The Ethiopian famine of 25 years ago was the greatest humanitarian disaster of the late 20th century, killing more than 600,000 people before the world took notice. Peter Gill was the first journalist to reach the epicenter of the famine in 1984 and he returned at the time of Live Aid to research the definitive account of the disaster, A Year in the Death of Africa.
Now, in Famine and Foreigners, Gill returns to Ethiopia to piece together the real story of the last 25 years, drawing on interviews with leading Ethiopians and with an army of foreign aid officials. He conducted extensive interviews with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and the leading development economists, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs. Most important of all, Gill has traveled throughout the country and interviewed scores of Ethiopia's dignified but still hungry farmers. What stands out in these pages are the graphic encounters with these Ethiopians--the supposed beneficiaries of western aid--who still struggle on the knife-edge of existence. What also emerges is the often tense relationship between official aid-givers and recipients--whether in the area of economic reform or the modern demands for "governance" and political change. Twenty five years on, we can say that we did feed the world. But did we change the face of poverty, did we close the gap between rich and poor, did we fulfill the promise of "development?"
A generation after Live Aid, this book questions whether any of world's big promises are being fulfilled. Have aid experts got it right? Are recipient countries allowed to pursue their own vision? Is democracy essential for banishing poverty? Now that the West faces its own economic challenges, it is time to ask whether the "development era" may be coming to an end.

Aid organizations have their origins in a desire to help the world's poorest and most marginalized people - but are they reaching these people? Factors are coming together that put pressure on NGOs working in development: the economic crisis, the growing conditionality of aid, and increased competition for funding between NGOs. This creates 'a perfect storm' driven by a new language of aid, policies and procedures leaving poor women behind. This book explores how international NGOs are navigating these rapid changes that challenge their role and legitimacy, values, and overall purpose. The writers see a crisis for NGOs as they are pulled further from those they claim to work with; they also explore alternative ways of conceptualizing development, and of bringing about improvements for the most marginalized and increasingly 'unheard' women. This book is essential reading for development practitioners and those working on women's rights, as well as NGO staff , researchers, and students of development studies.

Yemen has faced continuing crises since 2010. The fighting and divisions have destroyed much of Yemen's physical, political and social infrastructure, undermining its tribal traditions and religious tolerance, and impoverishing the country. The outbreak of war in 2015 caused the world's worst humanitarian crisis. In this book, Yemeni and international experts assess what political arrangements are required to overcome fragmentation and discord in Yemen. They look to understand how people from all parts of the county can work together to build a new Yemen, one that will give a voice to its young population and provide a full role for women. The contributors argue that Yemen's major resource is its population, but that Yemenis need to be motivated and trained to give them the skills to rebuild the economy and to prepare for long-term challenges such as water shortages and climate change. The volume also discusses how the international community will need to absorb the lessons of the past to find better ways of creating the institutions, mechanisms and transparency with Yemenis that will enable the flow of vital assistance to where it is most needed. The book provides an up-to-date analysis to help governments and international agencies who will have to work with Yemen and its neighbours in the post conflict situation.

International Humanitarian NGOs and State Relations: Politics, Principles and Identity examines the often discordant relationship between states and international non-governmental organisations working in the humanitarian sector. INGOs aiming to provide assistance to populations suffering from the consequences of conflicts and other human-made disasters work in the midst of very politically sensitive local dynamics. The involvement of these non-political international actors can be seen as a threat to states that see civil war as a state of exception where it is the government's prerogative to act outside 'normal' legal or moral boundaries. Drawing on first-hand experience of humanitarian operations in contexts of civil war, this book explores how the relationship works in practice and how often clashing priorities can be mediated. Using case studies of civil conflicts in Sri Lanka, Darfur, Ethiopia and Chechnya, this practice-based book brings together key issues of politics, principles and identity to build a 'negotiation structure' for analysing and understanding the relationship. The book goes on to outline a research and policy development agenda for INGOs to better adapt politically to working with states. International Humanitarian NGOs and State Relations will be a key resource for professionals and policy makers working within international humanitarian and development operations, as well as for academics and students within humanitarian and development studies who want to understand the relationship between states and humanitarian and multi-mandate organisations.

The threats the world currently faces extend beyond traditional problems such as major power competition, interstate conflict, and nuclear proliferation. Non-traditional security challenges such as climate change, migration, and natural disasters surpass states' capacity to address them. These limitations have led to the proliferation of other actors-regional and international organizations, transnational networks, local and international nongovernmental organizations-that fill the gaps when states' responses are lacking and provide security in places where there is none. In this book, Mely Caballero-Anthony examines how non-traditional security challenges have changed state behavior and security practices in Southeast Asia and the wider East Asia region. Referencing the wide range of transborder security threats confronting Asia today, she analyzes how non-state actors are taking on the roles of "security governors," engaging with states, regional organizations, and institutional frameworks to address multifaceted problems. From controlling the spread of pandemics and transboundary pollution, to managing irregular migration and providing relief and assistance during humanitarian crises, Caballero-Anthony explains how and why non-state actors have become crucial across multiple levels-local, national, and regional-and how they are challenging regional norms and reshaping security governance. Combining theoretical discussions on securitization and governance with a detailed and policy-oriented analysis of important recent developments, Negotiating Governance on Non-Traditional Security in Southeast Asia and Beyond points us toward "state-plus" governance, where a multiplicity of actors form the building blocks for multilateral cooperative security processes to meet future global challenges.

This volume presents the first global history of human rights politics in the age of decolonization. The conflict between independence movements and colonial powers shaped the global human rights order that emerged after the Second World War. It was also critical to the genesis of contemporary human rights organizations and humanitarian movements. Anti-colonial forces mobilized human rights and other rights language in their campaigns for self-determination. In response, European empires harnessed the new international politics of human rights for their own ends, claiming that their rule, with its promise of 'development,' was the authentic vehicle for realizing them. Ranging from the postwar partitions and the wars of independence to Indigenous rights activism and post-colonial memory, this volume offers new insights into the history and legacies of human rights, self-determination, and empire to the present day.

Why do some development projects succeed where others fail? This book looks at some macro and some less known micro success stories and considers what enabled them to bring change in some of the world's most deprived communities. Using case studies from ten countries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Tiwari's innovative approach offers a multi-layered understanding of poverty which provides insights into causal, enabling and impeding factors. While a macro level analysis of development is a common feature of the current literature, there has been little attempt to develop a micro level understanding of development at the grassroots. Tiwari's work fills this important gap while drawing attention to the importance of engaging local actors at an individual, collective, and state level, demonstrating how achieving a "convergence" of goals among all actors is a crucial component to a development project's success. Looking beyond the case studies to consider how this unique "convergence framework" might be usefully applied to other contexts, the book has profound implications for how we view fragile states and conflict zones, and the ability of the international agencies to take effective action. A unique study based on extensive empirical research, Why Some Development Works will make essential reading for students and researchers studying international development across the social sciences, as well as humanitarian and development practitioners and policy makers.

International trade continues to be a focal point for political and social contestation. The extension of World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreements into new areas such as investment, services and intellectual property rights engendered massive conflict and rendered ongoing negotiations infinitely more technical and complex. A chorus of legitimacy concerns were raised by the extension of trade rules beyond barriers to trade at the border to national regulatory regimes in a host of ostensibly non-trade areas such as food safety, environment, human health and taxation. Meanwhile, the WTO's Doha Development Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations is trapped in seemingly endless deadlock. These developments are accompanied by the proliferation of progressive, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who are critical of the global trade agenda. They aim to elevate social, cultural and environmental concerns of entire communities over market-related concerns in the international trade system and to give a voice to poor and otherwise marginalized groups in trade policymaking processes.This book considers whether more open trade policymaking processes that include progressive NGOs lead to a stronger, more legitimate and qualitatively enhanced international trade system. The European Union (EU) stands out among major trading powers for its significant and dramatic response to new demands for access and participation. This book examines whether improvements in the political opportunity structure for progressive NGOs results in more legitimate external trade policymaking in the EU. Hannah argues that there is clear potential for NGOs to represent citizens' demands, constitute a basic form of popular representation and hold decision-makers accountable to a broader public, and in the past NGOs have been instrumental in providing education, raising awareness, and giving a voice to broader societal concerns about the social, environmental and health-related aspects of proposed trade deals. However, they have not been able to determine policy outcomes in this arena, regardless of whether they are deeply and formally integrated into the trade policymaking process or protesting on the margins.The book builds upon the insights of constructivism to advance an alternative account of the role of NGOs in the EU's trade policymaking process, suggesting that NGOs have succeeded only when their attempts to achieve more democratic, sustainable and equitable trade policies have conformed broadly to the dominant episteme. When they seek to overrule that episteme, they fail. These findings suggest that early optimism about the power of NGOs to influence international public policy was both premature and naive. This book will be of value to scholars and students with an interest in NGOs and international trade negotiations, as well as to policymakers, national trade negotiators, government departments and the trade policy community.

Negotiating Corruption demands that we think again about corruption in Africa. It problematises the framing of African corruption as a phenomenon that emerges from a clash between two sets of norms. Moreover, it highlights the colonial legacies of this frame, which situates African corruption within continually recurring debates about the political inclusion or banishment of 'others'. NGOs are characterised as intermediaries between the local and the international, and between the state and the population. In both of these roles they are understood to reform governance by bringing about changes in culture and instituting bureaucratic norms. They have, therefore, been seen as part of the apparatus of a global liberal governmentality. This book complicates this portrayal and highlights the ambiguous role of liberal governmentality through an exploration of the 'grey practices' of the NGOs studied. These practices are 'grey' as they do not fit the pattern of virtuous NGOs holding the state to account described in development policy, yet at the same time they ensure that the state produces the outcomes that a fully-functioning state ought to. This enacting of oppositional and antagonistic elements is further unpacked in conversation with Homi Bhabha's concepts of negotiation and hybridity. Negotiating Corruption draws attention to both the limitations of current explanations of corruption in Africa and the problematic way in which they are framed. The book's detailed engagement with understandings of corruption within policy and academic debates will make it a useful resource for undergraduate teaching. It will also be of keen interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students who engage with the issues of corruption, NGOs, civil society, African politics, governmentality, and hybridity.

This book explores the limits of NGO influence and the conditions that constrain NGOs when they participate in international negotiations Through an empirically rich study of the UN World Summits on the Information Society (WSIS) this book conceptualizes structural power mechanisms that shape global ICT governance and analyses the impact of NGOs on communication rights, intellectual property rights, financing, and Internet governance. The institutional framework of UN negotiations makes it easy for states to exclude NGOs from crucial meetings and to neglect their most relevant demands, in part explaining why NGOs had only limited influence on the policy outcomes of the WSIS in Geneva 2003 and Tunis 2005, although high numbers of NGOs participated. Using a critical perspective, Dany demonstrates that despite the far-reaching participation rights for civil society actors, structural power mechanisms continued to limit the influence of participating NGOs and this contradicts the widely held assumption that extensive NGO participation necessarily increases NGO influence on the policy outcomes. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, global governance, the United Nations, and global information and communication politics.

In Domesticating Democracy Susan Helen Ellison examines foreign-funded alternate dispute resolution (ADR) organizations that provide legal aid and conflict resolution to vulnerable citizens in El Alto, Bolivia. Advocates argue that these programs help residents cope with their interpersonal disputes and economic troubles while avoiding an overburdened legal system and cumbersome state bureaucracies. Ellison shows that ADR programs do more than that-they aim to change the ways Bolivians interact with the state and with global capitalism, making them into self-reliant citizens. ADR programs frequently encourage Bolivians to renounce confrontational expressions of discontent, turning away from courtrooms, physical violence, and street protest and coming to the negotiation table. Nevertheless, residents of El Alto find creative ways to take advantage of these micro-level resources while still seeking justice and a democratic system capable of redressing the structural violence and vulnerability that ADR fails to treat.

The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South provides the first detailed examination of the Universal Negro Improvement Association's rise, maturation, and eventual decline in the urban South between 1918 and 1942. It examines the ways in which Southern black workers fused locally-based traditions, ideologies, and strategies of resistance with the Pan-African agenda of the UNIA to create a dynamic and multifaceted movement. A testament to the multidimensionality of black political subjectivity, Southern Garveyites fashioned a politics reflective of their international, regional, and local attachments. Moving beyond the usual focus on New York and the charismatic personality of Marcus Garvey, this book situates black workers at the center of its analysis and aims to provide a much-needed grassroots perspective on the Garvey movement. More than simply providing a regional history of one of the most important Pan-African movements of the twentieth century, the Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South demonstrates the ways in which racial, class, and spatial dynamics resulted in complex, and at times, competing articulations of black nationalism.

After World War II, American organizations launched efforts to improve the lives of foreign children, from war orphans in Europe and Japan to impoverished youth in the developing world. Providing material aid, education, and emotional support, these programs had a deep humanitarian underpinning. But they were also political projects. Sara Fieldston's comprehensive account Raising the World shows that the influence of child welfare agencies around the globe contributed to the United States' expanding hegemony. These organizations filtered American power through the prism of familial love and shaped perceptions of the United States as the benevolent parent in a family of nations. The American Friends Service Committee, Foster Parents' Plan, and Christian Children's Fund, among others, sent experts abroad to build nursery schools and orphanages and to instruct parents in modern theories of child rearing and personality development. Back home, thousands of others "sponsored" overseas children by sending money and exchanging often-intimate letters. Although driven by sincere impulses and sometimes fostering durable friendships, such efforts doubled as a form of social engineering. Americans believed that child rearing could prevent the rise of future dictators, curb the appeal of communism, and facilitate economic development around the world. By the 1970s, child welfare agencies had to adjust to a new world in which American power was increasingly suspect. But even as volunteers reconsidered the project of reshaping foreign societies, a perceived universality of children's needs continued to justify intervention by Americans into young lives across the globe.

Seeking to understand why host states treat migrants and refugees inclusively, exclusively, or without any direct engagement, Kelsey P. Norman offers this original, comparative analysis of the politics of asylum seeking and migration in the Middle East and North Africa. While current classifications of migrant and refugee engagement in the Global South mistake the absence of formal policy and law for neglect, Reluctant Reception proposes the concept of 'strategic indifference', where states proclaim to be indifferent toward migrants and refugees, thereby inviting international organizations and local NGOs to step in and provide services on the state's behalf. Using the cases of Egypt, Morocco and Turkey to develop her theory of 'strategic indifference', Norman demonstrates how, by allowing migrants and refugees to integrate locally into large informal economies, and by allowing organizations to provide basic services, host countries receive international credibility while only exerting minimal state resources.

This book provides the first book-length, English-language account of the political ethics of large-scale, Western-based humanitarian INGOs, such as Oxfam, CARE, and Doctors Without Borders. These INGOs are often either celebrated as 'do-gooding machines' or maligned as incompetents 'on the road to hell'. In contrast, this book suggests the picture is more complicated. Drawing on political theory, philosophy, and ethics, along with original fieldwork, this book shows that while humanitarian INGOs are often perceived as non-governmental and apolitical, they are in fact sometimes somewhat governmental, highly political, and often 'second-best' actors. As a result, they face four central ethical predicaments: the problem of spattered hands, the quandary of the second-best, the cost-effectiveness conundrum, and the moral motivation trade-off. This book considers what it would look like for INGOs to navigate these predicaments in ways that are as consistent as possible with democratic, egalitarian, humanitarian and justice-based norms. It argues that humanitarian INGOs must regularly make deep moral compromises. In choosing which compromises to make, they should focus primarily on their overall consequences, as opposed to their intentions or the intrinsic value of their activities. But they should interpret consequences expansively, and not limit themselves to those that are amenable to precise cost-benefit analysis. The book concludes by explaining the implications of its 'map' of humanitarian INGO political ethics for individual donors to INGOs, and for how we all should conceive of INGOs' role in addressing pressing global problems.

This book deals with two major issues: how Indonesian NGOs survived under Suharto's authoritarian rule; and how NGOs contributed to the promotion of democracy in the post-Suharto era. If NGOs are to change from 'development' to 'movement' in democratic post-Suharto Indonesia, they must adjust not only their management and working style, but also their very ideology. This comprehensive study will be an important book for scholars interested in Asian studies, Indonesian politics and development studies.

Anthropological field studies of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in their unique cultural and political contexts. Cultures of Doing Good: Anthropologists and NGOs serves as a foundational text to advance a growing subfield of social science inquiry: the anthropology of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Thorough introductory chapters provide a short history of NGO anthropology, address how the study of NGOs contributes to anthropology more broadly, and examine ways that anthropological studies of NGOs expand research agendas spawned by other disciplines. In addition, the theoretical concepts and debates that have anchored the analysis of NGOs since they entered scholarly discourse after World War II are explained. The wide-ranging volume is organized into thematic parts: "Changing Landscapes of Power," "Doing Good Work," and "Methodological Challenges of NGO Anthropology." Each part is introduced by an original, reflective essay that contextualizes and links the themes of each chapter to broader bodies of research and to theoretical and methodological debates. A concluding chapter synthesizes how current lines of inquiry consolidate and advance the first generation of anthropological NGO studies, highlighting new and promising directions in this field. In contrast to studies about surveys of NGOs that cover a single issue or region, this book offers a survey of NGO dynamics in varied cultural and political settings. The chapters herein cover NGO life in Tanzania, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Peru, the United States, and India. The diverse institutional worlds and networks include feminist activism, international aid donors, USAID democracy experts, Romani housing activism, academic gender studies, volunteer tourism, Jewish philanthropy, Islamic faith-based development, child welfare, women's legal arbitration, and environmental conservation. The collection explores issues such as normative democratic civic engagement, elitism and professionalization, the governance of feminist advocacy, disciplining religion, the politics of philanthropic neutrality, NGO tourism and consumption, blurred boundaries between anthropologists as researchers and activists, and barriers to producing critical NGO ethnographies.

It has become commonplace to observe the growing pervasiveness and impact of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). And yet the three central approaches in International Relations (IR) theory, Liberalism, Realism and Constructivism, overlook or ignore the importance of NGOs, both theoretically and politically. Offering a timely reappraisal of NGOs, and a parallel reappraisal of theory in IR-the academic discipline entrusted with revealing and explaining world politics, this book uses practice theory, global governance, and new institutionalism to theorize NGO accountability and analyze the history of NGOs. This study uses evidence from empirical data from Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia and from studies that range across the issue-areas of peacebuilding, ethnic reconciliation, and labor rights to show IR theory has often prejudged and misread the agency of NGOs. Drawing together a group of leading international relations theorists, this book explores the frontiers of new research on the role of such forces in world politics and is required reading for students, NGO activists, and policy-makers.

When do international non-governmental organizations like Oxfam or Human Rights Watch actually work? "Help or Harm: The Human Security Effects of International NGOs" answers this question by offering the first comprehensive framework for understanding the effects of the international non-governmental organizations working in the area of human security. Unlike much of the previous literature on INGOs within international relations, its theoretical focus includes both advocacy INGOs--such as Amnesty International or Greenpeace, whose predominant mission is getting a targeted actor to adopt a policy or behavior in line with the position of the INGO--and service INGOs--such as CARE or Oxfam, which focus mainly on goods provision.
The book rigorously and logically assesses how INGOs with heterogeneous underlying motivations interact with those other actors that are critical for advocacy and service provision. This theoretical framework is tested quantitatively on a sample of over 100 countries that have exhibited imperfect human security situations since the end of the Cold War. These case-study vignettes serve as "reality checks" to the game-theoretic logic and empirical findings of the book.
Amanda Murdie finds that INGOs can have powerful effects on human rights and development outcomes--although the effect of these organizations is not monolithic: differences in organizational characteristics (which reflect underlying motivations, issue-focus, and state peculiarities) condition when and where this vibrant and growing force of INGOs will be effective contributors to human security outcomes.

Analysing the relationship between civil society and the state, this book lays bare the assumptions informing peacebuilding practices and demonstrates through empirical research how such practices have led to new dynamics of conflict. The drive to establish a sustainable liberal peace largely escapes critical examination. When such attention is paid to peacebuilding practices, scholars tend to concentrate either on the military components of the mission or on the liberal economic reforms. This means that the roles of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the impact of attempting to nurture Northern forms of civil society is often overlooked. Focusing on the case of Cambodia, this book seeks to examine the assumptions underlying peacebuilding policies in order to highlight the reliance on a particular, linear reading of European / North American history. The author argues that such policies, in fostering a particular form of civil society, have affected patterns of conflict; dictating when and where politics can occur and who is empowered to participate in such practices. Drawing on interviews with NGO representatives and government representatives, this volume will assert that while the expansion of civil society may resolve some sources of conflict, its introduction has also created new dynamics of contestation. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, development studies, S.E. Asian politics, and IR in general.

The idea that international development aid needs to be better managed and coordinated gained currency in the early 1990s. The increasing emphasis on management has resulted in the present vogue of 'managing for development results' as one of the central tenets in the discourse on international aid. But how appropriate are these ideas, tools, and techniques for non-governmental development organizations (NGOs), and how much does geographic context matter? Examining the current debate on aid effectiveness and the role of NGOs in contributing to it, this book highlights the critical importance of understanding how the global and the local interact to increase aid efficacy and develop more culturally astute ways of managing NGOs. With a focus on NGOs active in sub-Saharan Africa as case studies, author Frederik Claeye demonstrates that NGOs are not mere passive recipients of management knowledge and practices emanating from the global governance structure of international aid, but actively engage with these ideas and practices to translate and rework them through a local cultural lens. This process results in the emergence of unique hybrid management systems that combine the pressure to become more business-like with the mission to satisfy the demands of the communities they serve.

Through a global and interdisciplinary lens, this book discusses, analyzes and summarizes the novel conservation approach of rewilding. The volume introduces key rewilding definitions and initiatives, highlighting their similarities and differences. It reviews matches and mismatches between the current state of ecological knowledge and the stated aims of rewilding projects, and discusses the role of human action in rewilding initiatives. Collating current scholarship, the book also considers the merits and dangers of rewilding approaches, as well as the economic and socio-political realities of using rewilding as a conservation tool. Its interdisciplinary nature will appeal to a broad range of readers, from primary ecologists and conservation biologists to land managers, policy makers and conservation practitioners in NGOs and government departments. Written for a scientifically literate readership of academics, researchers, students, and managers, the book also acts as a key resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses.

Why do international peacebuilding organizations sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, even within the same country? Bridging the gaps between the peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and global governance scholarship, this book argues that international peacebuilding organizations repeatedly fail because they are accountable to global actors, not to local institutions or people. International peacebuilding organizations can succeed only when country-based staff bypass existing accountability structures and empower local stakeholders to hold their global organizations accountable for achieving local-level peacebuilding outcomes. In other words, the innovative, if seemingly wayward, actions of individual country-office staff are necessary to improve peacebuilding performance. Using in-depth studies of organizations operating in Burundi over a fifteen-year period, combined with fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nepal, South Sudan, and Sudan, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, African studies, and peace and conflict studies, as well as policymakers.