Abstract EN:

This thesis sets out to unpack the ‘‘associational revolution’’ in Serbia, the boom of local NGOs since the violent Yugoslav dissolution. Far from normative views, celebrating NGOs as democratic incarnations, we have to explain this phenomenon within its dialectical constitution with global systems of political economy, aid, and current neoliberal state restructuring. First, I analyze what democratization actually does, what kind of epistemologies of change it produces, how it collides to local political constellations, how it ‘pathologizes’ history and suggests technologies of the self as a form of social intervention. Second, I examine the politics of culture behind the dominant framework “Democrats vs. Nationalists” through the analytical prism of class: by depicting the ‘‘practical cosmopolitanism’’ that the salon NGOs deploy as a legitimizing strategy for consolidating power; and by analyzing the ‘‘nationalists’’ through class-based experiences of material and symbolic dispossessions. Third, I look at the art of NGOing; how project-making deradicalizes knowledge and political action; what labor patterns it produces through the formation of a local precariat. Finally, I discuss the overstated NGO-State clash through the welfare reform (outsourcing policy/provision). I argue that power hierarchies are instead to be drawn between a technocratic élite of experts, circulating among NGOs-donors-state, and nonprofit and public institutions in service provision, stigmatized for their “resistance”. Aid, I conclude, not only creates the conditions for its own institutional reproduction, but critically partakes to the social reproduction of unequally structured global systems.