Global Justice? Contesting NGOization: Knowledge Politics and Containment in Antiglobalization Networks

Abstract

This chapter discusses struggles over power and knowledge among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social movements contesting capitalist globalization. Building on a review of an emerging body of critical literature on NGOs’ implications in capitalist relations and the professionalization of social change, and the author’s activist engagement, it argues that processes of NGOization and professionalization, and hierarchies of power and knowledge within “alternative” milieus often reproduce rather than challenge dominant practices and power relations, and serve elite economic and political interests instead of constituencies which these organizations claim to represent. It identifies and questions aspects of hegemonic NGO practices, primarily among “civil society” networks contesting the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)¹ forum in the 1990s, in which I was an activist. In interrogating “alternatives to globalization” advocacy positions advanced by nongovernmental actors ostensibly committed to social transformation, I argue that critical attention to texts and actual practices reveals that many NGOs are tied to what I refer to as an ideology of pragmatism which normalizes and reinforces dominant ideologies of liberalism and liberal democratic nation-states with regard to their current and historical implication in colonialism and global capitalist relations. In contending that many such “alternative” actors claim a positional superiority for a small, professionalized NGO/activist elite, this chapter highlights how NGO texts and actual practices can socially organize, conceptually coordinate, fragment and compartmentalize struggles for social and environmental justice, undermining or constraining more critical systemic analysis.