Feyzi Ismail

NGOs, Social Movements and the Neoliberal State: Incorporation, Reinvention, Critique

As the global financial crisis turns a decade old, economic and political polarisation has intensified. The nature of neoliberalism as a mode of accumulation that penetrates virtually all aspects of economic, political and social life has meant that the global financial crisis is, of course, not limited to the economy. It has come to be accompanied by full-scale political and social crises in both the Global North and South (Cahill and Konings, 2017; Mirowski, 2014), and a crisis of neoliberalism itself (Saad-Filho, 2011). Despite the intellectual vacuity of neoliberalism as a system capable of explaining the world, and its declining legitimacy the world over, the neoliberals themselves appear to have no alternative to neoliberalism, except authoritarianism. The question is whether the managers of the system are capable of containing the crisis – or otherwise allowing the emergence of even more reactionary, xenophobic forces to assume power – or whether the crisis will be resolved through mass opposition to the neoliberal state. A progressive opposition will include the range of social movements, trade unions and political parties, and the building of alternative institutions, throwing neoliberalism into further crisis. Within this frame, what makes NGOs distinct is their ambivalence: the fact that they are, on the one hand, a ‘favoured institutional form’ (Kamat, 2013: ix) of the neoliberal state and, on the other, capable of building alliances against neoliberalism, particularly in times of polarisation and crisis (Beinin, 2014; Dauvergne and LeBaron, 2014). In a global context where NGOs are subject to further subsumption as ideological weapons of the state and ‘material complicity with capital’ (Choudry and Kapoor, 2013: 14), and yet where there is growing class conflict and an increasing rejection of the status quo, we cannot assume their political affinities and affiliations; instead we must consider whether and how exactly they engage in oppositional politics and under what conditions. The neoliberal venture of the past four decades has been devastatingly successful in reinforcing the transfer of wealth and power from public to private, from poor to rich and from labour to capital. In the process, this phase of capitalism has brought forth deepening financialisation and

Polar opposites? NGOs, left parties and the fight for social change in Nepal

In the early 1990s, when NGOs were rising to prominence as an ostensible force for social change in Nepal, the Maoists were also beginning to organise, and denounced NGOs as agents of imperialism. The Maoists came to prominence by fighting a People’s War launched in 1996, with the intention of improving life for the poor peasant and working-class majority. But after a decade-long struggle, the Maoists became incorporated into the parliamentary system. While Nepal’s first democratic revolution in 1990 met formal, popular political demands, which were consolidated in a subsequent revolution in 2006 overthrowing the monarchy and bringing the People’s War to an end, there was little socio-economic progress for the vast majority. The argument advanced in this article is that this lack of progress relied on the interplay of two phenomena: an anti-Maoist alliance consisting of the international community, the domestic ruling elite and NGOs, and a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of the Maoists’ political theory.

Extended Book Review: No is where it startsKleinNaomiNo Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics, London: Allen Lane, 2017; 288 pp.: ISBN 0241320887, £12.99pb

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New Nepal: The Fault Lines

cultural studies, students and academics studying China and Asian studies, law, film, music and fashion studies, business and management will all find something of interest and use in this delightful book. Further, this book is highly recommended to anyone who wishes to begin to understand some of the most significant transformations in law, business, art and the digital world taking place all around us, via Montgomery’s scrutiny of three ‘creative industries’ in China. She is truly an interdisciplinary scholar who is capable of putting together a complex jigsaw puzzle in a most imaginative and informative manner. More than that, she reminds us that we need to move further and quicker academically from disciplinary to problemsolving research, from specialised solipsism to collaborative co-ordination and from national isolation to international networks if we are to begin to comprehend the global metamorphosis of the twenty-first century.