Civil-society Building, Liberal Subjects and the State in Serbia (original) (raw)

Abstract

The processes of democratisation of postsocialist governance have been associated with civil-society building through international development. Anthropologists criticised what they described as depoliticisation and 'NGO-isation' of civil society and called for grass-roots movements and flexible networks rather than formalised and donor-driven ‘project society’. This literature treats civil society organizations (CSOs), in the form promoted by mainstream liberal theory and development policies, as easily co-optable by formal governance institutions. Thus, the practice of 'public advocacy', one of the current development buzzwords in Serbia, seems rather paradoxical. Based on neoliberal mantras of 'decentralisation' and 'participation', CSOs are required to represent an opposition and corrective to the centralised and insufficiently democratic state, yet they are simultaneously made to approach it. However, I wary of assuming indiscriminately that CSOs are willing or even actively aspiring to get co-opted by donors and the state. Stemming in the 'anti-politics' tradition of dissent in communist Eastern Europe and present neoliberal and poststructuralist ideologies of civil society, many of these CSOs strive to become 'independent' from the state and big international donors. In Serbia, the anticipated departure of the latter instigates the nascent practice of 'fundraising from local sources', i.e. from ‘individuals and businesses in the community’, as one of the key ways of attaining the sought independence. In my anthropological work-in-progress, I study public-advocacy and fundraising initiatives of the Balkan Community Initiatives Fund (BCIF), a Belgrade re-granting foundation, and its grantee organizations in Serbia. I draw on participant observation of daily life at BCIF, trainings for the grantees and their projects implementation, and on interviews and textual data. Studying the discourse and practice of public advocacy enables a move beyond simple (civil) society/state binaries toward an analysis of the ways in which state and civil-society actors mobilize political-economic and political-cultural resources to form political alliances for the implementation of intersectoral governance processes. The performative 'cultural constitution' of the boundary between the state and civil society is a condition rather than contradiction of such alliances. It enables CSOs to define themselves and their role so that they can integrate the requirement of independence with the need to work with the state. Similarly, CSOs receive fundraising trainings and attempt to develop individual and corporate philanthropy in their communities in a quest to construct liberal subjects of the conscious philanthropist and the independent civil-society actor. Nevertheless, the autonomy of these subjects is integrative rather than fragmenting as the subjects are (to be) produced by participating in a self-regulating moral community – the democratic nation. I conclude by arguing that the interlinkages of public advocacy and local fundraising do represent a strong potential for bottom-up democratisation, but in Serbia they face the legacies of radically different socialist and authoritarian policies oriented to the construction of socialist and ethnonational subjects. Serbia’s current neoliberal preference, shaped by the ongoing IMF involvement, for austere fiscal rather than developmental policies poses further constraints for the democratic nation-building.

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