Informal Global Interdependence – Civil Society as a Two-Edged Sword
15 Dec 2011
The promotion of external pagehuman rights and external pageglobal justice remains an essential objective for those who seek greater global governance. In recent years, an extensive array of external pageinternational declarations and legislative instruments has been complemented by initiatives such as the external pageResponsibility to Protect (R2P), which stipulates that where states are either unwilling or unable to guarantee their citizens’ external pagehuman security, the international community has a duty to step in and fill the void. (The motives behind R2P are, of course, a mixture of altruism and self-interest.) What all these declarations, instruments and initiatives reflect is a simple truth – states and other, more formal mechanisms of global governance often fail to uphold universal minimum standards. In response to this failure, civil society organizations (CSOs) have evolved either to fill gaps or put pressure upon states and formal international institutions to change their behavior.
The venerable Human Rights Watch (HRW), for example, is one of the pioneers of the civil society movement. Originally formed in 1978 under the moniker of Helsinki Watch, HRW first monitored the former Soviet Union’s compliance with the external pageHelsinki Accords. Since then, it has formalized itself as a CSO institution, expanded its scope, and now concentrates on human rights-related issues in almost 100 countries. Indeed, HRW’s global reach has come to reflect civil society’s undeniable importance in crafting alternative, non-governmental forms of effective transnational self-regulation.
Given the importance of CSOs as an integral feature of the international system, our focus today is to consider how these mechanisms of improved transnational interdependence enhance, or not, “the ties that bind.” (The United Nations University’s (UNU) Governance through Civil Society Engagement in Asia, for example, provides a helpful overview of the ways in which CSOs engage with formal mechanisms of governance in this part of the world and indeed beyond.) However, our appreciation of the purpose and function of CSOs comes with a caveat, as illustrated by Mary Kaldor’s War and Peace: The Role of Global Civil Society, which casts a critical eye over the activities of CSOs before, during and after violent conflict. In providing this caveat, we remind ourselves, unhappily enough, that not all CSOs are a force for improved governance within the international system.
Civil Society and International Organizations
According to the UNU, “CSOs create a role for themselves in global governance when they engage in norm-setting for the international state system, creating norms that are [subsequently] adopted by nation states.” Norm-setting can, for example, be achieved through effective advocacy campaigns, monitoring for compliance with international agreements and the mobilization of like-minded grass-roots organizations. In accomplishing such tasks, CSOs not only potentially fill ‘governance vacuums’ that may stem from weak formal institutions, they also increase the effectiveness of existing mechanisms, primarily by working with a diverse set of stakeholders that include citizens, public bodies and government agencies. CSOs, in short, help develop synergies among different participants in the global governance process.
The above benefits are readily acknowledged by the UNU and like-minded institutions. “CSOs are both valuable and valued,” the UNU specifically observes, “because they expand the capacity of the UN, extend the reach of the UN into societies and mobilize societal support for the UN.” At the global level, CSOs such as Transparency International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, Amnesty International and the World Association of Voluntary Organizations (CIVICUS), to name just a few, “influence transnational decision-making by broadening access to global governance and enhancing transparency and accountability within global governance institutions like the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.” At the national and local level, CSOs are fundamental to bridging the gap between abstract standards of good governance on the one hand, and grass-roots actors who are mostly concerned with context-specific issues on the other. Examples of this gap-bridging can involve public law issues (e.g., the Pakistan Bar Association’ challenge to former President Pervez Musharraf ’s dismissal of judges), the promotion and protection of human rights, providing services and shelter to slum dwellers in government-initiated programs, and much more.
To accomplish the above ends, however, CSOs need to maintain high levels of access to global institutions, at a minimum to maximize their influence or, indeed, to participate in the governance process at all. Full and frank exchanges between CSOs and international organizations should – in theory - result in increased transparency and mutual supervision of specific activities. Fair enough, but what about the legitimacy and accountability of civil society actors themselves, or as David Rieff once notoriously put it, “So who elected the NGOs?”
The Good and the Bad
Mary Kaldor’s analysis of CSOs is markedly different from the positive, if not outright anodyne view of the UNU. According to Kaldor and her fellow travelers, the term “civil society” is a dangerously fungible one. (But perhaps not as dangerous as the most fungible one of them all – the shape-shifting “international community.”) It obviously encompasses a multitude of actors and grass-roots organizations – NGOs, media organizations, private lobby groups and businesses. Among this diverse group are organizations that do not necessarily embrace the political agendas or universal values espoused by formal transnational bodies such as the UN.
To demonstrate this point, Kaldor’s War and Peace: The Role of Global Civil Society uses case studies from Iraq and the former Yugoslavia to highlight an unhappy truth – CSOs have historically dedicated themselves not only to gap-filling and institution buttressing, but an ugly minority have also been complicit in darker activities – illegal trafficking, for example, and even genocide and crimes against humanity. In the latter and admittedly extreme case, Kaldor argues that local civil society was used “as a platform for fanning exclusive Serbian nationalism by the Belgrade-based Serbian Association of Writers and the debates about Kosovo it hosted in the late 1980s. Kosovo’s autonomous status was disputed in heated emotional language that vilified the Albanian majority population, portrayed the Serb emigration from Kosovo as an ‘exodus’, and lamented their fate as ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’.” This kind of hate-speech, our author concludes, eventually helped legitimize Serbian grievances in Kosovo, Bosnia Herzegovina and Croatia and turned a local perversion of what CSOs should not do into an international-level problem.
Kaldor further reminds us that good intentions can result in less-than-favorable outcomes. Accordingly, “the presence and activities of humanitarian agencies can be a factor in the duration, intensity and outcome of conflict, whether intended or not.” Violent state and non-state actors, for example, often intercept humanitarian supplies, thereby “forcing NGOs and international agencies to pay for access to injured civilians or displaced persons, and even using refugee assistance as a vehicle for ethnic cleansing.” So, CSOs are gap-fillers and they do help prop up underperforming formal governmental structures, but as Kaldor et al note, global and local civil society is a complex and contradictory thing; it contains elements that can contribute to peace and yet play a pivotal role in fomenting conflict. As always, in the case of improved management and governance over conflict zones, one must distinguish between different segments of civil society – both internal and external to the area – in order to support the non-sectarian, public interest-based activism that can “carry the seeds of rebuilding . . . legitimate public authority.”
Conclusion
Today’s selection of articles demonstrates that civil society’s engagement with formal global governance, either at the transnational or local level, is complex and not by definition altruistic. As the UNU’s Governance through Civil Society Engagement in Asiademonstrates, NGOs and other civil society actors do play an increasingly important role in gap-filling or propping up more formal global governance mechanisms. Yet, improvements must be made. Not only do CSOs face the challenge of holding nebulous international organizations to account, they must also address concerns regarding their own legitimacy. War and Peace: The Role of Global Civil Society, on the other hand, sheds light on the darker sides of civil society’s engagement with increased transnational oversight. By extolling just the virtues of CSOs, one can overlook their manipulation by self-seeking actors, and even their complicity – witting or not – in the very abuses that most seek to prevent. The challenge, as always, will remain for advocates of next-stage global governance to distinguish between those informal mechanisms that are helpful to their cause and those that are not.
Recommended Reading
ISN Digital Library
Civil Society in Uncivil Places: Soft State and Regime Change in Nepal
Cutting the Links between Crime and Local Politics: Colombia's 2011 Elections
Political Space for Non-Governmental Organizations in United Nations World Summit Processes
US Based NGOs in International Development Cooperation: Survival of the Fittest?
Other Sources
David Rieff (2003) A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis
Thomas Pogge (2010) Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric
In case you have missed any of our previous content on global interdependence, you can catch up here on: An Impediment to Global Governance – Strategic Culture, Formal Global Interdependence – The Historical (and Western) Case for Global Governanceand Informal Global Governance: The Case of Nuclear Disarmament.