On OpenDemocracy: We need to have an honest conversation about ‘foreign agent’ laws
More on how the current discourse is deficient, and what it would take to have a better one. And a little bit about Georgia.
In my most recent piece for OpenDemocracy, published today, I continue to explore what’s so dishonest about how we look at and talk about so-called “foreign agent” laws in countries like Russia and, most recently, Georgia.
Here, I tried to envision what an honest conversation would look like: it would be about equality, democracy and agency, it would deconstruct the logical and moral inconsistencies of our current discourse, and it would aim for new, constructive, mutually agreed norms for funding other countries’ civil society sectors. It would be waged by a much broader array of voices, not just people and institutions that have a manifest conflict of interest in keeping Western money flowing to NGOs and media in the global South.
Fun story: I first published on Opendemocracy about this topic almost exactly a decade ago in February 2013, soon after Russia had passed its first foreign agent law and, with a delay of a few months, started implementing it. I saw that moment as a window of opportunity to raise something I had long felt strongly about, but which was unmentionable in my field at the time: that Russian NGOs should raise more money at home, for their own sake. It was a mild and optimistic piece, focusing on the health and potential of Russian civil society, but even so, the OpenDemocracy Russia editors (a previous team, but no less open-minded, curious and knowledgeable than today’s) thought it was so subversive that they commissioned not one, but two rebuttals from heavy-weights of the Russian human rights and American grant-making sectors, which were published simultaneously. Which they never did back then or now on any other issue.
Ten years later, this is a much more critical text, at a much sadder time.
Please read, share - and have a conversation:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/foreign-agents-laws/