“Profoundly Ungrateful”: The Paradoxes of Thatcherism in Northern Ireland

Abstract

In the 1980s, the Thatcher governments increased funding for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Northern Ireland. This was partly a consequence of neoliberal policies that subcontracted public services to private bodies; as a result, NGOs became more firmly incorporated into the welfare state. However, increased entanglements of NGOs and state did not create passive state subjects. Instead, NGO activity remained rooted in local communities, animated by a common ethic of welfare as entitlement and changing nationalist and loyalist orientations to the state. When the government attempted to redirect NGO funding, cross‐community opposition emerged, despite long‐standing political polarization between nationalists and loyalists. This article describes how NGOs were driven by a local ethic and how their alliance successfully framed state subsidy as social justice. This example supports a broader argument that NGO practices are not neatly determined by a logic of global, universal neoliberalism but are profoundly shaped by local ethical regimes.

Controversies, Authority, and the Limits of Participation: Chicago's 49th Ward

“…For it is the citizens' interiorization of expert knowledge that is viewed as enabling the formulation of their singular perspective on the case" (2005,222). Like other ethnographic accounts of supposedly monolithic processes, we here highlighted messiness, ambivalence, and unpredictability (Curtis 2010;Vannier 2010).…”

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“…Poder-se-ia argumentar que o aumento do envolvimento neoliberal de ONG e do Estado por meio da subcontratação de serviços públicos a ONG cria prestadores de serviço passivos. No entanto, pesquisas noutros campos indicam que as ações das ONG nem sempre são determinadas por lógicas neoliberais e, por exemplo, podem ser moldadas por contextos históricos particulares e regimes éticos locais, seguindo as próprias agendas das ONG (ver, por exemplo, Curtis, 2010;Mosse & Lewis, 2005). Para entender melhor o potencial e as limitações das ONG no campo de combate ao tráfico é necessário antes de tudo seguir o convite de Wacquant (2009Wacquant ( , 2012 para considerar o neoliberalismo também como um discurso político, ao invés de simplesmente um projeto económico caracterizado, entre outros, pela mudança do estado de bem-estar para o estado carcerário e pelo surgimento de novas instituições de governo, como as ONG.…”

Engagements with a Productively Unstable Category: Anthropologists and Nongovernmental Organizations

“…Work on NGOs can be found within political anthropology, anthropology of development, public policy, humanitarian action, and organizational anthropology. In 2010, a second special issue of Political and Legal Anthropology Review on NGOs usefully opened up possible new theoretical directions (e.g., Alvaré 2010;Curtis 2010;Timmer 2010;Vannier 2010). Unlike the first, this collection did not confine itself to a single theme.…”