Yes Ikiemoye, International Civil Society Organizations are mechanisms that control the morality of the world by promoting western value systems. These organizations introduce western development strategies and western agendas to the developing world. These strategies and agendas are developed by the western policy makers with little or no consultation with the community in the grassroots.

Promoting uniformity in value systems through humanitarian work has a direct impact on social structures as well as the traditional knowledge of the communities. The current humanitarian project is a great threat to diversity of cultures, diversity of value systems and the diversity of traditional knowledge.

In my opinion, you cannot speak of a well-defined neocolonialism for one simple reason: the influence that the -as you call if- international civil society takes is far from homogeneous. There is a whole lot of different organizations that work for different aims, at times, inside one organization there are different groups with different politics.

My second point: this neocolonialism does not work. What concerns my research, the indigenous movement in Ecuador, international actors -among them some of the organizations you name- influenced rather heavily the development of many of the organizations of this movement. It started, in fact, as a church-led movement with heavy participation of the church and its international organizations, such as oxfam - nevertheless, only a few years later, by the end-1970s, they could achieve their independence and learned how to play with the different organizations without getting into a dependency. So by now, the organizations of the indigenous movement are financed in a great proportion by international actors, but never by one only. In this way, they maintain their independence and are able to make politics that have nothing to do with and at times are rather against what their international donors want.

One needs to understand the politics and ideology behind international NGOs before making any claim. The issue is after the collapse of USSR, most of the western allies in the cold war, who are dictators in their own countries were abandoned becos the new unipolar world order led by the US did not need their services again. But because of the state failures and other problems caused during the cold war, state structure in Africa was weak and most African govt could not account for most of the foreign aids and grant given to them, then as a result, international NGOs were established as a proxy through which foreign aids could be channelled. However, due to the problems of international law, state institution cannot be ignored without causing diplomatic row. Therefore, state were tolerated but foreign govt trust the judgement of international NGOs than that of state institutions in Africa. To me International NGOs are spies being financed to give policy information of the host country. They are product of global policy of neoliberal capitalism.

Dear Ikiemoye,

I disagree with this argument, simply because NGOs have little power. Many of them do useful work, often project-based with little sustainability. I am not aware of good academic work in this area.

Kind regards,

S.