List of publications on foreign funding for civil society and foreign agent laws
The issue all my work as an activist and analyst has always boiled down to
Below I have posted links to all my publications on the role foreign funding, in the form of grants, plays in the development of civil society organizations in post-Soviet states (and by extension in the Global South). These texts were written over more than a decade. I’m parking them here to make them easy to share all at once. I’d prefer if I could do that without publishing this as a new post and subjecting my subscribers to a clip show, but there is no other way to do this on here.
It’s not a very long list. For most of those years, I spent far more time on developing practical ways to help NGOs in the former Soviet Union start raising money from their own communities than on writing about it. It was slow, tough work. I met hostility, indifference and skepticism from all stakeholders - grant-dependent NGOs and grant-making philanthropies and aid agencies. It was at the same time a fascinating and utterly rewarding experience.
Admittedly, another reason I didn’t write and speak much about this topic because in the foreign aid/democracy promotion/civil society support industry, it makes you stand out as a dangerous heretic. With several dozen grassroots activists depending on my grant-writing success, I couldn’t afford to alienate donors. Those days are over, but despite everything, it makes me sad.
Anyway, here is the list of published texts and videos, in reverse chronological order. It will be updated whenever I publish something else.
2024:
Rethinking Foreign Aid (from the inside) (The Ideas Letter)
Georgien: Ende eines neoliberalen Traums (ND Aktuell; in German)
Stop Blackmailing Georgians Over EU Membership (Jacobin)
Georgia’s ‘Foreign Influence’ Law Isn’t What You Think (Moscow Times)
2023:
Crossed Wires: How Geopolitics Misserves Russian Civil Society (Moscow Times)
We need to have an honest conversation about ‘foreign agent’ laws (openDemocracy)
2019:
Funding changes in the Caucasus—will NGOs adapt? (OpenGlobalRights)
OGR Webinar: New Business Models for Human Rights (OpenGlobalRights)
2018:
Despite closing space, innovative branches of Russian civil society thrive (OpenGlobalRights)
2013:
Funding Russian NGOs: opportunity in a crisis? (openDemocracy)
When OpenDemocracy published this article, which I wrote a few months after Russia passed the first version of its “foreign agent” law, they commissioned not one, but two rebuttals to be published simultaneously, one by a leading Russian human rights lawyer:
Russian NGOs: the funding realities
… and one by a then-senior officer at the National Endowment for Democracy:
Why domestic philanthropy isn’t enough for Russian NGOs
That decision illustrates how controversial it was back then to suggest that Russian civil society should be financed by anyone but Western donors.
To be fair, this changed over the years, slowly. By around 2020, some of Russia’s leading human rights NGOs - the sector of civil society that had held out the longest, after social, humanitarian and cultural organizations had already established thriving domestic fundraising practices - got serious about raising money from the Russian public, and they did really well at it. One well-known strategic litigation organization, for example, managed to raise some 10% of its usual annual budget in just its first year of turning to the public for donations. It is difficult now to be as excited about this as I was at the time. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine triggered, among others, a catastrophic shock to its civil society, those tentative beginnings of domestic resource mobilization probably came too late - too late to salvage independent Russian civil society or to build a new social contract between government, society and civil society that might have taken Russia in a different direction,
I have also written about this issue on my Substack:
Foreign agent law fundamentals, part I: we need to be honest with ourselves