10. Reforming Resistance: Neoliberalism and the Co-option of Civil Society Organisations in Palestine Sibille Merz
This article explores the effects of the neoliberal development paradigm on the restructuring of social formations through the external funding and promotion of civil society groups, especially non-governmental organisations (NGOs). It uses the case study of the increasing presence of NGOs in Palestine,1 more precisely in the West Bank towns of Ramallah and al-Bireh. Based on fieldwork, it argues that neoliberal rationality aims at transforming societies and subjectivities around the notion of ‘enterprise’ and weakens the collective national resistance movement. The subject of the international aid regime as well as the role of nongovernmental organisations and especially their often depoliticising and de-democratising effects has been researched and criticised by various scholars in the past. Nonetheless, little has been said about the role of NGOs in an explicitly neoliberal development project that aims at the transformation of social relations, general conduct and subjectivities. In a neoliberal rationality, civil society is not - or not only - a philosophical concept and by no means a neutral space between the state and the
This article is based upon a longer article by Sibille Merz: ‘“Missionaries of the new era”: neoliberalism and NGOs in Palestine’, Race & Class, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 50-66.