Preliminary Programme

The catastrophic Ethiopian famine of 1984 remains one of the few humanitarian crises in the Global South to so heavily penetrate the global conscience. However, while it was largely portrayed by agencies as a simple tale of food deprivation due to drought, the reality was far more complex. Given the highly contested political environment, which involved the Ethiopian state’s military confrontation with separatist regions, what were the actual effects of aid on the ground? When NGOs became involved in the state’s forced resettlement programme, to what extent can we say that they became a tool of Mengistu’s counter-insurgency strategy? This paper will analyse the divergent responses of Oxfam and MSF to resettlement, which reflected disagreements over whether to publicly condemn the forced nature of the policy. While MSF spoke out about resettlement and subsequently got expelled from the country, Oxfam chose to stay silent in order to prioritise the maintenance of access to victims. This paper will examine Oxfam and MSF’s differing conceptions of ethical action in terms of their operationalisation of the principles of independence and neutrality.
This will reveal the overlapping influences of organisational identity and national political culture on their decision-making in the field. (Show less)

Increasingly, scholars have begun to emphasise the issue of global inequality in the field of INGOs, an issue typically underemphasised in early scholarship on the so-called world polity, world society, or global civil society. We build on earlier research on transnational social movement organisations (TSMOs), and focus specifically on the Human Rights (HR) movement. Using new data from the Union of International Association’s Yearbook of International Organizations, We extend earlier data on the years 1953-2003 (Smith and Wiest 2012) to recent years (2016), and look at HR international non-governmental organisations (HRINGOs) to investigate whether earlier conclusions about TSMOs hold up in this specific movement. Looking at lifespan, geographical reach, issue areas, organizational structure, and global connections (to IGOs and other INGOs), are HRINGOs in the Global South and North becoming more similar or different? If there are persistent North-South differences among HRINGOs across the globe, is this due to an inequality of connections or an inequality of resources? Are civil and political rights, on the one hand, and cultural and economic rights, on the other, divided between Northern and Southern organisations, or have such divisions faded away? If there is a tendency toward multi-issue, intersectional movement agendas and frames in the HR sphere, is this a cultural script diffusing from scholars and activists in the Global North, or a response from Southern organisations dealing with intertwined issues on the ground? Our analysis of the new dataset sheds critical light on the history of the HR movement, and reinvestigates theoretical debates between more materialist and more institutionalist accounts of social movements, transnational advocacy, and international governance. (Show less)

There was a boom in starting new international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in the second half of the 19th century, and since then the international trend of organised cooperation almost never slowed down. Almost: we can observe a significant drop in the number of INGOs being founded and an increase of INGOs ceasing to exist, per year, in the periods around the two World Wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945). But are the wars themselves the main cause of these changes, or is the tense political situation preceding a war to blame? And which organisations are particularly vulnerable to a hostile diplomatic climate: those with less resources, with more universalistic aims, or maybe those with especially internationally-oriented topics? Thanks to a unique dataset based on the Yearbook of International Organisations, published by the Union of International Associations (UIA), we can answer such questions by interpreting the results of statistical analyses in their historical context. This study provides crucial insights into the influence of inter-state politics on smaller scale non-governmental international organisations and therefore contributes to our understanding of war and peace beyond their usually studied backdrops. (Show less)