Drawing from two ethnographic case studies, both from Haiti, this article argues that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as intermediaries, "glue" globalization in four ways. First, in their "gap filler" roles NGOs provide legitimacy to globalization, representing alternatives to states fragmented by neoliberalism. Second, NGOs, in the contemporary neoliberal aid regime, can undermine the governance capacity of states in the Global South, eroding the Keynesian social welfare state ethos and social contract that states are (or should be) responsible for service provision. Third, NGOs provide high-paying jobs to an educated middle class, reproducing inequalities inherent to and required by the contemporary neoliberal world system. Fourth, NGOs, as an ideologically dependent transnational middle class, constitute buffers between elites and impoverished masses and can present institutional barriers against local participation and priority setting. Drawing on recent anthropological scholarship that moves away from reifying NGOs and their professed ideologies, this article focuses on NGO practice.
The term “disaster capitalism,” launched in 2005 by activist journalist Naomi Klein, still has resonance within social movement circles. Yet its proliferation in media and social movements risks a confusion and weakening of the core concept and critiques. As anthropologists who value local communities' understanding of their own social world, how do we confront such a concept? What are our roles, both in clarifying and understanding the concept? More importantly, what is and should be our praxis, our responses to stemming the worst abuses of disaster capitalism? This chapter presents a sketch of a definition and model for disaster capitalism, followed by examples from ethnographic work on the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2010 British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico to illustrate the phenomenon of disaster capitalism in practice. We follow this with discussions of the limitations of the disaster capitalism concept and the roles of anthropologists in confronting the issue.
The category "NGO" (nongovernmental organization) is notoriously hard to fix. The term NGO-which defines these organizations in terms of what they are not-masks great diversity and assumes an unproblematic boundary. The use of the term persists, in no small part because several different types of actors involved in a range of fields depend on what we call the "productive instability" inherent to the NGO category. As a discipline, given our history and methodology, anthropology and anthropologists are uniquely poised to grapple with the ideas and practices associated with the inherently unstable category of NGO. Rather than attempting to fix the category or contest the boundaries implied by it, anthropologists are instead beginning to interrogate the meanings behind the contestations themselves.Rather than attempt precise classification or bemoan the uncertainty, we contend that the NGO category is "productively unstable." We argue that productive work lies ahead in charting similarities and differences within NGOs across aid and activism. This task mirrors an inherent messiness for both NGOs and anthropologists as we grapple with dilemmas of engagement. Such a critically engaged anthropology of NGOs also stands poised to offer useful guidance to the discipline as it struggles over "relevance" in this new century.
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