Contesting the common sense around NGOs Against NGOs: A Critical Perspective on Civil Society, Management, and Development, SrinivasNidhi. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2022. pp. 343. INR 1299. ISBN: 9781108885843.
本书批判性地审视非政府组织在发展和管理意识形态中的角色，揭示其如何作为资本主义积累的工具，并替代社会运动，适合对公民社会、发展政治和批判管理研究感兴趣的读者。
In this provocatively titled book, Against NGOs, Srinivas brings together three fields of inquiry that are seldom interrogated together-development, management, and civil society.Srinivas locates these fields in their historicized moment, within changing regimes of accumulation, and cast against conceptualizations of expert power.The narrative arc across the book is that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have played a pivotal role as carriers of the development ideology and in legitimizing the doctrine of management.Management and development as ideologies have deeply intertwined trajectories across regimes of capitalist accumulation; they have a "periodized affinity."What implications, then, do these trajectories have for civil society?Srinivas picks up on Arundhati Roy's criticism of the NGO-ization of resistance as a point of departure for this book.In the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, 1 Roy (2016) underscored the intertwined role of NGOs, the neoliberal state, and corporations.Consider the transnational role of Rockefeller and Ford Foundations that functioned as instruments of the US state, even as the latter was toppling democratically elected governments in South America, Iran, and Indonesia.While NGOs become "the buffer between the sarkar [government] and the public (loc 334)," they are accountable to funders and not the people.Roy contends that NGOs-not as individual exceptional cases, but as a social category-defuse political anger and dole out aid in circumstances when people would otherwise mobilize to stake claims.In a similar indictment, Davis (2006) referred to NGOs as peddling "soft imperialism" as conduits for international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to "short-circuit" the state and work directly with the "grassroots."In effect, masquerading as emancipatory and compassionate, NGOs legitimize neoliberal capitalism's excesses and extractions.Srinivas concurs that the NGO-ization of resistance becomes problematic as it substitutes social movements and collective struggles with a technocratic realm that is a "shorthand for means-oriented, bureaucratic, dis-empowering forms of social behavior (p.14)."However, he departs from portraying NGOs in binaries as heroes/technocratic saviors and villains/managerial monsters in civil society.His contribution lies in historicizing NGOs, situating them within specific regimes of accumulation, and tracing their ascendance as ends in themselves alongside management as an ideology.This analytic move offers engrossing insights as we begin to see these strange bedfellows-development agents and managers-alter civil society's landscape, typically in favor of the powerful.Srinivas structures the book along regimes of capitalist accumulation that shift from liberal capitalism (1850s-1948) to state capitalism and financialization (1972-present).