Abstract
The question of where NGOs become active requires different answers depending on whether we talk about thematic areas, geographical scales, or physical places that can be located on maps. The Statistics Division of the United Nations (UNSD) looks at the first of these meanings by classifying NGOs according to their main thematic purpose such as “culture and recreation,” “education,” “health,” or “law, policy, and advocacy.” Social scientists including political geographers have contributed to our knowledge of how social actors are shifting their involvement from the local to the global and back again, while at the same time manipulating the meanings of these spatial markers. Others have explored the consequences for NGOs of being physically situated in places where they try to lobby power holders (national capitals and UN hubs) or deliver aid (war and disaster zones)—as opposed to the many placeless activities NGOs engage in, such as online information dissemination. This chapter discusses each of these distinct spaces in turn.
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Notes
David Gates, IBP hearings before Congress, 1967, quoted in Chunglin Kwa, “Representations of Nature Mediating between Ecology and Science Policy: The Case of the International Biological Programme,” Social Studies of Science 17 (1987): 423.
Barbara Ward and René Dubos, Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (London: Norton, 1972), 208.
Note that states can also be found both among the neutralizers and the politicizers. For example, during the landmark UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm 1972, a Swedish delegate coined the term “ecocide” as a polemical charge against environmental evildoers, while the head of the U.S. delegation insisted to remain “an environmentalist and not a politician.” See Wade Rowland, The Plot to Save the World: The Life and Times of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Co., 1973), 118.
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See Craig Warkentin, Reshaping World Politics: NGOs, the Internet, and Global Civil Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 32–33.
See, for example, Peter Pels, A Politics of Presence: Contacts between Missionaries and Waluguru in Late Colonial Tanganyika (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1999).
Dorothea Hilhorst, The Real World of NGOs: Discourses, Diversity and Development (London: Zed Books, 2003). As interface experts with sometimes-considerable local knowledge, NGOs have attracted both the interest of intelligence agencies and of international business companies looking for local buyers or suppliers. See, for example, DeMars, “Hazardous Partnership”;
and Sabine Trannin, Les ONG occidentales au Cambodge: La réalité derrière le mythe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), 232.
See also Volker Heins, “Democratic States, Aid Agencies, and World Society: What’s the Name of the Game?” Global Society 9, no. 4 (2005): 361–84.
Quoted in Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 127.
On the history of the idea that injured soldiers and other victims of war are “neutrals,” see Andrea Russo, “Ferdinando Palasciano et la neutralité des blesses de guerre,” in Préludes et pionniers: Les précurseurs de la Croix-Rouge, 1840–1860, ed. Roger Durand and Jacques Meurant (Geneva: Société Henry Dunant, 1991).
See Jean-Claude Favez, The Red Cross and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 94–99.
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See the typology of secular NGO traditions in Abby Stoddard, “Humanitarian NGOs: Challenges and Trends,” in Humanitarian Action and the “Global War on Terror”: A Review of Trends and Issues, ed. Joanna Macrae and Adele Harmer, HPG Report No. 14, July 2003.
See Sarah Kenyon Lischer, Dangerous Sanctuaries: Refugee Camps, Civil War, and the Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 146–49.
See Fiona Terry, The Paradox of Humanitarian Action: Condemned to Repeat? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 13.
Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks At America (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1942), 220.
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See Wallace J. Campbell, The History of CARE: A Personal Account (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1990).
Michael Novak, quoted in Scott Flipse, “The Latest Casualty of War: Catholic Relief Services, Humanitarianism, and the War in Vietnam, 1967–1968,” Peace & Change 27 (2002): 257.
See Alan Whaites, “Pursuing Partnership: World Vision and the Ideology of Development,” Development in Practice 9 (1999): 410–23.
Lawrence A. Pezzullo, “Catholic Relief Services in Ethiopia: A Case Study,” in The Moral Nation: Humanitarianism and U.S. Foreign Policy Today, ed. Bruce Nichols and Gil Loescher (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 225.
“Confusion des genres” is a typical formula used by ICRC intellectuals both in criticisms of other humanitarian organizations and in self-criticisms. See, for example, Jean-Francois Berger, The Humanitarian Diplomacy of the ICRC and the Conflict in Croatia, 1991–1992 (Geneva: ICRC, 1995), 22;
and Jean-Francois Fayet and Peter Huber, “La mission Wehrlin du CICR en Union soviétique (1920–1938),” International Review of the Red Cross 85, no. 846 (2003): 95–117.
Paul O’Brien, “Politicized Humanitarianism: A Response to Nicholas de Torrente,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 17 (2004): 31–39.
See Kenneth Anderson, “Humanitarian Inviolability in Crisis: The Meaning of Impartiality and Neutrality for U.N. and NGO Agencies Following the 2003–2004 Afghanistan and Iraq Conflicts,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 17 (2004): 41–74.
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© 2008 Volker Heins
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Heins, V. (2008). Where Do NGOs Seek Involvement?. In: Nongovernmental Organizations in International Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611269_5
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