Why are some international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) more politically salient than others, and why are some NGOs better able to influence the norms of human rights? Internal Affairs shows how the organizational structures of human rights NGOs and their campaigns determine their influence on policy. Drawing on data from seven major international organizations the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Medecins sans Frontieres, Oxfam International, Anti-Slavery International, and the International League of Human Rights Wendy H. Wong demonstrates that NGOs that choose to centralize agenda-setting and decentralize the implementation of that agenda are more successful in gaining traction in international politics.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that the most successful NGOs are those that find the "right" cause or have the most resources, Wong shows that how NGOs make and implement decisions is critical to their effectiveness in influencing international norms about human rights. Building on the insights of network theory and organizational sociology, Wong traces how power works within NGOs and affects their external authority. The internal coherence of an organization, as reflected in its public statements and actions, goes a long way to assure its influence over the often tumultuous elements of the international human rights landscape. "

The voluntary sector is made up primarily of not-for-profit and non-governmental organizations that engage with social issues. Voices from the Voluntary Sector contains reasoned reflections by practitioners on some of the significant challenges faced by today's not-for-profit organizations in Canada. Broad in scope, these essays present a rich, multi-dimensional set of vignettes that as a whole express the vitality and humanity of the voluntary sector in Canada.

The contributors discuss organizational and managerial challenges, social entrepreneurship, and how to foster effective global movements. The essays include a reflection on the ways that young people can find the courage to become leaders, an exploration of the absence of First Nations peoples within voluntary sector organizations, and a consideration how parental incarceration affects the life prospects of children. Voices from the Voluntary Sector is a valuable resource that addresses a wide range of concerns related to the responsiveness, character, and leadership of third sector organizations.

This accessible book provides a concise introduction to the way in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) work. By bringing together a range of literature - including ideas from international relations and organizational analysis - Hudock is able to develop a new conceptual framework for understanding both the strengths and weaknesses of NGOs as they operate in the development field.

Healthy democracy depends on a strong and vibrant civil society. NGOs have a central role to play in this process, especially those which empower disadvantaged and under-represented groups. However, Hudock shows that over recent years, NGOs have become heavily dependent on development agencies and governments for their funding, jeopardizing their effectiveness. The book argues that we need a thorough organizational and political understanding of the way in which NGOs in the north and south work in order to comprehend fully both the opportunities they can offer and the serious constraints under which they operate. Using many examples and two case studies, Hudock highlights the difficulties faced by NGOs and outlines possible solutions for the future.

"NGOs and Civil Society" will be indispensable reading for all those studying the role of NGOs in development studies, international relations and the sociology of development, as well as for practitioners.

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's government encouraged substantial American investment in education and aid. It was argued that Turkey needed the technical skills and wealth offered by American education, and so a series of American schools was set up across the country to educate the Turkish youth. Here, Ali Erken, in the first study of its kind, argues that these organizations had a huge impact on political and economic thought in Turkey - acting as a form of `soft power' for US national interests throughout the 20th Century. Robert College, originally a missionary school founded by US benefactors, has been responsible for educating two Turkish Prime Ministers, writers such as Orhan Pamuk and a huge number of influential economists, politicians and journalists. The end result of these American philanthropic efforts, Erken argues, was a consensus in the 1970s that the country must `westernize'. This mindset, and the opposition viewpoint it engendered, has come to define political struggle in modern Turkey - torn between a capitalist `modern' West and an Islamic `Ottoman' East. The book also reveals how and why the Rockefeller and Ford foundations funneled large amounts of money into Turkey post-1945, and undertook activities in support of `Western' candidates in Turkey as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. This is an essential contribution to the history of US-Turkish relations, and the influence of the West in Turkish political thought.

World orders are increasingly contested. As international institutions have taken on ever more ambitious tasks, they have been challenged by rising powers dissatisfied with existing institutional inequalities, by non-governmental organizations worried about the direction of global governance, and even by some established powers no longer content to lead the institutions they themselves created. For the first time, this volume examines these sources of contestation under a common and systematic institutionalist framework. While the authority of institutions has deepened, at the same time it has fuelled contestation and resistance. In a series of rigorous and empirically revealing chapters, the authors of Contested World Orders examine systematically the demands of key actors in the contestation of international institutions. Ranging in scope from the World Trade Organization and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Regime to the Kimberley Process on conflict diamonds and the climate finance provisions of the UNFCCC, the chapters deploy a variety of methods to reveal just to what extent, and along which lines of conflict, rising powers and NGOs contest international institutions. Contested World Orders seeks answers to the key questions of our time: Exactly how deeply are international institutions contested? Which actors seek the most fundamental changes? Which aspects of international institutions have generated the most transnational conflicts? And what does this mean for the future of world order?

Since 1951 thousands of volunteers from all over Australia have worked in developing countries across the world. This is the story of the organisation that made this possible, the Overseas Service Bureau later known as Australian Volunteers International. From its origins as a community-based association expressing solidarity with people in newly independent countries, it grew into a significant organisation managing a suite of international development programs. The organisation's activist impulses and principles were evident as it responded to the critical international issues of the times. It supported opponents of apartheid in Southern Africa, worked in Cambodia when Australia had no diplomatic representation there and in Vietnam when Australian aid had been suspended, nurtured relationships with Indonesian NGOs during Suharto's reign, supported civil society across the Pacific Islands, and provided significant and timely support for East Timor's self-determination. This book explores the organisation's growth with increased government funding and the accompanying challenge of maintaining its own values and identity in an era when decolonisation presented increasingly complex demands.

This book presents a rigorous empirical study of various aspects of poverty alleviation in rural Bangladesh. The themes include the trend and structure of rural poverty and the role of microfinance in alleviating rural poverty through participation of the rural poor in NGOs and microfinance institutions (MFIs). It also includes different challenges of participation of rural poor women in NGO-MFIs. In probing those issues, this book employs a different approach of investigation. In comparison with other poverty studies, this book can claim a number of distinct features. First, this book probes the participation behavior of rural poor women who face different socioeconomic, cultural and psycho-attitudinal challenges to participate in NGO-MFIs which ultimately prevented the attainment of the prime objective of poverty alleviation in Bangladesh. In analyzing those issues, this book uses a social psychological theory named the theory of planned behavior (TPB) as a theoretical model upon which the research framework was grounded upon. Second, unlike other studies which are based on relatively small and unrepresentative samples, this book is based on a nationally representative large-scale survey. Third, even though it employs a cross-sectional survey, the study explored in this book attempts to infuse an element of dynamics by employing information on both current and initial condition of resources of households being defined as the resource-base a household had inherited at the time it was formed. This type of data-set helped analyze the dynamics of resource adequacy of the participants in NGO-MFIs which yielded key insights into the challenges of poverty alleviation. Fourth, a concern with the possible influence of microfinance in the economy runs as an intrinsic theme throughout the book. In addition to devoting a long chapter of emergence of NGO-MFIs in Bangladesh, the author analyzes the role of microfinance in its specific contexts in each subsequent chapter, for example, in shaping the trends in poverty, inequality, resource accumulation and in influencing participation of the rural poor in NGO-MFIs and in affecting the ability of the rural poor to be free from poverty and to cope with environmental shocks. Some remarks on possible prospects or recommendations are provided at the end of the book.

After World War II dozens of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) emerged on the global scene, committed to improving the lives of the world's most vulnerable people. Some focused on protecting human rights; some were dedicated to development, aimed at satisfying basic economic needs. Both approaches had distinctive methods, missions, and emphases. In the 1980s and 90s, however, the dividing line began to blur. In the first book to track the growing intersection and even overlap of human rights and development NGOs, Paul Nelson and Ellen Dorsey introduce a concept they call "new rights advocacy." New rights advocacy has at its core three main trends: the embrace of human rights-based approaches by influential development NGOs, the adoption of active economic and social rights agendas by major international human rights NGOs, and the surge of work on economic and social policy through a human rights lens by specialized human rights NGOs and social movement campaigns. Nelson and Dorsey draw on rich case studies of internationally well-known individual NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, CARE, ActionAid, and Save the Children, and employ perspectives from the fields of human rights, international relations, the sociology of social movements and of complex organizations, and development theory, in order to better understand the changes occurring within NGOs. In questioning current trends using new theoretical frameworks, this book breaks new ground in the evolution of human rights-development interaction. The way in which NGOs are reinventing themselves has great potential for success--or possibly failure--and profound implications for a world in which theenormous gap between the wealthiest and poorest poses a persistent challenge to both development and human rights.

Back to America is an ethnography of local activist groups within the Tea Party, one of the most important recent political movements to emerge in the United States and one that continues to influence American politics. Though often viewed as the brainchild of conservative billionaires and Fox News, the success of the Tea Party movement was as much, if not more, the result of everyday activists at the grassroots level. William H. Westermeyer traces how local Tea Party groups (LTPGs) create submerged spaces where participants fashion action-oriented collective and personal political identities forged in the context of cultural or figured worlds. These figured worlds allow people to establish meaningful links between their own lives and concerns, on the one hand, and the movement’s goals and narratives, on the other. Collectively, the production and circulation of the figured worlds within LTPGs provide the basis for subjectivities that often nurture political activism. Westermeyer reveals that LTPGs are vibrant and independent local organizations that, while constantly drawing on nationally disseminated cultural images and discourses, are far from simple agents of the larger organizations and the media. Back to America offers a welcome anthropological approach to this important social movement and to our understanding of grassroots political activism writ large.