Title: Making Society “Civil”: NGOs, Donors, and Peacebuilding in Post-war Croatia
How is community-level peace constructed in the aftermath of conflict? In my dissertation, I examine the process of peacebuilding in Croatia following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. After the end of the Cold War, international peacebuilding projects followed a set of assumptions: that democratization brought peace; that civil society is a necessary component of a democratic state; and that by funding non-governmental organizations (NGOs), donors are creating civil society. In my dissertation, I break down these assumptions and examine the actual roles donors and NGOs play in peacebuilding.
In this system, NGOs are crucial to peacebuilding in two ways. First, they are the providers of peacebuilding activities. Second, they play the role of “civil society”, with all the assumptions of democratic roles that it entails. NGOs fail to fulfill expectations in both capacities. I find that their role as direct providers of peacebuilding activities is hampered by the organizational constraints of the widespread system of NGO-donor funding. The understood role of NGOs in civil society is also complicated by the multiple understandings of the role of civil society in a democracy, the relationship between civil society and the state, and the relationship between civil society and the general population. Because the international interventions into Croatian civil society switched between multiple understandings of civil society, the resulting policy was confused and often contradictory. The product of this system is an NGO sector, meant to protect the vulnerable in a post-war society, which is becoming increasingly reliant on the Croatian government for support as international donors are leaving the country.