization
“Pink Tide” in Latin America, 293–95 models and, 65; secular personhood
piqueteras movement (Argentina), 292, in relation to, 75
298–99 postsocialist Europe, Bosnian ngos and
“+5” conferences, Latin American femi- climate of, 45–46
nism and, 291–93, 296–99 poststructuralism, ngo scholarship
Poland, women’s organizations in, and, 5–6
271–72 poverty: Ghanaian Women’s Manifesto
PoLAR (2010), 4 analysis of, 235–36; Nepalese rural

372â•… Index
 revolution and role of, 51; violence women’s activism and, 170–72, 180–
linked to, 60–65 86; velvet triangle concept and, 267–
power-Â�sharing mechanisms, in postwar 69; women’s ngos in EU as, 271–74
Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, 24 Progress Program (EU), 275–76
power structure: in Bangladesh, 213–15; Project for Tomorrow (pft), 167, 176–
Indian gongo subversion of, 102–6; 78
Indian women’s ngos and, 143– property rights and arrangements, gen-
48; integration of ngos into, 8–11; dered violence in Soviet-Â�era Russia
knowledge and, 213–15; Nepalese and concepts of, 126–28
women’s participation and leader- Proshika Human Development Forum,
ship in, 52–60; ngo-Â�based social 215n1, 217n21, 217n24
movement model and, 291–99; ngo- Psychosocial therapy, Bosnian ngos’
ization paradigm and power/knowl- focus on, 35
edge theory, 225–26; ngos in relation public engagement, women’s ngos in
to, 1–6; secular personhood in rela- EU and, 279–81
tion to, 74–75; spatial practices and Pudrovska, Tatjana, 284n8
women’s participation in, 154–60; pueblo feminista (feminist people),
Thai women’s activism and influence 298–99
of, 166–90; in women’s advocacy net- purdah practices, Indian women’s ngos
works, 267–69 and role of, 151
primitivization paradigms, gendered
violence issues and, 138–40 Queer (arts) Festival (Sarajevo), 48n21
private networks, gendered violence in
Russia and role of, 127–28 race and racism, ngos and, 14–15
privatization: framing of gendered vio- radne akcije (work actions), 30
lence issues and, 139–40; of gendered Raheja, Gloria, 151
violence, 124–25; Ghanaian Women’s Rani, Meena, 93
Manifesto critique of, 235–36; Indian rape survivors: ngos in Bosnia for,
neoliberal degovernmentalization 31–37. See also sexual violence
and, 113n11; ngoization paradigm Rawlings, Nana, 233–34
and, 8–11, 165–72, 225–27, 302–10 reconciliation institutions, in postwar
process-Â�oriented logic, as ngoization Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, 26–27, 47n6,
alternative, 293–95 47n9
professional ngo bureaucracies: reconstruction efforts, in postwar
Arab women’s movements and, 228, Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, 26–27
230; distance from grassroots and, refugee services, in postwar Bosnia-�
305–10; employment in Bosnia-Â� Herzegovina, 26
Herzegovina of, 30–31, 36–37; lack representation, Thai women’s activism
of public engagement and, 279–81; and politics of, 172–74
in Latin America, 299; ngo-�based reproductive rights, Latin American
social movement model and, 291–99; feminist activism for, 296–97
ngoization paradigm and, 222–27, resistance movements, in Latin
306–10; in postcommunist Romania, America, 292–99
255–57; in Russia, 133–38, 246n6; Thai Richard, Analiese, 302

Indexâ•…373
rituals and customs: Indian women’s sacrifice, Thai women’s activism and
ngos and role of, 150–51; Nepalese concept of, 180–81
women’s adherence to, 71–74 Sampson, Steve, 43
Roma issues, Romanian women’s activ- Sangtin Writers, 171–72, 189–90, 224
ism on behalf of, 258–59 Sawer, Marian, 272
Romania: democratic transition in, 220; Schild, Verónica, 64, 75
gender equality in, 256–57, 260–64; Scott, James, 82–83
postcommunist feminism in, 248–64; Scott, Joan, 222
US policy in, 47n7 second-�wave feminism, in socialist-�era
Romanian Official Gazette, 261 Bosnia-�Herzegovina, 38
“room-Â�service feminism,” Romanian self-Â�censorship, political constraints on
concept of, 254–55, 264n4 women’s ngos and, 278–79
Roth, Silke, 272 self-�realization: depoliticization of
Rouseff, Dilma, 294 economic equality and, 138–40; in
Rowlands, Jo, 162 Soviet-Â�era Russia, 126; Thai women’s
Roy, Arundhati, 224, 247n12 activism and ideology of, 176–78
rural activism: capitalism as catalyst for, Sempreviva Organização Feminists
62–65; class hierarchies and mar- (sof), 294–95, 297–98
ginalization of, 169–72; community Sen, Amartya, 306
development/cultural preservation Sen, Gita, 182
discourses and, 175–78; community service-Â�oriented ngos, neoliberal en-
development discourse and, 175; ex- couragement of, 141n10
clusion in Thai scholarship of, 172–74; sexual politics: of Latin American
financial dependency on ngos and, feminists, 296–99; ngos and, 14–15;
201; hybrid gongo/ngo structure political economy of shaming and,
and, 99–106; Indian women’s em- 198–99; in rural Bangladesh, 206–9;
powerment and, 93–112; labor migra- Thai feminist discourse on, 181–86
tion and, 215n6; microcredit systems sexual violence: local Russian women’s
and, 193–96, 204–6, 214–15; Nepalese groups, attitudes concerning, 129–32,
developmental failure and rural revo- 142n16; ngo mobilization in post-
lution, 50–86; oppositionality with war Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina and issues
urban feminism and, 187–90; politi- of, 26–27, 36–37; Russian vs. Western
cal consciousness and, 81–86; struc- crisis center models and role of, 136–
tural violence of development and, 38; transnational campaigns against,
61–65; Thai feminist discourse and 121–25. See also domestic violence;
marginalization of, 181–86; of Thai rape survivors
women, 166–90, 190n3; village social Shah, Gyanendra, 55, 71, 91n52
networks in Nepal and, 87n8 Shah, Prithvinarayan, 55
Russia: crisis center model in, 133–38; Shah, Saubhagya, 83–84
feminist activism in, 125–28; gender Shah dynasty (Nepal), 55
violence issues in, 138–40; prioritiza- shaming: in microcredit enterprises
tion of economic change over femi- loan recovery program, 207–9,
nism in, 129–32; women activist orga- 217n21; as social control instrument,
nizations in, 119–21, 223, 245n1 198–99

374â•… Index
Sharma, Aradhana, 14, 20, 22, 93–112, ngos, 146–48; micropolitics of, 152–
236 54; of Romanian women’s organiza-
Sikkink, Kathryn, 12, 122 tions, 261–64; women’s participation
Silliman, Jael, 245n4 and empowerment and, 154–60
Simpson, Meghan, 245n4 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 50, 65,
Sixteen Decisions (Grameen Bank), 141n8
204–6 Srebrenica genocide survivors, activism
Soares, Vera, 289–91 of women’s groups for, 36–37, 48n17
social engineering, by Bangladesh star (Strategies, Training, Advocacy
ngos, 215n5 for Reconciliation) Project, 47n9
social gatherings, of Bosnian ngos, state-�as-�giver paradigm, Indian hybrid
33–37 gongo/ngo programs and, 101–6,
socialist feminism: “association of 112n9
women” in Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina and, “state effect” of ngos, 7–11
32–37; post-Â�Cold War capitalism and, state institutions: in Bangladesh,
14; Russian women’s organizations 200–201; in Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina,
and, 125–28, 141n13 24, 37–43; democratization and
social justice movements: Bosnian empowerment accountability of,
ngos and mobilization for, 36–37; 302–3; economic discrimination of
feminist discourses on, 175; feminist women in, 130–32; gendered violence
social movements and, 219–20; lit- committed by, 122–25; Ghanaian
eracy programs as catalyst for, 60; Women’s Manifesto demands from,
ngo-Â�based social movement model 234–36; Ghanaian women’s move-
and, 291–99; ngo collaborations ments and, 233–34; hybrid gongo/
with, 302–10; Thai feminist perspec- ngo collaboration in India and,
tives on, 184–86, 191n18; transna- 93–112; Latin American ngo collabo-
tional advocacy for, 120–21 ration with, 292–99; local practices
social media, gender issues in Bosnia of, impact on ngos of, 13; Mahila
on, 41 Samakhya project partnership with,
social services ngos: in Bosnia-Â� 96–98; microcredit systems and use
Herzegovina, 28–37; Indian Our of, 208–9; neoliberal degovernmen-
Water project and, 149–65; overview talization and, 113n11; Nepalese de-
of, 10–11; reinforcement of patriar- velopmental failure and, 50–86; ngo
chal assumptions through, 41–43 collaboration with, 1–11, 20, 124–25,
soft law practices, European Union 304–10; ngoization paradigm and
policies and, 269–70 collaboration with, 196–97, 226–27,
songs, Thai women’s activism and 287–88; in postcommunist Romania,
double meaning in, 179–80, 191n16 254–57; state-Â�civil society partner-
Sophia (Queen of Spain), 215 ships and, 94–95; structural violence
Soviet Women’s Committee, 125, of, 62–65; subversion of empower-
140n2 ment and activism by, 101–6; Thai
Spain, women’s organizations in, 272– women’s activism and role of, 170–72;
73 violence in Nepal committed by,
spatial practice: in Indian women’s 70–74. See also Government Orga-

Indexâ•…375
state institutions (continued) textile production, Thai cultural preser-
nized Non-Â�governmental Organiza- vation initiatives and, 176–78
tions (gongos) Thailand: activist mothering movement
Stokke, K., 146–47 in, 178–81; community development/
“strategic sisterhood,” critique of, 123– cultural preservation discourses and
24 activism in, 175–78; feminism and
structural violence, development as human rights in, 181–86; ngoiza-
form of, 60–65 tion in, 169–72, 191n6; scholarship on
subalternity: Indian gongo/ngo women’s activism in, 172–74, 191n9;
structure and, 100–106, 109–12; neo- transborder feminist solidarity with
liberal and conscientization models women in, 186–90; women’s activism
and, 65; Nepalese developmental in, 166–90
failures, 50–52; ngo activism and, Thayer, Millie, 45, 286
308–10; political consciousness and, “third moment” feminism, 295
82–86 third sector institutions, in postwar
subjectification, gendered concepts of Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, 25–27
personhood and, 75–81 Third Wave feminism, in Latin
“successful development” thesis, rural America, 298–99
revolution in Nepal and, 54–55 Third World feminism: First World
suffering, subjectivizing force of, gen- feminist discourse on, 182–86; ngo-
dered personhood and, 74–81 ization paradigm and, 226; ngo
sukha (ease and comfort), Nepalese structure and, 7–11; structural vio-
concept of: empowerment among lence of development and, 60–65
women and, 71–74; marriage in con- 31st December Women’s Movement,
text of, 76–81 233–34
support groups, Russian vs. Western Together at Foişor Program for Com-
crisis center models and role of, munity Development (Roman), 260
136–38 top-Â�down project implementation: par-
surveillance mechanisms, in micro- ticipation in development projects
credit systems, 206–9 and, 146–48; Thai women’s activism
and, 176–77
Tamang women in Nepal, empower- Toward a Nonsexist Education, 260
ment among, 73–74 transnational advocacy networks: class-Â�
Tanzania, ngo coalitions in, 11 related access to, 183–86; critique
tax laws, political constraints on of paradigms within, 138–40; divi-
women’s ngos as result of, 277–79 sions and tensions within, 119–21;
Taylor, Verta, 272 economic issues as focus of, 132;
technocratic ideology, ngo activism EU funding access for, 274–76;
and, 308–10 European Union role in, 269–70;
teleology: feminist activism and, 219– future issues for, 281–83; gender
20; of ngoization paradigm, 222–23 equality policies and, 266–83; Indian
“testimonial knowledge,” of women’s women’s empowerment programs
ngos in EU, 271 and, 95–98; Latin American “move-

376â•… Index
 ment work” and, 289–91; ngoiza- movement in, 272–74; battered
tion paradigm and, 4–6, 12–18, 223; women’s movement in, 122–25; ngo
post-�ngoization feminism in Latin structure in, 7
America and, 296–99; public engage- universalism, feminism and theme of,
ment and, 279–81; Russian feminist 119
activism and, 121–25, 141n7; Rus- University of Sarajevo, gender studies
sian vs. Western crisis center models at, 41
and, 133–38; Thai women’s activism University Press Limited (upl), 213–15
and, 170–72, 186–90; velvet triangle un Millennium Development Goals, 12
concept and, 266–69; women’s ngos Uruguay, feminist movements in, 296–
and European Union, 270–74, 307–10 97
transnational social movements US Agency for International Develop-
(tsms), anti-�violence campaigns by, ment (usaid): Bangladesh programs
123–25 of, 200–201; in Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina,
transversal politics, Thai feminist soli- 26–27, 47n9; empowerment initia-
darity and, 188–90 tives of, 60–65; Nepalese women’s
Tribhuvan University, Center for Eduâ•‚ empowerment unit in, 62–65
cational Research, Innovation, and usury practices: Bangladeshi women’s
Development, 58 involvement in, 207–9; microcredit
Tsikata, Dzodzi, 221–23, 224 and expansion of, 210–13
Tsing, Anna, 246n11
Tver,’ Russia, crisis center model in, Valiente, Celia, 272
133–38 Vargas, Virginia, 290, 291–92
Vati, Leela, 99
UK Charities Commission, 279 velvet triangle, transnational women’s
Ukraine: ngo boom in, 46n1; women’s advocacy and, 219–20, 266–69
social activism in, 223 Venezuela, neopopulism in, 293–94
un High Commission on Human vernacular press, in Bangladesh, 213–15
Rights, 123 vertical integration, Latin American
United Kingdom, political constraints feminist movement and, 288–91
on women’s ngos in, 278–79 Village Development Committees
United Nations: conferences on women, (vdcs) (Nepal), 55–60
8, 11–12; human rights conferences Village Women’s Development Comâ•‚
of, 123; impact on ngos of, 17–18; mittee (Khanakammakaan phad-
Latin American feminist movements thana satrii muu baan) (Thailand),
and, 290–91, 295–99; Latin American 170–72
ngoization and, 287–88; ngoization violence: absence of development and,
paradigm and influence of, 283n2; 81–86; development as catalyst for,
state-Â�civil society partnerships pro- 60–65; in Gorkha district of Nepal,
moted by, 94–95, 292–95; Thai femi- 55–56, 89n39; Nepalese developmen-
nist discourse in, 184–86; violence tal failure and role of, 50–51; Rus-
against women issues at, 122–25 sian vs. Western crisis center models
United States: abeyance in women’s and framing of, 136–38; transnational

Indexâ•…377
violence (continued) model, in microcredit systems, 206–
campaigns against, 121–25, 141n5. 9; in India, state-Â�government collabo-
See also domestic violence; sexual ration on, 93–112; Indian ngos and
violence facilitation of, 151–65; mainstreaming
virtual management of ngos, 259–64 of, as development strategy, 63–64,
volunteerism: in postcommunist Roma- 107–8; Nepalese rural revolution and
nia, 251–52; skepticism in Bosnia-Â� role of, 52–86; participation in devel-
Herzegovina concerning, 29–37, 47n13, opment projects linked to, 145–48;
48n19; in Thai women’s activism, 179– political agency in Nepal and, 65–74;
81; in United Kingdom, 278–79 rural activism as tool for, 169–72;
shaming as tool for, 198–99; spatial
Walley, Christine, 172–74 practices and creation of, 154–60;
Wallstrom, Margot, 273–74 state accountability for, 302–3; suf-
Warsaw Pact, 250 fering as subjectivizing force and,
Watson, Peggy, 126 74–81; unofficial gongo advocacy
Western feminism: Russian crisis center for, 101–6
models and, 125–26; Russian Soviet-Â� Women’s Manifesto for Ghana (The
era connections with, 120, 140n2; so- Coalition on the Women’s Mani-
cialist feminists and, 14; Third World festo for Ghana), 221, 234–36; coali-
feminism and, 182–86; transborder tion building and inclusion agenda
critiques of, 186–90 of, 236–44
Wiegman, Robyn, 226–27 women’s movements: emergence
Woman and Politics, 185 in Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina of, 29–37,
Women and the Constitution Network, 40–43; feminist framework in India
185 for, 95–98; Ghanaian Women’s Mani-
Women in Development Europe, 280– festo and, 221, 234–36, 245n7; histo-
81 ricization of, in Ghana, 232–34; Latin
women-Â�in-Â�development (wid) para- American feminist ngos and, 288–
digm, in postwar Bangladesh, 199– 99; maternalism in, 178–81, 191n14;
201 Nepalese developmental failures
Women’s Development Programme and, 50–86; ngoization inhibition
(wdp), 95 of, 223, 227–32; professionalization
women’s empowerment: activist of, 224–27; in Romania, 249–57; in
mothering movement (Thailand) and, Russia, 119–21; Russian crisis center
178–81; Bangladeshi women money- model and, 125–28, 141n13; in Thaiâ•‚
lenders and, 210–13, 217n26; Bos- land, 166–68; women’s advocacy
nian ngos and emergence of, 39–43, networks, 266–83
48n14; dialogic exchange and growth women’s ngos: Bangladesh micro-
of, 160–63; economic equality as credit operations and, 206–15; Ban-
focus in, 129–32; feminist discourse gladesh women moneylenders and,
on ngos and, 303–10; Ghanaian 210–13, 217n26; credibility in Bosnia-Â�
Women’s Manifesto analysis of, 234– Herzegovina of, 28–29; economic and
36; Ghanaian women’s organizations legal constraints of, 274–76; emer-
and, 233–34; group responsibility gence of, 1, 11–18; European Union

378â•… Index
 and, 270–74; feminism and structure partnerships promoted by, 94–95;
of, 301–10; fundraising difficulties Third World economic sovereignty
of, 274–76; Ghanaian historicization and, 196–97
and feminist organizing of, 232–34; World Conference on Women in Bei-
in India, gendered paradoxes in, jing, 11–12, 123, 141n8, 173–74, 253,
143–65, 189–90; “movement work” in 287–88
Latin America and, 288–91; ngoiza- World March of Women against Vio-
tion paradigm and, 221–23, 228–32; lence and Poverty (wmw), 297–99
political constraints on, 276–79; in World Social Forum (wsf), 292–95,
postwar Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, 21–27; 296–99
public engagement and, 279–81; in
Romania, 257–64; Thai women’s Yami, Hisala, 85
activism and, 166–90; theory and youth issues, Thai women’s activism
critique of participation in, 145–48; concerning, 177–78
transborder feminist solidarity with Yunus, Muhammad, 197–200, 214–15,
Thai women and, 186–90; trans- 215n1
national agendas regarding, 13–18; Yuval-Â�Davis, Nira, 188–89
women’s development programming
in Nepal and, 57–60 Žbanić, Jasmila, 40
Woodward, Alison, 266–67 Zenica, Bosnia-Â�Herzegovina, local
work identities in hybrid gongo/ngo women’s organizations in, 23–24
structure, Mahila Samakhya project Zhenskii Svet (Women’s Light), 129–40
in India and, 98–106 zhesovety (Soviet-Â�era women’s organiza-
World Bank, 302; ngos and, 17–18, tions), 125, 140n2
47n6, 48n22; state-�civil society Zippel, Kathrin, 279

Indexâ•…379