“As movement towards an agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan gathers momentum, a multi-track approach needs to emerge in order to make any peace more sustainable,” writes Onnik James Krikorian for commonspace.eu. “Governments, local communities, and the non-governmental sector should be partners and not rivals.”
“We wanted civil society but got NGOs,” International Alert’s Caucasus Director, Marina Nagai, quoted an Eastern European activist as saying in 2018, perfectly summing up the dichotomy between the sphere and the public it is meant to serve and represent. A 2013 briefing paper, How to Finish a Revolution: Civil Society and Democracy in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, by Orysia Lutsevych, Deputy Director of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, went even further.
“Western-funded NGOs form an ‘NGO-cracy’, where professional leaders use access to domestic policy-makers and Western donors to influence public policies, yet they are disconnected from the public at large,” it read. “New civil voices use more mass mobilisation strategies and social media, and are visible in public spaces. They are more effective in influencing the state and political society than Western-funded NGOs.”
Given the controversy surrounding the recent attempt to introduce a “foreign agents bill” in Georgia, criticism of Western-funded NGOs carries with it some risks, and while some fulfil their stated aims and objectives, many others do not. The point was particularly true prior to the 2020 Karabakh war and has become even more acute afterwards with some simply not visible at all and others even opposed to the terms of a long-anticipated peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
[…]
The full article can be read here.
