A Relational Approach to NGOs in Global Politics

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. How do non-governmental organizations (NGOs) create the spaces in which they act, despite all the odds that are stacked against them? How do NGOs meet the requirements of the moment, often being in the right place at the right time? Why is the sum of NGO activity frequently greater than the parts? To answer these questions, A Relational Approach to NGOs in Global Politics analyses the ways in which NGOs relate to each other as well as with states, intergovernmental organizations, businesses, and other actors. It considers NGOs as living organizations - flexible, adaptive, creative - to examine the various NGO relationships and how they are built to surmount challenges, manage complexity, and make progress. In doing so, it sheds light on their power and agency in global politics. Maryam Zarnegar Deloffre and Sigrid Quack develop core conceptual building blocks, such as NGOing and typologies of social interactions and relational power, which are explored in empirical studies of NGOs on a range of topics. These include legal environmental conflicts, humanitarian assistance, and counterterrorism, as well as analyses of relational forms such as super-networks, meta-associations, and mergers and acquisitions. With a broad conceptualization of NGO-NGO relationships and in-depth analysis of the forms and processes of NGO interactions, this volume expands the understanding of NGOing, promotes synthetic knowledge about the power and effects of NGO interactions, and reveals new perspectives on processes of global governing.