This article is an ethnographic study of the effects of micro-credit on gender relations in rural Bangladesh. Focusing on the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh and three other leading non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the country, I analyze the role of gender in the expansion of globalization and neoliberalism in Bangladesh. The Grameen Bank has become a global symbol of poor women’s empowerment and is celebrated for its 98 percent loan recovery. In this article, I examine some of the NGO tactics behind the loan recovery programs. In particular, I examine how Bangladeshi rural women’s honor and shame are instrumentally appropriated by micro-credit NGOs in the furtherance of their capitalist interests.

https://rug.nl/research/globalisation-studies-groningen/research/conferencesandseminars/conferences/eumicrofinconf2011/papers/7a.karim.pdf

Demystifying Micro-Credit The Grameen Bank, NGOs, and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh

Sonia Alvarez reconsiders what she had earlier labelled ‘the Latin American feminist NGO boom’ of the 1990s. She offers reflections on how and why, at least in that region of the world, we may be moving beyond it. Alvarez revisits the notion of NGO‐ization, then reviews the crucial ‘movement work’ performed by NGOs that was often obscured by that notion. She proposes that Latin American feminisms and other social movements may be moving away from the particular organizational forms and practices – actively promoted and officially sanctioned by national and global neo-liberalism – that characterized NGO‐ization in the past.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fdev.2009.23.pdf

Beyond NGO‐ization?: Reflections from Latin America

This article offers an explanation for the use of gender essentialisms in transnational efforts to advocate for the protection of war-affected civilians. I question why human rights advocates would rely upon such essentialisms, since they arguably undermine the moral logic of the civilian immunity norm on which their normative claims are based. This can be understood, I argue, as part of a strategic framing process in which pre-existing cultural ideas, filtered through an environment characterized by various political constraints, impact the rhetorical strategies available to advocates. In-depth interviews with civilian protection advocates reveal that many believe that warring parties, the global media, transnational constituencies and partners in the international women's network will all be more receptive to their message if it is couched in terms of protecting “women and children” specifically. Network actors believe that while this may undermine the protection of adult male civilians and while it may reproduce harmful gender stereotypes, these problems are outweighed by the gains in access to needy populations and the benefits of getting “civilians” on the international agenda. I conclude by considering the extent to which this cost/benefit analysis is being contested and reconsidered by some actors within the civilian protection network.

“Women, Children and Other Vulnerable Groups”: Gender, Strategic Frames and the Protection of Civilians as a Transnational Issue

Rural women's active support for the decade-long Maoist insurrection in Nepal has captured the attention of academics, military strategists, and the development industry. This essay considers two theories that have been proposed to account for this phenomenon. The "failed development" hypothesis suggests that popular discontent with the government is the result of uneven, incomplete, or poorly executed development efforts and recommends more and better aid as the route to peace. In contrast, the "conscientization" model proposes that, at least in some cases, women's politicization may be the unexpected result of successful development programs that aimed to "empower" women by raising their consciousness of gender and class-based oppression. Drawing on the testimonies of women who participated in such programs in Gorkha district-a Maoist stronghold where women are reported to have been especially active-I argue that both of these explanations reflect assumptions about social subjectivity that are critically out of synch with the realities of rural Nepal. Gorkhali women's support for the rebels embodies a powerful critique of neoliberal democracy and the Nepal state, but one that is based on morally-grounded ideas about social personhood in which self-realization is bound up in mutual obligation and entails personal sacrifice-not the culturally-disembedded valorizations of autonomy, agency, and choice that most models presume. Theorists of subaltern political consciousness-and of the relations between development and violence-must engage with the gendered moral economies of the people they aim to empower if they ultimately hope to promote sustainable peace. [Keywords: empowerment, development, gender, violence, political consciousness, resistance] "Humanity is a modernist figure; and this humanity has a generic face, a universal shape. Humanity's face has been the face of a man." -Donna Haraway, 1992 "If the question of female subaltern consciousness is a red herring, the question of subaltern consciousness as such must be judged a red herring as well. " -Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1988 "I am worried about my own country. In our country, nothing has happened besides murders and killings. Our country is our home. If the country is destroyed, our village is disturbed, and if the village is disturbed, our home is disturbed, and if our home is disturbed, then we're destroyed too." -Padam Kumari Gorkha On February 13, 1996, a homemade bomb exploded at the agricultural development bank in rural Gorkha district, Nepal.1 The blast damaged the building and its furniture; more importantly, the attack destroyed all records of the bank's agricultural loans. Within hours, near simultaneous attacks took place at police posts in Rolpa and Rukum districts, further west. Together, these assaults announced the commencement of a decade long armed Maoist revolt against the government of Nepal and what their instigators defined as 200 plus years of feudal exploitation of Nepal's peasantry, the beginning of the jana yuddha-or "People's War." The onset of the insurrection took most Nepalis by surprise.2 Initially dismissed by the political center as an aberrant phenomenon confined mainly to a few areas in the far Western region, the movement grew by leaps and bounds; less than six years later it had penetrated almost all of Nepal's 75 districts and by 2006,70% of the countryside was said to be under Maoist control. As the scale of the conflict has grown, so too did its casualties. By 2006, more than 13,000 people had been killed in connection with the uprising and state efforts to suppress it. Rape, kidnapping, and disappearances have become commonplace and both the Maoists and the State have been accused of human rights abuses. Schools, health posts, and development projects have been disrupted or forced to close all over the country, and infrastructure such as airstrips, bridges, and telephone lines have been destroyed. …

"Failed Development" and Rural Revolution in Nepal: Rethinking Subaltern Consciousness and Women's Empowerment

In May 1998 activists from crisis centers all over Russia gathered in Moscow for a conference to discuss the formalization of their thus-far loose network into a national association. The conference was a veritable gala. I was stunned to see almost all of my Moscow-based womens movement acquaintances as well as representative of the main international foundations and agencies (the Ford Foundation the Open Society Institute the American Bar Association the British Embassy Amnesty International). Everybody who was anybody in the field of womens community activism and development was there. At the conference the theme of universalism sounded loud. The first speakers--mostly repsentatives of international agencies--emphasized cross-cultural commonality. One of the first to the podium was a British woman a representative of an expatriate club and a longtime benefactor of antiviolence campaigns. As she put it "Violence against women is not a Russian problem but an international problem affecting women of all religious and national backgrounds. We are all vulnerable to violence from men; most of us in this room will have experienced violence at some stage in their lives." She offered words of encouragement to the new network--"my point is that we were where you are now" Her remarks were intended to bring the women in the room together. (excerpt)

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Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belonging: Defining Violence against Women in Russia

This article examines how women are represented by women's nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists and their foreign donors in postwar reconstruction initiatives in Bosnia–Herzegovina. I argue that dominant donor representations of women as peacemakers and natural agents of ethnic reconciliation present a paradox for the women they target. Women are charged with achieving the very political goals of ethnic reconciliation and refugee return, yet the essentialist constructions used to encourage women's peacemaking roles effectively marginalize them from formal political power. When local women activists use similar “affirmative” gender essentialisms, they risk closing off women's potential for influence in the formal (male) political sphere. However, I argue, given the moral and political climate of postwar Bosnia, in which politics is perceived as a corrupt, male sphere, this strategy allows women to gain moral authority and real, though indirect, power with which to achieve their often very political goals.

Women as agents of ethnic reconciliation? women's ngos and international intervention in postwar bosnia–herzegovina

© 2003 Elissa Helms All Rights Reserved The copyright for individual articles in both the print and online version of the Anthropology of East Europe Review is retained by the individual authors. They reserve all rights other than those stated here. Please contact the managing editor for details on contacting these authors. Permission is granted for reproducing these articles for scholarly and classroom use as long as only the cost of reproduction is charged to the students. Commercial reproduction of these articles requires the permission of the authors. Feminist scholars have shown that national discourses are commonly gendered (e.g., Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989; Gal 1994; McClintock 1993; Verdery 1994; Yuval-Davis 1997). But can gender discourses also be “nation-ed”? This paper demonstrates that such a dynamic takes place in the interplay between local women’s organizations and the western-dominated “international community” of donors and officials. Western donors are virtually the only sources of funding for the many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have sprung up in Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia) since the end of the 1992-5 war. While these donors claim to promote a diverse and healthy civil society, in practice they focus much more narrowly on NGOs that promote interethnic cooperation and reconciliation (Belloni 2001; Smillie 1996; Stubbs 1995; and see Hann and Dunn 1996; Wedel 2001). This underlies their ultimate goal: the establishment of a stable, multi-ethnic Bosnian state which ethnic nationalists, especially Croats and Serbs, in various ways resist. In this way, international intervention policies in many ways reinforce the “communitarian” logic of ethnic categorization (Bougarel 1996) even as they seek to dismantle it (Gagnon 2002).

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Elissa Helms

Papers

Women as agents of ethnic reconciliation? women's ngos and international intervention in postwar bosnia–herzegovina

The “Nation-ing” of Gender? Donor Policies, Islam, and Women’s NGOs in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina