Gender Dictionary: traveling concepts and local usages in Lebanon

قاموس الجندر: مفاهيم متنقّلة واستعمالاتها المحلية في لبنان

The term has been used to refer critically to the proliferation of non-governmental organizations, especially in developing countries and at the encouragement of large donor organizations. Features of NGOization in non-governmental organizations are: donor dependency, accountability to donors instead of beneficiaries, single-issue focus, emphasis on technical expertise, and moving away from grassroots organizing and mobilization thereby leading to depoliticization and support of the “anti-politics machine” of development(1).

In the 1990s, scholars writing on democratization associated NGOs with institutional decentralization; which refers to shifting social economic responsibilities away from a state’s authority (center)(2). Thus, establishing and funding NGOs was viewed as one method with much capacity for rapid social intervention and high accountability to citizens. In this sense, the multiplication of NGOs in developing countries was seen by the “northern” funders as a primary condition for the flourishing of civil society, particularly in postsocialist countries(3) but also in postcolonial and modern authoritarian states – including the Arab states. Since then, critics of Northern/Western development policies have argued that NGOs are simply the favored institutional forms of neoliberalism, mainly because they helped ease the state’s withdrawal from social provision by providing minimal social services, and thus contained dissent and radicalization(4).

The term NGOization emerged specifically from Latin American and Indian experiences with development politics and neoliberal economic imperialism. Author and political activist Arundhati Roy, who is a key critic of development politics, has named NGOs an “indicator species” of neoliberalism, provocatively arguing that “the greater the devastation caused by neoliberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs”(5). Research on Palestine(6) and Nicaragua has shown that NGOs have weakened GROs (grassroots organizations), despite the latter having significant social bases and a history of consistent mobilization(7). In the Lebanese context, NGOization is intimately linked with post-war neoliberal and sectarian politics, where sometimes the newly founded NGOs are co-opted by sectarian state politics rather than challenging them(8).

Women’s organizations have been particularly susceptible to NGOization or at least have been the focus of most of the critique directed at the phenomenon. Islah Jad has noted that in the case of Palestine, the singling out of women as a target group might undermine collectivities built around national independence struggles(9).

In Lebanon, the increased NGOization of women’s movements has had mixed results, but a clear professionalization trend can be observed(10). In addition, the quick multiplication of sexuality rights NGOs over the past decade demonstrates a preference for institutionalized professionalized approach and not community grassroots organizing, in a context where such organising attempts has had quite ephemeral lifespan at least since the late nineties. While efforts at community organizing from the bottom do exist, as several feminist and queer underground collectives continue to self-organize, observers tend to identify a certain tendency to follow global donor trends. These can be reflected sometimes in the adoption of a specific cause (the nevertheless crucial issue of migrant domestic workers for example, which can be argued has come at the expense of neglecting issues of other women workers locally) or in the choice of preferred structure (whether hierarchical, deliberately “non-hierarchical”, horizontal collective, or cooperative, etc) which can be argued is adopted through a process of negotiating on-ground experiences with power as well as with various globalizing trends.

Recent scholarship tends to add nuance to the dichotomy between “NGO” and “social movement” arguing that the former “refers to status” and the latter to “a process” highlighting that the cleavage makes sense for the activists themselves(11) which is also observable in the lebanese context. Leading researchers who were formerly very critical of NGOization are encouraging a more ambivalent reevaluation of the work done by non-governmental organizations, especially those focusing on women(12). They claim that the work of NGOs is not always completely NGOized. Rather, women’s NGOs always performed a hybrid function, as both feminist movement activists and providers of civil society technical expertise. Groundbreaking academic Sonia Alvarez claims that in the South American region, many women’s NGOs have been important producers and disseminators of feminist knowledge and contributed to the incorporation of at least some feminist ideas in development discourses(13). This reevaluation is important to consider in Beirut’s movements and in the Lebanese context at large.

When considering active women’s rights groups in Beirut and their interaction with local communities, one can observe a reliance on the “mediatization” of particular issues such as domestic violence campaigns run by KAFA which then function to mobilize local communities(14). While such an approach serves to mainstream very urgent questions of violence against women, it directs their energy and funding toward changes in the law or ideology (see for example Kafa’s campaign against men buying sex(15)), while sometimes also falling into a discourse of victimhood that limits conceptualizations of women as agents and survivors.

In general, and as explained above, principles such as “gender mainstreaming” and “LGBT rights” are strongly associated with transnational NGO politics and donor priorities, and often lead to ineffective and largely problematic adaptations. Yet, and despite of criticism of women’s, gender and sexuality rights’ groups such as KAFA, Abaad, and Helem and their often contradictory politics; these groups have been able to insert feminist ideas and anti-homophobic attitudes in mainstream discourses through the aforementioned legal efforts or media campaigns.