Civil Society and Global Poverty

Clive Gabay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136262883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) is world's largest civil society movement fighting against poverty and inequality, incorporating over 100 affiliated country-level coalitions. It has become a significant global actor and its annual days of mobilisation now attract over 175 million people around the world.

This book seeks to explore GCAP's power and its embodiment of emancipatory change. It develops a framework that assesses its external power as an actor by exploring how power works in it, and the relationship between the two. Gabay demonstrates that GCAP, and actors like it, may transcend some of the obstructions they face in navigating and proposing alternatives to dominant codes and practices of neo-liberal globalisation. Thematically, the book explores GCAP's constitutive powers along three axes: hegemony, inclusion and legitimacy. It draws on a wide range of social and political theory, including Liberalism, Anarchism and postcolonial theory and featuring case studies on Malawi and India.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, international development, global governance, social movements and civil society.

1 Introduction

In the more than 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, something has been happening to progressive non-state actors and networks. They have expanded and proliferated; they have been suggestive of the unification of diverse peoples across national and regional boundaries in common cause; they have claimed recognition of their campaigns in multilateral reforms and international treaties on everything from the regulation of landmines to the deregulation of the internet. They have, some argue, prefigured equitable and emancipatory alternatives to neo-liberal and market-driven globalization. Their power has grown with the explosion of cheaper communications technologies and the availability of 24-hour news in many parts of the world. Globalization has stretched and intensified the social relations that enable these non-state actors to hold states and international organizations accountable from every corner of the world. However, continuing and growing socio-economic disparities call into question these actors' effectiveness, whilst public disagreements over aims and strategies call into question the degree to which such actors represent coherent positions on the impacts of globalization and nco-liberalism, as well as the position of marginalized groups in constituting these positions. Many commentators appear to have taken the appearance and proliferation of these non-stale actors as good in and of itself, without interrogating the internal dynamics that constitute them.

This book addresses these dynamics, in relation to a specific actor, the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP), in the belief that due to GCAP's size and scope it can provide us with important insights into actors and networks similar to it. This is because GCAP is by many measures an extremely significant actor on the world stage. It maintains a presence in 115 countries; it claims to have mobilised 2 per cent of the world's population on one day in 2008,¹ a figure that continues to grow every year; and it was the organizational umbrella

Box 1.1 What is GCAP?

GCAP is ‘the world's largest civil society movement calling for an end to poverty and inequality’ (www.whitcband.org). GCAP is constituted by 115 national-level coalitions of International NGOs (where they have a base in a particular country), country-specific NGOs, faith-based organizations, social movements, trade unions and parliamentarians. These national coalitions are supported and coordinated to varying degrees by regional secretariats. The secretariats and coalitions work under broad programmatic agendas agreed to at a bi-annual global assembly, attended by members of national coalitions. In between global assemblies, an elected Global Council (supported by a global secretariat) takes decisions on issues as they arise.

GCAP's main aim is to hold national governments and international agencies to account over their commitments under the Millennium Development Goals, as well as a range of agendas including climate and trade justice (GCAP, 2007a). To this end GCAP organizes, via its national coalitions, mobilizations around major international summits, as well as the Stand Up against Poverty events that take place on the International Day for the Eradication of World Poverty in October every year. In 2008, GCAP claims that over 116 million people ‘stood up’ against poverty around the world (GCAP, 2008a).

behind the 2005 UK Make Poverty History campaign/US One Campaign. Further details on GCAP are provided in Box 1.1, but for now it is important to state the importance of interrogating an actor like GCAP.

Whether it is because actors like GCAP are assumed a priori to be progressive, to transcend dominant neoliberal and hegemonic power (see Keane, 2001; Kaldor, 2003; Falk, 2005) or because the emergence of the World and regional social forums are assumed to have given voice to groups previously marginalized from more traditional NGO campaigns (see Della Porta, 2005; Reitan, 2007). issues of power are often overlooked in analyses of actors and networks like GCAP. This book represents an attempt to bring power back in, asking how these actors and networks engage with governmental and/or hegemonic power; exploring the ways in which they are constituted by hegemonic forces and discourses and/or challenge and transform them; investigating how the demands of these actors and networks are articulated; and assessing the ways in which they seek to legitimate themselves, and whether this is a process which makes them more or less observable as distinctly global actors.

The book therefore makes several key contributions:

• The identification of a form of ‘monitory power’, inherently ambiguous, which characterizes the relationships between actors and networks like GCAP and governmental and neo-liheral hegemonic formations. Where many have either celebrated or dismissed the transformational potential of actors and networks like GCAP, this book argues that the process of engaging with governmental and neo-liberal hegemonic formations in order to hold them to account and transform them presupposes a mode of action that can be called monitory. However, this form of monitory power is unavoidably connective and relational, and thus monitory power flows both ways. Just as actors and networks like GCAP may expand or transform the discourses and practices of governmental and neo-liheral hegemonic formations, so those same formations may ‘monitor back’., in other words partially or completely subjectify actors and networks like GCAP in neo-liberal rationalities.

• The Millennium Development Goals are widely heralded for the potential they contain to lift unprecedented numbers of people out of poverty. Even where they have been subject to critique this has largely emerged as a polemic response to the neo-liberal rationality that infuses them. This book explores empirically how the MDGs ‘act’ to both order and provoke civil society articulations and imaginations of poverty and social justice.

• Cosmopolitanism has become increasingly critiqued as a construct of Western colonial and neo-imperial power, even when embodied through supposedly ‘progressive’ actors and campaigns.² Whilst the perspective of this book largely shares in this critique, it also finds that the cosmopolitan ethic is not simply limited to Western, colonial agents (despite the assertions of many of its critics: see Mouffe, 2005; Douzinas, 2007) but can be rearticulated by postcolonial imaginaries as a way of asserting a productive agency that transcends the imagination of the postcolonial subject/victim.

• Lastly, but perhaps most significantly is GCAP itself. Self-proclaimed as the largest civil society movement in the world (statistically a likely claim), GCAP is a vastly under-studied phenomenon. This is a network that can mobilize over 150 million people on one day. which sits at the table with UN Secretary General Ban-Ki-Moon and which receives millions of dollars in grants from the Gates Foundation. In short, GCAP is a significant political and sociological actor, which we know next to nothing about. This book is an attempt to start scratching the surface.

Something is happening here … conceptual clarity

Several scholars have provided what appear to be analytical frameworks for understanding actors and networks like GCAP. Why then, will this book not make use of them? Isn't GCAP an ‘alter-globalisation movement’ (Featherstone, 2003; Sassen, 2007; Reitan, 2008), part of what others call ‘global civil society’ (Keane, 2001; Kaldor, 2003), the ‘global justice movement’ (Cohen and Rai, 2000; Rootes and Saunders, 2007), ‘movement of movements’ (Della Porta, 2005; Newman, 2007), or the ‘anti-capitalist movement’ (Gilbert, 2008)? Is GCAP not a ‘transnational advocacy network’ (Keck and Sikkink, 1998)? Whilst all of these terms are suggestive of some aspect or other of GCAP's normativities and agencies, all of them involve simultaneously excluding equally important aspects. So for instance, as we will see in the coming chapters, it is very difficult to describe GCAP purely in terms of being ‘alter’-globalization, or ‘anti’-capitalist when as well as challenging the logics inherent in neoliberal and hegemonic discourses it simultaneously embodies them. Similarly, when we already know that concepts like ‘global justice’ can be as divisive as they are uniting amongst actors such as GCAP (see Yanacopulos, 2009), how much analytical purchase do we get when deploying the terms ‘global justice movement’, or ‘movement of movements’, which both suggest a certain degree of uniformity over aims at least, if not means? Lastly, whilst GCAP advocates (and thus might be called a transnational advocacy network [Keck and Sikkink, 1998]), this is not all it does. As we will see, GCAP's core agenda is mass mobilization, whilst to call it a transnational actor suggests it is embedded across a variety of nation-states. Despite the 115 national coalitions that constitute it, we will see that this too is a questionable claim.

These are the reasons why this book will talk of ‘actors and networks like GCAP’. It is not a matter of conceptual laziness, but rather a recognition that ‘othering is always implied in making present’ (Law, 2003: 7), and that in the spirit of exploring as full a range as possible of GCAP's normativities and agencies we should resist the academic urge of trying to label GCAP as something, when doing so could have the reverse effect of displacing its specificity.

Further clarity is however required over some of the other language deployed through this book. Referring to actors like GCAP as networks carries specific connotations- The proliferation of actors like GCAP over the past 20 years relies on them either being networks, or networked. In other words, they are both produced by networks of social relations, not necessarily all progressive and emancipatory, and belong to more ontologically verifiable networks of organisations and actors with whom they interact on a regular basis. Given the uneven nature of these networks it is important to bear in mind that this book will not be relying on a ‘network of networks’ imaginary, deployed by amongst others Castells (1999a; 2000) and Della Porta (2005). This imaginary arguably flattens social relations (Routledge, 2003a: 345) by imagining that these processes uniformly replace a space of different places with spaces of place-dissipating and unfixing grass-rooted flows (Castells 1999b). In the context of this study, this imaginary is also slightly tautological; whilst accepting that social reality is networked (unevenly), it does not necessarily reveal very much about the flows of power within networks to talk of a ‘network of networks’. Instead the book deploys networks as a set of (uneven and exclusionary) inter-organizational, individual-organizational and interpersonal relationships (Diani, 1992: 109) that constitute actors like GCAP, adding to this though the ‘external’ relationships which also constitute the forms of knowledge these actors possess. These latter relationships include those with governmental and other powerful hegemonic³ actors and their discourses. Furthermore, networks will not be taken to imply a uniformity of membership type or affect. Actors like GCAP invoke and deploy a number of subjects, sites, tactics, strategies and characteristics. These intersect with each other to create context-specific one-off campaigns, united coalitions and loose sub-networks.

Lastly, it is important to frame the manner in which neo-liberalism will be referred to throughout the book. This is because before we understand how GCAP is constituted by, or represents a counter or transcendent social force to neo-liberalism, we must understand what we mean by that term. What are the forces GCAP is opposed to? What are neo-liberal logics? Indeed, it is largely how neo-liberal globalization is defined that informs the approaches made by scholars to where resistance should be located, and thus informs how we judge the effectiveness of actors and networks like GCAP. For some, resistance is highly localized, either as a result of the individualizing and alienating effects of neo-liberal globalization (where neo-liberalism itself is the ‘global’ process in question) (Jones, 2005; Harvey, 2005), or because neo-liberalism itself is constituted by the various contexts in which it is embedded and is thus only productive of site-specific domina tions and resistances (Rose, 1996; Larner, 2003). On the other hand, there are those who claim that resistance to neo-liberal globalization is itself global, again, either as a result of a perspective on neo-liberal globalization, which posits it as homogeneous in its effects (Kingsnorth, 2003; Reitan, 2007). or because of a normative belief in the agendas and homogeneity of the movements and campaigns they see around them {Keane, 2001; Kaldor, 2003; Falk, 2005). This book sits largely in the governmentality literature that explains neo-liberalism as produced by the contexts in which it is embedded (Rose, 1996; Lamer, 2003), although with an acknowledgement that such contexts can be patterned across spatial contexts (Brenner, Peck and Theodore, 2010). This patterning means that whilst we may see neo-liberalism as sets of policies adopted by states, it is more accurate to think of neo-liberalism as a governmental set of logics, which sometimes works through the state, but also around and above it.

This approach to neo-liberalism explains how the oppositionality embodied by GCAP is in fact unstable and inconsistent, depending on how GCAP materializes in various sites. As we will see, similar processes of neo-liberalization lead to very different responses in the various sites where GCAP has a presence, dependent on how this presence is embodied and practiced. This uneven materialization is both a product of what might be taken as differential neo-liberal rationalities in various sites, but is also produced by what Brenner, Peck and Theodore note is the constitutive differential rationality, or ‘family resemblances’ (2010: 203) inherent to the project of neo-liberalism itself.

Conceptualising GCAP

The many terms that have been developed to frame actors and networks like GCAP provide a rich set of conceptual tools with which to analyze the kinds of activism and protest that have grown around the world in the post-Cold War period in the pursuit of socioeconomic justice. Many of these frameworks are also explicitly normative, in as much as they emerge from and coalesce around distinctive sets of assumptions about the agency of actors and networks like GCAP. It is this normativity however that simultaneously limits the fullness with which any of these referents can be used to understand the powers, potentialities and agencies of actors and networks like GCAP.

One significant normative position that has been developed to understand actors and networks like GCAP can be referred to as ‘liberal cosmopolitanism’. liberal cosmopolitans tend to be over-celebratory of the potentials and powers of such actors and networks. This is because they engage with them from a distinctly liberal epistemology of their agency (See Table 1.1), positing them as autonomous, deliberative, democratic and pre-figurative of a post-Westphalian, citizen-led democratic order. The framework of analysis that liberal cosmopolitans provide therefore excludes a variety of ways of evaluating the agency of actors and networks like GCAP. Liberal cosmopolitans posit a diffusion of power away from the state and hegemonic formations to non-state actors, but fail to provide an analysis of how neo-litaeral hegemonic power has become increasingly diffuse, and thus may constrain actors and networks like GCAP, rather than simply providing transcendent political opportunities. Linked to this, the liberal cosmopolitan framework is unable to provide a contextualized understanding of the legitimacy and representivity of actors and networks like GCAP, and the degree to which they do, rather can be presumed to, provide spaces of deliberation and alternatives to neo-liberal globalization to be enacted. This is especially the case given the degree to which they may be penetrated by diffuse governmental and neo-liberal hegemonic formations. These critiques will be developed further in subsequent chapters.

Another important set of scholars who have sought to understand the agency (both actual and potential) of actors and networks like GCAP, are what might be called ‘radical alter-globalizalionists’. This set of thinkers draw on a range of structural and post-structural theories to provide a potential framework for understanding such actors and networks, and the degree to which they provide alternatives to dominant neo-liberal forms of globalization and hegemony. Whilst radical alter-globalizationists are more convincing than liberal cosmopolitans in accounting for actors and networks like GCAP, it remains the case that the normative commitments of radical alter-globalizationists establish binaries between counter-hegemonic⁴ and post-hegemonic⁵ renditions of the conditions in which such actors and networks operate, and of the strategies they should pursue (See Table 1.2). This again closes down understandings of such actors and networks that might resonate between and/or transcend these positions (for example, the degree to which they might work both inside and outside governmental and neoliberal hegemonic formations). Adopting a radical alter-globalizationist approach therefore only allows an imaginary that views one or the other of its binaries as being authentically radical.

Table 1.1 What's so liberal about the liberal cosmopolitans? Four key components6

Post Westphalianism

Kaldor's claim that ‘global civil society’ represents a new site of democratic representation in an age of globalization (2005: 107) is a decidedly institutionalist perspective, sharing ground with Falk who sees a strengthened and redefined United Nations, driven by ‘globalization from below’ as the guarantor of global democracy (1999: 133). It is the belief in and the re-siting of the social contract to some form of global system of gov...