Authors
Catherine E Herrold, Katharina Obuch, Stefan Toepler, Vladimir Benevolenski
Description
Buoyed by the role of civil society in the downfall of the Soviet Bloc twenty-five years, international donors, public and private, embarked on new development strategies that focused heavily on democratization. Civil society came to be seen as a core ingredient of democratizations strategies in transition countries as much as in the developing world. Donors devoted significant resources to supporting Western NGOs and indigenous civil society organizations to foster participation and local civic engagement, empower communities and demand accountability from local governments.
In recent years, however, a veritable backlash against Western democratization efforts has begun to take place. Much of this backlash is directed against international NGOs and their local partners and is taking place in a broad range of countries all over the globe and in political regimes that range from authoritarian to “defective” or, in the …
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