Indigenizing “Civil Society” in Serbia: What Local Fundraising Reveals about Class and Trust (published version) (original) (raw)

Indigenizing “Civil Society” in Serbia: What Local Fundraising Reveals about Class and Trust

This is a pre-copy-edit version of my article to appear in Focaal - Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology issue 71 (Spring 2015). This article reconsiders established anthropological knowledge about postsocialist “civil society” through an analysis of recent efforts of Serbian NGOs to reduce their dependence on foreign donors and develop “local fundraising” from individuals and businesses. These initiatives had to address widespread suspicion toward NGOs, which confirms the earlier findings about their donor-driven origins and the class divide between them and the surrounding society. Nevertheless, the article shows that the fundraising activists strove to overcome suspicion and indigenize civil society. While anthropologists tended to portray NGO workers as a transnationalized elite, they are more adequately described as a middle-class fraction currently subject to a process of precarization. The article also shows how the NGO workers’ strategies to overcome suspicion, drawing variously on the global models of rational philanthropy, populist modes of self-presentation or pre-existing ties to the new donors, obscured or reduced the relevance of the class divide.

Civil-society Building, ‘Advanced Liberal’ Governmentality and the State in Serbia

The democratisation of governance in postsocialist Eastern Europe has been associated with civil- society building through international development initiatives. Anthropologists criticised it as ‘NGO-isation’ and building of a ‘project society’. This paper deals with latest stages of civil- society building in Serbia, typified by the development of ‘public advocacy’ and ‘local fundraising’. In my anthropological work-in-progress, I study such programs of the Balkan Community Initiatives Fund, a Belgrade re-granting foundation, and its grantee organizations in Serbia. These initiatives introduce ‘advanced liberal’ governmentality to Serbia which constructs relationships of civil society and ‘political society’ in a depoliticised manner consistent with the assumptions of good governance. Taking my cues from the polity approach, governmentality theory and anthropology of the state and postsocialism, I show how civil society interacts with the state in practice when being ‘developed’ in a context shaped by socialist and ethnonationalist governmentalities.

Habits of the Heart: Grassroots " Revitalization " and State Transformation in Serbia

Cultures of Doing Good: Anthropologists and NGOs, edited by Amanda Lashaw, Christian Vannier, and Steven Sampson, 2017

Since the mid-90s the concept of Civil Society appears more and more often as a global axiom in development discourse and policies dealing with transition and reconciliation in post-communist and post-conflict countries. This chapter will offer some anthropological insights of a USAID-funded “Democracy promotion” program, implemented in Serbia from 2001 to 2007. The aid-intervention called “Community Revitalization through Democratic Action” was promising a rupture of what was thought to be a “communist culture of dependency” through the promotion of civic engagement at the grassroots level, i.e through creating and “empowering” dozens of local NGOs. First, I set to describe and understand the doings and outcomes of this project through analyzing the multilevel power relations built around it, the various meanings, strategies and conflicts wedded around the normative discourse of ‘participation’. Second, I argue that this civil-society program had very little to do with “bringing back the people” but was instead targeting the re-structuring and re-scaling of state structures, with very diverse outcomes

Nongovernmental Organizations: Anthropological and Historical Aspects

International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2015

This article reviews the brief history of the NGO, including its relation to development, neoliberalism, the United Nations, and mutual aid organizations. NGOs gather and render actionable forms of knowledge from diverse locations, at the interface of financial infrastructures and fields of organizational power. Like ethnography, NGOs render local forms of embodied knowledge explicit, quantifiable, and commensurate with knowledge in other locations of the globe. This has made them a popular if problematic location for fieldwork. As a flexible socio-technology, the NGO form interpolates global flows of knowledge, power, and finance.

The Mystery of Civil Society and NGOs in the 21st Century (2005)

The Mysteries of Civil Society and NGOs in the 21st Century , 2005

The author, an experienced scholar, activist and writer on governance, leadership and civil society, provides in this book, an expose on the nature and character of the NGO world today and of non-profit entities operating in the third zone interfacing the State and business; asserting that while global revolutions in information technologies, social systems and global political and economic realities have transformed business and the State, their impact on the civil society organisational sector can be said to be tsunarnic. This book is an expose into the moral corruption in the non-pmfit sector, into what the author calls the greatest threat to mankind in the 21° Century: the emerging eliticisation, depersonalization, demoralization and immoralization of civil society and the alienation of the IndivIdual. In very clear and unmistaken language, the author gives an insiders view to the NGO phenomenon, supported by a realistic paradigm and understanding of social praxis that is completely authentic and unexpected in a field that could be considered as emerging The author provides a fresh, original and authentic view of what non-govemmenta! organisations are, x-rays the non-governmental world or the Third Zone, and gives insight into the various manifestation of NGO phenomenon that exists today, availing us with the most extensive characterisation of NGO typologies by any social scientist.