Help or Harm: The Human Security Effects of International NGOs - Hardcover

Murdie, Amanda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080479197X ISBN 13: 9780804791977

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amanda Murdie is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri.

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Help or Harm

The Human Security Effects of International NGOs

By Amanda Murdie

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9197-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
1. Introduction, 
2. INGOs in World Politics, 
3. Signaling Principles: INGOs, Domestic and International Communities, the State, and Human Security Effectiveness, 
4. INGOs and Human Security Service Outcomes: The Case of Development, 
5. INGOs and Human Security Advocacy Outcomes: The Case of Human Rights, 
6. INGOs—Possible Angels for Human Security?, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

THOUSANDS OF NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS (NGOS), most of them international in scope, have descended upon post-Taliban Afghanistan. The vast majority of these organizations are interested in improving human security, working to provide important health and development services, and promoting rights for repressed populations in the country. Despite their lofty goals, the people of Afghanistan are not impressed. According to a 2008 and 2009 survey by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, 54 percent of people in Afghanistan think NGOs within Afghanistan are corrupt. Organizations of all sizes and creed have been accused of taking funds from the international community and not using that money to help the people of Afghanistan. Some organizations have been found guilty of their accused crimes. Many Afghans have run on political platforms concerning the ineffectiveness of the NGO sector. As the joke goes, the NGO community in Afghanistan is so bad that "first there was Communism, then there was Talibanism, and now there is NGOism" (Mojumdar 2006; see also Cohen, Kupcu, and Khanna 2008).

Similar attitudes exist in Haiti, where, in the few years since the devastating 2010 earthquake and hurricane, the small state has quickly lived up to its designation of the "republic of NGOs." Per capita, more non-governmental organizations, most of them international in scope and focus, are in Haiti than anywhere else in the world. Many of these organizations are extremely well funded, working to provide basic sanitation, education, and health services to help rebuild Haiti. However, resentment is high: graffiti in Port-au-Prince labels organizations "thieves," "liars," and "corrupt," listing organizations by name and then saying in Haitian Creole that "all [are] complicit in the misery" (Valbrun 2012). Locals often see the organizations as simply interested in filling their own coffers, buying expensive flats and SUVs in Haiti, and then, according to Birrell (2012), "heading off early to the beaches for the weekend."

Despite these negative reviews, some international non-governmental organizations are making a difference in basic service provision, both within Afghanistan and Haiti and elsewhere. Examples of successful outputs are widespread; for example, the organization Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE) International reported that between late 2001 and 2003, one of its key projects in Afghanistan irrigated 2700 hectares of land, protected another 600 from flood erosion, and built 1600 cubic meters of water drawing points (CARE 2003).

Similarly, non-governmental organizations working with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Haiti have removed "2 million cubic meters of rubble" and are "providing safe drinking water to 1.2 million people daily" (Valbrun 2010).

In many locales, there are examples of successful project outputs by nongovernmental organizations, often with overall increases in service provision within the country. For example, vaccination drives by international nongovernmental organizations have been tremendously successful. Organizations have even managed to hold vaccination days for children in the midst of civil wars, with both sides calling a "cease-fire" in order to attend vaccination clinics in the countries of Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sierra Leone, among others (Hotez 2001). As a result of the work of these organizations, often in concert with donor agencies and private foundations, cases of polio, a debilitating and often deadly disease that targets children, have been reduced by a whopping 99 percent since 1988. India, once the "epicenter of the polio epidemic," was actually polio free in 2011 (Pruthi 2012). As another example, international non- governmental organizations in Timor in the early 2000s were tremendously successful in providing health services after conflict; organizations there also helped empower the public health sector during reconstruction starting in 2003 (Alonso and Brugha 2006). Similarly, in 2001, organizations in Bangladesh created a government partnership for tuberculosis treatment, increasing access to key medicines for infected populations (Ullah et al. 2006).

Beyond basic service provision for human security, the success of international non- governmental organizations on human rights promotion, as another key area of human security, also appears mixed, with tremendous success by some organizations in some countries on certain issues and catastrophic failure by other organizations in other situations. Another example is the work of organizations in North Africa. Even two decades before organizations aided in orchestrating some of the peaceful protests and advocacy associated with the Arab Spring of 2011, human rights international non-governmental organizations in Morocco had worked to limit government repression, including the use of torture during interrogations. The work of human rights organizations even led to the closure of the infamous Tazmamart secret prison (Granzer 1999). Organizations pressured regime leaders directly and brought powerful international actors, including United States and French foreign policy leaders, into the advocacy network, providing background reports on Moroccan practices and empowering diaspora groups to take up the cause.

At the same time international non-governmental organizations in Morocco were stopping government abuses of physical integrity rights, however, organizations were having very limited success at stopping the practice of female genital cutting in the whole North African region. This was an issue that many organizations thought they could quickly outlaw and eradicate. Governments had very little interest in the practice, roles of women in society were quickly expanding, and many international resources were devoted to the cause. To a large degree, all of this work by international non-governmental organizations was for naught: a huge cultural war was created by the international efforts, framing advocacy related to the eradication of female genital cutting as paternalistic and "postcolonial imperialism" (Boyle 2005, 1). The efforts even led some domestic advocates to wonder why the practice of genital cutting was being pushed for eradication by international non-governmental organizations from Western countries, where the use of breast implants, seen as another form of genital mutilation, was widespread (Wilson 2002; Lake 2012). International advocacy on the issue created a backlash: more adult women in Burkina Faso and Yemen had undergone genital cutting in 2005 than in 1998 (WHO 2010). Most of the survey data on the issue finds that women in the region generally support the practice, even after the highly publicized eradication campaign of the 1990s (Wagner 2011). Among Moroccans, where female genital cutting was not...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 080479197X
• ISBN 13: 9780804791977
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 303
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland