The New Conflict Managers: Peacebuilding NGOs and State Agendas

Abstract

The number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of all types, including international, domestic, development, human rights, has dramatically increased in the last decades. Of this overall trend, Lester Salamon exults: “a veritable associational revolution now seems underway at the global level that may constitute as significant a social and political development of the latter twentieth century as the rise of the nation state was of the nineteenth century.”¹ As this chapter will explore below, there are multiple explanations for this trend. Insofar as this growth of NGOs may be pegged to changes in the behavior of nation-states, one might argue that NGOs have taken on functions that states have failed at or are ill-suited to manage. Alternatively, it can be argued that states are purposefully, particularly through financing, encouraging NGOs to take on certain responsibilities when it is in the interest of those states not to become directly involved.