IR and NGOs — A Simplistic Story?

Abstract

This chapter deconstructs IR’s understanding of non-state actors as too optimistic and theoretically under-complex. A normative bias towards actors of ‘global civil society’, ‘transnational civil society’ or ‘international civil society’ is a common feature of IR theoretical engagements with NGOs. In its most extreme, IR argues that NGOs tend to pluralise power and to problematise violence (Kaldor 2003: 8), that the society of non-state actors ‘encourages compromise and mutual respect’ (Keane 2003: 14), and that NGOs act as a ‘world consciousness’ (Kohout and Mayer-Tasch 2002). I will argue that these emancipatory understandings of non-state actors are the product of the absence of a rigid theorizing of the capitalist state and capitalist society.