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The Evolution of Western Aid for Palestinian Civil Society: Bypassing Local Knowledge and Resources

Much has been written about the democratic deficit in the Arab Muslim worlds in the last two decades. Such literature has reinforced the idea that the promotion of democracy by international actors is a necessity for the region. However, it has been widely assumed that international (i.e. mostly ‘western’) donors are participating homogenously and in an automatically positive manner in ‘funding virtue’ and that civil society promotion is a form of panacea in this quest for democracy, with the enhancement of the judicial, legislative and institutional arrangements in a given polity. However, a sudden increase in the number of and funding towards (advocacy) NGOs is not sufficient to democratize polities, be they Middle Eastern or not. Some have pointed to the fact that democracy promotion could even turn out to be a mixed blessing for Arab activists since it has prompted Arab states to control even more avenues of participation, while others have argued that there is too much civil society but too little politics in much of the international donors’ efforts. A final argument is that the resilience of Arab autocratic regimes is due to the ‘robustness’ of its coercive apparatus. Let us note that none of these three explanations really questions the role of external actors as a source of the problem, and all tend to view their role as positive, if questioned at all. This article does not intend to shed more light on the already well-documented internal democratic deficit of recipient NGOs for their elite tendencies, or to discuss the hackneyed question of whether democratization might work in the Arab worlds. Instead, it intends to look at how the ways in which international donors conceive of programmes dealing with civil society promotion might also be a source of the failure of the Arab Mediterranean world to become more democratic. Along the lines of Whitehead, it will be argued that to reach a good level of democratization, democracy should be built from within a given polity, thus questioning the imposition and promotion of democracy by outside actors. In consequence, one has to question the assumptions underpinning the work of international donors, to understand how donors can indirectly contribute to the partial failure of democratization by creating a situation of heteronomy whereby local actors (such as NGOs) are not able to define their own priorities but have to follow the conditions and working modalities set up by external donors. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3, 397 – 417, May 2008