NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects

Often conflated with social movements and other formations constituted by and representing the interests of the disempowered, NGOs require critical examination. Choudry and Kapoor have assembled an urgently timely and significant contribution in this regard and is a must-read for students and activists alike, especially in this moment of accelerating and deepening inequalities within and between countries. ― Robyn Rodriguez, associate professor, Asian American Studies, University of California Davis

While deploying context-specific approaches to theorizing NGOs, social movements, and their complex inter-relations, this insightful and provocative collection demonstrates that it is imperative to analyze NGOs’ complicity with capital and coloniality, especially in the current global crisis of neoliberalism. Perhaps most innovative is the argument – advanced by the editors and taken on squarely by richly detailed case studies from an impressive range of world regions – that NGOs are not external to state, market or society. Rather, in the early twenty-first century, they have come to constitute “one more institutional form through which class relations are being contested and reworked.” A most welcome addition to the critical literature on NGOization. ― Sonia E. Alvarez, Leonard J. Horwitz professor of Latin American politics and society, University of Massachusetts Amherst