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Interview with Sarah Mendelson*Interviewed by Stephanie Walker and Sean Costigan
Columbia International Affairs Online
September 27, 2002
SC: We thought we'd start out with a definition of civil society as it is so often used and yet rarely understood. Here's a definition: civil society may be broadly defined as all the natural and voluntary association in society to be distinguished from government and commerce. Does that definition conform to your understanding of civil society?
SM: Yes, I think it does conform. When we originally did this project, we had something like sixteen studies and we were looking at Western support for the development of political parties, the development of independent media, environmental and women's NGOs and efforts at reducing ethnic conflict. The divide is often whether or not you include political parties in the discussion of civil society or if people are only looking at the so-called "third sector," or NGOs. For the book we narrowed our focus and looked mainly at efforts to develop NGOs. But, broadly speaking, you're right, the understanding is that civil society is that space between government and private life, that third element. Commerce has an interesting relationship with civil society, and a lot of times people do consider commerce—voluntary associations of businesses, for example. Commerce definitely has a role to play. The divide is too large between what we usually think of as civil society groups and business, and that is something to explore. Civil society is larger than just NGOs, but NGOs play an important role in their development. Let's put it this way: when you're actually trying to talk about both building civil society and figuring out how civil society can be an agent for change, no one is good at defining what it is and what it isn't, but there is a working understanding of what we are all talking about.
SW: What do you think are the key ingredients for a sucessful NGO operation?
SM: Money. Energetic and entrepreneurial people. And by entrepreneurial I mean people who are open to ideas and to using ideas—people who are not worried by well, say, that's an American concept, or that's a Serbian concept. People who are looking to see how something worked and how it might be modified to work in a new circumstance.
I think a good sense of how people are thinking and talking about the issues, in whatever your are target is. I think a lot of NGOs are very poor at understanding how you use research to mobilize people. For example, NGOs are very used to talking to one another, but often times people working at NGOs don't really know how average people think about a certain issue. Or they don't know how elites think about a certain issue.
Different NGOs have different strategies. For example, Human Rights Watch, a big American human rights organization, their strategy is very focused on elite opinion, the New York Times, the Washington Post. They have a very good sense of how to interact with elites on certain issues. You don't need to target everybody, but you need to know who your target is and how your target thinks about things.
Information is also really what we're talking about, information and skills. It's not just having information, but it's what you do with the information. And then, of course, networks. NGOs by themselves can't do much. In my own work with Russian organizations, and taking into account the state of debate in the scholarly literature, it's been about the power of NGOs and transnational networks. There are NGOs, international organizations and then there are states. The role of states is incredibly important, and as we get more case studies together we realize just how important the role of powerful Western states are in advancing certain issues. For NGOs, it's very important to have good connections and relations. The networks are very important.
SW: The theme of context comes up so often in your book as a factor in the success of NGOs.
SM: The context matters, and this particularly true for NGOs working locally inside a place or inside a state and those working transnationally. If you are working exclusively transnationally and are trying to do things like promote the development of institutions in another environment, then the strategy that you use—and this is what we found over and over again in the case studies—really has to be driven by the context. You cannot go and and say "Human rights activists and political parties should be working together," that's meaningless to people in country X. Those kinds of strategies have to come from people on the ground.
SC: One of the conclusions of your study is that transnational networks have helped spread norms at the microlevel and yet macrolevel changes appear not to have occurred. Is this only a matter of time, or are there other factors involved?
SM: I don't think it's linear. It's not like today there's no macro-level change and tomorrow there will be. When we're talking about the macro-level change, again what we're talking about is the influence of these powerful liberal states. The question is, international assistance can have an impact, transnational networks can have an impact within certain activist communities, but then trying to effect change within a state among the elite, that is another issue.
What I saw happening, from these case studies and in other work that I'm doing, is that you should think of it in two different levels. The transnational stuff was having an impact within the activist communities because they had access to them. But to try and influence elites within Uzbekistan or Russia or the government of Belarus, their influences come from their counterparts in other states and if you expect to see the spread of democracy or norms favoring human rights, you look at what's the impact of Prime Minister Blair or President Bush. How does President Bush interact with Prime Minister Putin on issues having to do with human rights and democracy, for example. In that case, what we saw was language that undermined work that was being done at these lower levels. It's not just about Bush and Putin, it's also about Clinton and Putin and Yeltsin. Pick a country and pick anytime in last 5-6 years. What you saw was elections that were fraudulent, or you saw powerful leaders overlooking human rights abuses even though the leaders they met with were connected to those abuses. With the right hand, states were funding work that was trying to develop democratic institutions and spread democratic and human rights norms, and other the hand they weren't always calling into question violations. For me, I work on Russia, and the most egregious example is the lack of international response to gross human rights violations in the war in Chechnya. The European Community, the US and Canada have funded the development of democracy and the spread of democratic and human rights norms and we have done extremely little on Chechnya.
SW: You are especially critical of Russia in that NGOs have lent the appearance of democracy without its substance. Is Russia is a special case? If so, what lessons does it hold for other countries?
SM: We heard from the president of Kyrgyzstan on Monday and the first 15 minutes was all about democracy and human rights. He spoke to about 300 NGOs and 30 political parties. Leaders all over the world have learned how to talk about democracy and human rights. At the same time, they are busy undermining those very institutions, NGOs and political parties. So, Russia is not a special case in terms of the contrast between form and content. But because Russia is such an important regional player, I think it deserves particular attention. And because the US had and has a particularly intense relationship, both good and bad, with Russia, it deserves particular attention. But it's not by any means unique. There are certain parts of this dichotomy of form and content that are worse in Russia than in other cases, but in other ways it's better. For example, in Ukraine the development of a democratic opposition is in many ways stronger than it is in Russia. Ukraine is also a much smaller country, 50 million versus 140 million. In Russia, however, the impact of this war in Chechnya has been intense. In many ways Russia is ahead of various Central Asian states in the development of democracy and human rights. So, the dynamic that you see in Russia you see in other places. Because of Russia's position in the international system it deserves special attention.
SC: There seems to be a lot of tension between what Western NGOs may want, and what local actors see as important. Is there a solution to this divergence, or are one group's imperatives more important than the other?
SM: I think that this is a huge dynamic within assistance. This is a huge dynamic between donors and activists on the ground, and it's not just about assistance, it's true of foundations in research. Something becomes a fad and all of a sudden people are focused on a certain kind of research. During the Cold War, foundations hugely subsidized work on the Soviet Union. So we had a large number of scholars who worked on specific security aspects of the Soviet Union. We didn't focus very much on transnational terrorism or on Middle East, so the whole dynamic of donors asking for certain things and people following the money, per se, is not unusual. I think there needs to be a balance between what activists want and need and their ability to drive what work is done and what work is funded. It's important to be able to respond. I'm doing some work on anti-trafficking of women and girls, and often times activists don't necessarily know that this is a problem, even though we have lots of empirical evidence that it is a problem. For example, there may be a very small community working on the issue, but the larger human rights community may not know much about the issue.
There are ways in which outside forces, because of information that they have, can help draw attention. But it's got to be balanced. In terms of the cases in the book, we're really looking at very specific aspects of democracy promotion and there you really need to be sensitive to context. You can spend an awful lot of money that goes nowhere, based on a checklist that you have evolved in some Western capital. That's very unfortunate. But we're learning. In the year 2002, there are a lot of organizations, foundations and agencies that have learned lessons and have adapted.
SW: Some scholars have compared the proliferation of Western transnational networks to a new form of colonialism. How do you react to that assessment?
SM: I think there are two ways to answer that question. One is sort of a side step, but bear with me. The literature that looks at transnational networks, and secondarily they're looking at networks and the diffusion of norms, has very little information about how people actually think about these norms. The focus of the scholarship has been on the networks, but not on how people think about human rights or democratic norms. There haven't been large surveys done on how Ukrainians are thinking about human rights norms or how Uzbeks are thinking about the development of democratic institutions. While I wouldn't say this is a form of colonialism, I would say that the scholarship on networks is often times a little bit abstract and removed and it may be asserting, either for or against: a negative argument being this is a new form of colonialism, or a positive one that this is diffusing human rights or democratic norms.
Both of those need to be tested, though. Ultimately we need to have a lot more empirical evidence. A project that I've embarked on is trying to do just that by generating survey data, surveys on how people are thinking about these issues. The other thing is that networks are transnational—it's not just the British coming in and dominating. This is a cross-border phenomenon. This is a 21st century thing, not a 19th century one. Networks stand almost outside the interest of a specific state. There are networks of people in organizations, in both NGOs and government, that are trying to advance certain issues and causes. Are there differences, or people who are opposed to these networks? Absolutely. I think we have all, on some level, personally experienced this in the last year, right? But colonialism implies something else. First of all there's not that much money involved. The colonial model is one with huge amounts of money and personnel and time. The NGO model is much smaller.
SW: But the question is, do these NGOs sometimes do more harm than good?
SM: It's like talking about states. There are big states, small states, superpowers. There are failed states. It's difficult to talk in a universal way about NGOs. There are humanitarian organizations that sometimes do excellent work, there are organizations that do bad work, there are corporate organizations. We need to be more nuanced and that's part of the effort of the book. We're at the very early stages of looking at NGOs as a phenomenon.
SC: What are the implications of these case studies for the future of NGOs?
SM: What we try to do in the book is actually appeal both to scholars and also people who are in field. I've been told that some folks in the field have looked at the book and are interested in what's been written. Some people are going to like what they say and others aren't going to like what they see. Having worked in the field, it is often the case that you're working 18 hours a day and are underpaid and don't have enough time to prioritize or to find time to read. NGOs are constantly seeking funds and they have to evaluate what they are doing. There will be a time when looking at the power and limits of NGOs could be useful and helpful. In terms of the implications for organizations, I would hope that they would understand the book as both supportive of what they're doing, but also critical of things—lessons learned—there are some things that were done well, and others that weren't. I am distressed when I see organizations that continue to bring in people who have very little understanding or expertise in a region. People can do better. Organizations can do a lot better. If people don't take anything else away from the book, they should understand that having somebody who has worked in Chicago and dropping them in—pick any country—and saying go to it is very difficult. Maybe it made sense in 1989 when the Berlin Wall had just fallen, maybe it made sense in 1992 when the Soviet Union collapsed, but at this point there's a lot of expertise out there. There are a lot of people who know both about the development of institutions and something about the region. Hopefully organizations are getting further and further away from doing these kinds of crisis hires—who are we going to find to go? I still see it though.
SC, SW: Thank you for your time and insights.
SM: Thank you both.
Endnotes
Note *: Sarah E. Mendelson is a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic & International Studies Russia and Eurasia Program. She lives in Washington, DC and is the co-author, with John K. Glenn, of The Power of Limits and NGOs: A Critical Look at Building Democracy in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, published this fall by Columbia University Press. Back.