Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Danny Sriskandarajah, head of Civicus, an global civil society alliance
Danny Sriskandarajah, head of Civicus, an global civil society alliance. Photograph: Sam Friedrich
Danny Sriskandarajah, head of Civicus, an global civil society alliance. Photograph: Sam Friedrich

Democracy campaigner: governments are scared of the participation revolution

This article is more than 6 years old

The global pushback from governments against civil society is ‘an emergency’, says the head of a worldwide network of NGOs

Danny Sriskandarajah is charged with the job of looking out for countries where governments are cracking down on NGOs or on grassroots groups. Two years ago his organisation Civicus launched a monitor which tracks threats or infringements of the right to freedom of association, freedom of assembly and freedom of expression, both for grassroots, voluntary organisations, and for the larger professionalised NGOs.

“In the last four years things have changed so dramatically,” he says. “In 2013 we would be issuing press statements or alerts about Russia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, countries where you’d expect to see this sort of thing. But over the last few years we’ve been issuing alarms about the UK, US, Hungary and Poland. What’s begun to emerge is that we really think there is a global emergency around civil space, that for a variety of reasons governments and sometimes non-state actors are going out of their way to shut down the ability of citizens to collectively organise and mobilise.”

Red flags have been flying for a couple of years now. Doug Rutzen, head of the International Centre for Not-for-Profit Law says: “Since January 2012, more than 140 laws have been proposed or enacted by governments in 65 countries around the world aimed at restricting the registration, operation, and funding of NGOs.”

Alarm bells began to seriously ring for Sriskandarajah when India moved to tighten up restrictions on foreign funding for NGOs. In 2014 a leaked report by India’s Intelligence Bureau had accused NGOs of reducing India’s GDP; over the next year under prime minister Narendra Modi, the government cracked down on foreign funding for organisations like Greenpeace and the Ford Foundation.

“This was a real wake up call,” he says. “Firstly this was the world’s largest democracy, and a country still in need financially of foreign aid. But the political arguments the government was making around demonising civil society were being won easily. Indian civil society just wasn’t responding at the political level to challenge what the government was saying and doing.”

In the last couple of years, he observes, the same pattern has been playing out in the west. In the UK for example a number of moves by the government – “the lobbying act [which limits the amount that charities can spend on political campaigning], gagging clauses on NGOs, undercover surveillance by police officers, the well-documented extra restrictions on muslim charities…” have come at the same time as a sustained campaign against aid by the right-wing press, and aid organisations have been oddly unable to make the case for themselves.

Journalist Ian Birrell, who has been a steadfast critic of the aid sector in the UK, is not convinced that there is a global emergency. “I always think we need to be careful not to be over-pessimistic when the world is advancing at such pace.”

But he does agree that several countries are going backwards, “imposing rigid restrictions on NGOs to weaken human rights and pro-democracy groups that seek to challenge authoritarian regimes. We have seen this from Russia through to India. Perhaps the most alarming one I have observed with people I have worked with is in Egypt, where Donald Trump’s new friend Sisi has proved significantly more repressive than Mubarak and severely limited the space for civic society on pretext of stability. This has ended up with amazing human rights activists, including people I have worked with, ending up in jail or forced to dampen essential activities.”

He cautions that “we should be very careful bracketing the UK with such places, given the freedoms that we enjoy. This feels pretty insulting to those risking their lives in other countries who are fighting for things we take for granted.”

But for most it is clear that this problem is coming west. Deborah Doane, a director at Funders’ Initiative for Civil Society, says the threat to civic space in the west is growing stronger by the day. She says “Trump’s election has bolstered countries, with many now effectively saying we can do what we like now... Hungary’s most recent clampdown on academic freedom through effectively closing Central Eastern European University is a case in point. They’re also bringing in another NGO restrictive law, expected to pass in a couple of weeks.”

And in the US, says James Savage, programme officer at the Fund for Global Human Rights, Trump is a huge issue. “Everyone is still trying to work out what this will mean for democracy and human rights support by the US.”

Within the States, Savage points out, there are “approximately 12 bills legislating on assembly and expression currently being proposed in Indiana, Minnesota, Washington, and other states”. And the media criticism of aid organisations, seen in the UK and India, is now happening in the US. The rightwing press are focusing on the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundation, accusing them of funding protests, while the president is extremely receptive to stories from that end of the media.

So why is this happening? Professionalised NGOs have played their own role, concede Doane and Sriskandarajah. “Human rights has always been a battle,” says Doane. “As we professionalised civil society, we lost sight of what we’re fighting for. We treated development as charity and about mere provision of services, and the recognition of rights was put by the wayside by many.”

But Sriskandarajah points out a more important theme: the internet: “At a time when established political institutions are losing trust the world over, they’re organising in very different ways with the digital tools at their disposal. That poses a fundamental threat the world over to established power.

“It may well be that we are at the beginning of a kind of participation revolution. People have this unmet thirst for being able take part, beyond elections every few years and beyond nominating their party candidate.”

He gives the example of the recent petition to stop Trump coming to the UK. “We may be at the beginning of a much more chaotic, distributed daily politics. So you could argue that what we’re seeing is the pushback on the ability of citizens to mobilise because knowingly or unknowingly the people in power recognise how potentially destabilising it is.”

Sriskandarajah points out that when he meets politicians or officials, at heart their complaint is that “we – civil society organisations – lack legitimacy. That’s their charge. They believe they have the monopoly. But the fact is that you can’t put the participation genie back into the bottle. We have to come up with new ways of coming to terms of how people are organising.”

Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow @GuardianGDP on Twitter.

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed