NGOs and the State: Clash or Class? Circulating Elites of “Good Governance” in Serbia

Abstract

In 1990, James N. Rosenau (1990), a leading figure of international relations studies, announced that we are now entering an epoch of worldwide turbulence. The fragmentary consequences of economic globalization and new technologies have come to undermine state authority and sovereignty over territory and people. Rosenau argues that the long-established state-centric world has given place to an autonomous multicentered one, where nonstate actors, both from below and above, have gained a protagonist role in world politics. Within this trend of globalization studies and among these new “players,” particular attention is paid to NGOs. Indeed, in many parts of the world, the late 1980s and early 1990s have witnessed a boom of NGOs, a sheer growth in their number, scale, and inf luence. This phenomenon, now referred to as the “global associational revolution,” was matched by an increasing literature recognizing NGOs as a new social actor in the arena of global governance.

* I would like to thank Mark Schuller for setting up the panel “NGOs in an age of neoliberal (non) governmentality” at the American Anthropological Association conference in 2009 where this paper was first presented. I am deeply grateful to Elizabeth Mertz and the review committee of POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review for I have enormously benefited from their comments and remarks on an earlier version of this article.