Examining Civil Society Legitimacy

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SASKIA BRECHENMACHER, THOMAS CAROTHERS

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace gratefully acknowledges support from the Ford Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and the UK Department for International Development that helped make this study possible.

Civil society is under stress globally as dozens of governments across multiple regions are reducing space for independent civil society organizations, restricting or prohibiting international support for civic groups, and propagating government-controlled nongovernmental organizations. Although civic activists in most places are no strangers to repression, this wave of anti–civil society actions and attitudes is the widest and deepest in decades. It is an integral part of two broader global shifts that raise concerns about the overall health of the international liberal order: the stagnation of democracy worldwide and the rekindling of nationalistic sovereignty, often with authoritarian features.

Attacks on civil society take myriad forms, from legal and regulatory measures to physical harassment, and usually include efforts to delegitimize civil society. Governments engaged in closing civil society spaces not only target specific civic groups but also spread doubt about the legitimacy of the very idea of an autonomous civic sphere that can activate and channel citizens’ interests and demands. These legitimacy attacks typically revolve around four arguments or accusations: 

That civil society organizations are self-appointed rather than elected, and thus do not represent the popular will. For example, the Hungarian government justified new restrictions on foreign-funded civil society organizations by arguing that “society is represented by the elected governments and elected politicians, and no one voted for a single civil organization.” 

That civil society organizations receiving foreign funding are accountable to external rather than domestic constituencies, and advance foreign rather than local agendas. In India, for example, the Modi government has denounced foreign-funded environmental NGOs as “anti-national,” echoing similar accusations in Egypt, Macedonia, Romania, Turkey, and elsewhere. 

That civil society groups are partisan political actors disguised as nonpartisan civic actors: political wolves in citizen sheep’s clothing. Governments denounce both the goals and methods of civic groups as being illegitimately political, and hold up any contacts between civic groups and opposition parties as proof of the accusation. 

That civil society groups are elite actors who are not representative of the people they claim to represent. Critics point to the foreign education backgrounds, high salaries, and frequent foreign travel of civic activists to portray them as out of touch with the concerns of ordinary citizens and only working to perpetuate their own privileged lifestyle. 

Attacks on civil society legitimacy are particularly appealing for populist leaders who draw on their nationalist, majoritarian, and anti-elite positioning to deride civil society groups as foreign, unrepresentative, and elitist. Other leaders borrow from the populist toolbox to boost their negative campaigns against civil society support. The overall aim is clear: to close civil society space, governments seek to exploit and widen existing cleavages between civil society and potential supporters in the population. Rather than engaging with the substantive issues and critiques raised by civil society groups, they draw public attention to the real and alleged shortcomings of civil society actors as channels for citizen grievances and demands.

The widening attacks on the legitimacy of civil society oblige civil society organizations and their supporters to revisit various fundamental questions: What are the sources of legitimacy of civil society? How can civil society organizations strengthen their legitimacy to help them weather government attacks and build strong coalitions to advance their causes? And how can international actors ensure that their support reinforces rather than undermines the legitimacy of local civic activism?

To help us find answers to these questions, we asked civil society activists working in ten countries around the world—from Guatemala to Tunisia and from Kenya to Thailand—to write about their experiences with and responses to legitimacy challenges. Their essays follow here. We conclude with a final section in which we extract and discuss the key themes that emerge from their contributions as well as our own research.

OBJECTIVITY WITHOUT NEUTRALITY: REFLECTIONS FROM COLOMBIA

César Rodríguez-Garavito

Critics as diverse as postcolonial and postmodern scholars, authoritarian governments, conservative legal scholars, and some progressive social movements have objected to the activities of human rights organizations, claiming that these organizations lack legitimacy for their work. To complicate matters, this same charge—a lack of legitimacy—often encompasses diverse critiques: some critics point to geopolitical factors, such as the dominance of the Global North’s organizations in the field, or cultural attributes, such as allegations that human rights norms embody only Western values. Others highlight political factors, such as human rights organizations’ lack of public electoral accountability, and social concerns, including the allegation that NGOs have become professionalized and detached from the grassroots bases and communities they are meant to serve.

To find solutions to these real or alleged legitimacy shortcomings of human rights organizations, we therefore have to answer three key questions: What type of legitimacy is at stake? What is the organization’s nature, and what are its constituencies? And what context does the organization operate in? I discuss these questions here in light of the experiences of my own organization, the Center for Law, Justice, and Society (Dejusticia), based in Bogotá, Colombia. Although all four elements of legitimacy (geopolitical, cultural, political, and social) are relevant to Dejusticia’s work, this analysis addresses the organization’s political and social legitimacy—the main focus of this collection of essays.

With respect to the organization’s nature and constituencies, political and social legitimacy does not have a one-size-fits-all model—for the simple reason that there is no one-size-fits-all organizational structure for human rights actors. These actors range from large global membership-based organizations such as Amnesty International, to small local social movement organizations, to midsized “think-do tanks” such as Dejusticia that work both nationally and internationally. In addition to differences of scale and structure, human rights organizations vary widely in the tools they use. Different tools entail different expectations about legitimacy.

At Dejusticia, we define our approach and toolkit as action-research: a combination of academic research and advocacy strategies that feed into each other. Our research is geared toward unpacking and solving pressing human rights problems, and our advocacy is informed by the knowledge that we and others produce. What does this mean for our legitimacy? As scholar Martha Finnemore put it, legitimacy is “by its nature, a social and relational phenomenon”; it is given by others, including by peers and “by those upon whom power is exercised.” Our hybrid approach results in two different types of legitimacy expectations. First, for our research to be legitimate—that is, accepted by relevant audiences and constituencies—it must meet the rigor and objectivity standards demanded of scholarly work. Second, for our advocacy to be legitimate, it must be impactful and must meaningfully engage with those whose rights we defend.

These two sets of expectations do not necessarily align. In fact, they may at times pull us in opposite directions. On more than one occasion, our allies in advocacy work—for example, a social movement organization that we represent in court—have asked us to join a public statement that includes assertions of fact that go beyond what we can confidently say based on available evidence. Similarly, our colleagues in academia are sometimes baffled by our direct engagement in high-stakes litigation and campaigning. Maintaining our legitimacy thus entails a balancing act. We meet this challenge by being objective while not being neutral. Our distinctive voice and our scholarly tools demand that we engage in careful and objective consideration of all the facts and points of view. At the same time, we openly take sides with the victims of human rights violations and marginalized populations.