Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices

Abstract

This review surveys current literature concerned with the growing numbers, changing functions, and intensifying networks of nongovernmental organizations which have had significant impacts upon globalization, international and national politics, and local lives. Studies of these changes illuminate understandings of translocal flows of ideas, knowledge, funding, and people; shed light on changing relationships among citizenry, associations, and the state; and encourage a reconsideration of connections between the personal and the political. Attention is given to the political implications of discourses about NGOs, the complex micropolitics of these associations, and the importance of situating them as evolving processes within complexes of competing and overlapping practices and discourses.