(Re)Mobilizing the Masses: Youth, Civil Society, and Social Change in the 21st Century
Join the Institute for Middle East Studies and the Humanitarian Action Initiative for a discussion of Dr. Catherine Herrold’s forthcoming book (Re)Mobilizing the Masses: Youth, Civil Society, and Social Change in the 21st Century, featuring author Dr. Catherine Herrold in conversation with Dr. Michael Barnett.
Long hailed as part and parcel of a vibrant civil society and well positioned to promote social justice, economic development, and democracy, NGOs have more recently been accused of being, at best, coopted by and, at worst, willing pawns of international donors and national governing regimes. Eager to secure funding and access to policy makers, NGOs have aligned themselves with donors and embraced the bureaucratic management practices and international discourses necessary to appease their patrons. At the same time, government regulations restrict the extent to which NGOs can mobilize everyday citizens to challenge the prevailing status quo. All this coziness and impotence has led scholars to decry NGOs as depoliticized organizations that are disconnected from the very people in civil society they claim to represent.
Today’s youth are finding creative ways to reclaim civil society as a space of citizen engagement and empowerment. They are rejecting NGOs as vehicles of mass mobilization and instead experimenting with new organizing structures. Some have established informal initiatives and grassroots groups that bring people together around shared charitable, cultural, and environmental interests. Others are starting social enterprises that address local problems in innovative and revenue-generating ways. Still more have organized philanthropic giving circles and crowdfunding platforms that marshal local resources to incubate community-led social change initiatives. The youth groups’ activities are diverse, but their aims are similar: to restore cultures of voluntarism and revitalize civil society as a space of citizen-led change.
Drawing upon twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2022, along with one year embedded as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), (Re)Mobilizing the Masses: Youth, Civil Society, and Social Change in the 21st Century analyzes how contemporary social change organizations in Palestine’s West Bank and East Jerusalem are mobilizing grassroots communities and considers the promise and potential pitfalls of international donors’ efforts to support this locally embedded work.
Speakers
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Catherine Herrold is an associate professor of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She is a senior research associate in Maxwell’s Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration and a faculty affiliate of the Political Science Department. Herrold has served as a visiting scholar at the American University in Cairo (Egypt), Birzeit University (Palestine), and the University of Belgrade (Serbia). She has conducted fieldwork in Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Serbia, Syria and Qatar.
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Michael Barnett is University Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at the George Washington University. His research interests span the Middle East, humanitarianism, global governance, global ethics, and the United Nations. Among his many books are Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda; Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order; Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism; Rules for the World: International Organizations in World Politics (with Martha Finnemore); Security Communities (co-edited with Emanuel Adler); Sacred Aid (co-edited with Janice Stein); Power and Global Governance (co-edited with Raymond Duvall); Humanitarianism in Question (co-edited with Thomas Weiss).