UBC Political Science’s Democracy, Governance, Race and Justice Speaker Series hosts Professor Suparna Chaudhry. She will present a talk titled, “Uncivil Societies: Explaining State Repression of NGOs.”
Recent decades have seen an increasing government crackdown on civil society groups, particularly non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Why do countries repress these organizations? How do they weigh the costs and benefits of using violent and non-violent strategies of crackdown and under what conditions do they use one over the other to repress NGOs? This talk will look at the evolution in countries’ repressive toolkits. It will introduce new data on the use of “administrative crackdown,” which is the use of laws to control, obstruct or repress challenging civil society groups. Besides overcoming the negative consequences associated with violence, administrative crackdown is a more efficient long-term strategy to deal with costly NGOs. The talk will conclude by discussing the implications of this crackdown on donors, local organizations working in besieged countries, and the role of transnational networks in the Western liberal world order.