SOSTENIMIENTO CON BULONES SOSTENIMIENTO CON BULONES

As a mainstay in the field of transitional justice fold, NGOs have been consistently involved in practices designed to support and produce mechanisms of transitional justice in post-conflict settings. Though not often the subject of transitional justice scholarship, NGOs quite often ‘make vital contributions to transitional justice processes.’ (Backer, 2003, p. 297) Eric Brahm (2007, p. 62) has suggested that NGOs ‘have often played important roles in promoting and supporting transitional justice experiments around the world.’ Indeed, Brahm goes as far as to argue that, for each context, the relative success of any transitional justice mechanism, ‘often reflects the relative strength of human rights groups and organized survivors’ groups in pressing the new government to act.’ This being the case, NGOs are a useful site of exploration because of the importance of their role in the period before transitional mechanisms are operational.

[116]

Their use value in this respect is not limited to their role in pressing for transitional justice but also extends to the relationship between this function and their role as agents of civil society with a clear responsibility to the members of transitional societies. As Sending and Neumann (2006, p. 658) have shown NGOs ‘convey and mobilize the preferences and concerns of individuals and communities.’ It is not simply that NGOs pressure governments into adopting transitional mechanisms, but that they perform this function as part of their remit to represent and convey the interests of different constituencies. If the sacrificial violence of transitional justice is ‘governed’ by power, then the ways in which NGOs might mediate between transitional societies and transitional justice mechanisms are insightful. In particular, their relationship with transitional subjects, provides a key insight into the ways in which practices of power are crucial to the deployment of transitional justice mechanisms.

First, however, it is important to complicate the notion that NGOs simply mobilise the interests and preferences of their ‘constituents’. This way of expressing their function is in danger of skirting over the relations of power involved in their activities. Indeed, it is important to address this problem by properly taking into account the emerging governmental role that NGOs have taken in the emerging networks of global governance. Following some of the discussion in chapter 1, I want to suggest that NGOs involved in transitional justice engender relations of power that are more complex than the simply conveyance of interests. Indeed, as this analysis will show, ‘these organisations’ modes of operations are […] relations of power that are integral to the practices of governing.’ (ibid.) On this front, it is important to note that many NGO practices reflect a context in which neoliberal rationalities have begun to transform the purpose of civil society itself. Such developments are worth drawing attention to and will serve to enrich the chapter’s later discussions.

[117]

To understand the neoliberal transformation of civil society, it is first necessary to briefly return to Foucault’s analysis of classical liberalism. As Foucault (2010, p. 295) demonstrates, civil society emerges with an important function in regards to liberal government’s objective of facilitating individual interest. This new subject of interest demands new technologies to ensure freedom: ‘the art of governing must be given a field of reference, a new reality on which it will be exercised […] this new field of reference is civil society.’ (ibid.) Civil society is thus constituted as a new plain of action, a space in which individual freedom can take place. It is, in other words, that which facilitates individual interest whilst enabling it to remain bounded within a space that correlates to government and governance.

A ‘technology of government,’ (ibid., p. 296) civil society was important because it provided spaces in which individuals (predominantly bourgeois white males) could pursue their interests. But while Foucault ascribes the need for civil society primarily as the means through which governments could facilitate the pursuance of economic interests through exchanges, civil society also constituted the space through which a broader range of interests could be articulated and pursued. In a history of NGOs, for example, Steve Charnovitz (1996, p. 191) places the emergence of NGOs at the late eighteenth century when ‘individuals with shared interests created issue oriented NGOs to influence policymaking.’ As such, the abolition movement, the peace movement and the trade union movement are all early examples of the pursuance of common interests through civil society (ibid., pp.194-196). Trade unions represent a particularly powerful example of the classically liberal conception of civil society: the coming together of workers in the pursuit of their common interest in improving wages and working conditions.

[118]

Following the neoliberal turn, however, NGOs have both proliferated and undergone significant changes. As Sangeeta Kamat (2004) has shown, the proliferation of NGOs has gone hand in hand with the collapse of ‘third worldism’ and the rise of the state- phobic approach of the new humanitarianism. Following this shift NGOs have come to replace the developmental state ‘as the honest broker of ‘the people’s interests’.’ (ibid, p. 158) Such transformations have led to larger role for NGOs in the practice of governance in the face of the globally ubiquitous, neoliberal re-articulation of the state. As I showed in chapter 1, Duffield (2007, p. 91) has called this the governmentalisation of NGOs. Indeed, pointing to a wealth of research conducted into NGOs working at the ‘grassroots’ level, Kamat (2004, p. 168) shows that NGOs have moved away from ‘programmes that involve structural analysis of power and inequality and instead adopt a technical managerial solution to social issues of poverty and oppression.’

Part of this shift is related to the utilisation of NGOs by governmental donors such as national governments and international financial institutions. The relationship between NGOs and the World Bank, for example, has been significant in the sense that it has significantly shifted the scope and practice of NGOs:

Donor monitoring and accounting systems require NGOs to

implement social and economic projects in an efficient and effective manner […] the new economic regime has led to a culture of

professionalization and depoliticization of NGOs.(ibid.)

As such, the professionalisation of NGOs has been driven by their subjection to neoliberal rationalities, which demand conformity to economic logics. Such transformations reflect the neoliberal drive to subjugate all human activity to the rationality of the market. As a result, NGO projects are provided financial investment according to their particular technical expertise, but also according to their economic

[119]

efficiency, and their ability to demonstrate ‘impact’ or ‘return on investment’. The political horizon for modern NGOs has become limited; organising for broad societal transformation does not readily fit the requirements of large governmental donors who are governed by, and govern others, according to the logic of economy.

Far from providing a ‘third sector’ conceived separately from the market, NGOs have moved to the forefront of a governmentality by experts. As a result, NGO projects often become technical programmes aimed at individual empowerment, rather than concerned with overtly political goals. As Kamat (ibid, p. 169) notes, this is a narrowly defined notion of entrepreneurial empowerment where individuals become ‘clients; who ‘are encouraged to be entrepreneurial and find solutions to their livelihood needs.’ This provides a kind of neoliberal articulation of social justice, no longer concerned with transforming the socio-economic structures in which individuals are placed, but with adapting individuals – whose issues, it must be assumed, are down to their maladaptation to the laws of the economy – according to the demands of the market (Dardot & Laval, 2013, p. 187).

It also demonstrates how the transformation of civil society has mirrored the shift from liberal to neoliberal theories of the market. Recalling chapter 1, classical liberal economics conceived of the market as a place of natural exchange; it delimited a space which the state would best stay clear of altogether. Problematising the notion of natural exchange, the neoliberals theorised the market as a technology of economic competition, which had to be constructed and regulated by states. Similarly, just as civil society in classical Liberalism denotes the ‘natural’ coming together of individual subjects of interest, neoliberal civil society relies on NGOs to construct, organise and manage, that is to govern, the interest of subjects, constrained, of course, by the logic of the market.

[120] NGOs II: Practices of Power

Taking this transformation of civil society as a basis for understanding the function of NGOs, the next task is to explore the practices of NGOs as they work in the field of transitional justice. In doing so, this chapter will add to a small body of literature on transitional justice NGOs by giving a detailed and granular analysis of the practices of NGOs engaged within the apparatus. In doing so, it will also move a step further, demonstrating precisely the power relations NGOs engender. The aim is not just to outline NGO practices but to see how, through these very practices, NGOS ‘conduct the conduct’ (Foucault, 1982; 2009) of post-conflict populations and direct them towards the goals of transitional justice, and, following that, the wider goals of neoliberalism.

For the sake of clarity, this section will chart a range of examples, which have been organised by a ‘typology’ of practice, rather than separated into the discrete practices of individual NGOs. As such, the practices of NGOs have been organised along two categories. The first set of practices, acting-in-the-name of the Victim, constitute the practices which NGOs use to advocate, shape and deliver transitional justice including advocacy and mechanism design. The second set of practices, producing the Victim, refer to the practices of ‘enmeshment’ between NGOs and the population, which aim to produce Victim subjectivities. These practices are obviously intertwined, and are certainly implicated in each other. Nevertheless, their separation is useful because they perform different roles in the critical framework I am relying on to examine them. While the former show more effectively the way in which power shapes transitional justice’s sacrificial violence, the latter has a strategic importance in terms of the relationship between transitional justice and neoliberalism. These arguments will be given a closer treatment towards the end of the chapter.

[121]

There are two precautions to note here. Firstly, my claim is not that responsibility for both of these functions rests solely upon NGOs. There are other actors12 _{with their}

own practices that also make significant contributions. Secondly, the NGO practices shown here are not exhaustive, nor do they claim to be definitive; other practices exist and some of them may even be quite unorthodox. Unorthodox practices would remain, however, entirely within the spirit of using ‘apparatus’ as a conceptual framework. After all, apparatuses are not only defined by a set of knowledges, that is, rules that govern their trajectory, but also by their interaction with material contexts, and, as such, subject to change through experiments and the emerging knowledges that a gleaned from them. The objective here, is to outline those practices that might be considered typical for the apparatus.