Elissa Helms

Bosnia's NGO Boom

During the first few years after the 1992–95 Bosnian war, nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) were "springing up like mushrooms after the rain," as it seemed to one women's organization leader in the town of Zenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH). Cynical urbanites joked that any old nobody who could gather the signatures of twenty-nine of their relatives and friends (the law then required that number of signatures) could become an NGO. Indeed, although many NGOS were local spin-offs of international NGOS with professionalized staff members, there were also many groups of purely local origin. The latter were often a clutch of friends or even just one active person who registered as an NGO in the hope of garnering funding from one of the foreign and transnational donor agencies that had descended on BiH during and especially after the war. Some of these groups were the remnants of socialist-era community clubs, others had started out doing relief work during the war, and still others were forming for the first time. In a manner reminiscent of a cargo cult, people all over BiH set up NGOS hoping that the donations would come pouring in: if we build it, they will come! A large proportion of these organizations were women's NGOS.

Much of the hope generated around NGOS was in response to donors and foreign intervention agencies in charge of postwar reconstruction. These actors forcefully encouraged the formation of more and more NGOS that, when they appeared, were touted as evidence of the growth of civil society and ultimately democracy (Sampson 2003; Stubbs 2007). Feminist observers, citing the great numbers of women's NGOS, marveled at the extent of the Bosnian "women's movement." But there were NGOS and there were NGOS: the use of a single label masked the organizations' varying forms; motivations; conceptualizations; and engagements with communities, donors, and the state. It also hid the differing expectations of donors buried in their calls for BiH to build civil society, fight ethnonationalism, democratize, or simply "join Europe." Moreover, the terms "women's NGO" and "women's issues" were applied to, and understood as referring to, a wide range of stances and activities, from self-described feminists critical of established gender norms to those who promoted a return to traditional women's roles in the patriarchal family—as well as everything in between. Added to this variety were the many different ways in which the new rhetoric and practices were accommodated into existing society.

This essay traces the trajectory of women's organizing in BiH since the end of the war, exploring the disconnects and convergences between the discourses and practices of donors and of local women's NGOS. I unpack assumptions about women's activism and NGO work, historical patterns and the legacies of socialism, and relationships among NGOS, civil society, and the state. Instead of, or in addition to, what scholars working in other parts of the world describe as the NGOization of feminism (Alvarez 1999; Lang 1997; Silliman 1999), I argue that BiH has experienced what might be called a movementization of NGOS, although not in absolute terms. This does not mean that the negative effects of NGOization have not been strongly felt in BiH, but that more positive effects from a feminist perspective can also be identified. Like Aradhana Sharma in her work on an NGO program to empower poor women in India, I do not aim to negate existing criticisms but to "ethnographically tease out the tensions, contradictions, redefinitions, and, indeed, suppressions" (2008, xxiv) of NGO work from a feminist perspective. Although emphasis on the NGO model in BiH could be said to have impeded work toward social change in many ways, the conditions of NGO promotion—foreign intervention and the involvement of democratization and development donors—ultimately facilitated what we might now call a nascent feminist scene.

Writing about these groups is difficult to do without using the very concepts that I argue need to be scrutinized. First, because of the range of forms taken by NGOS (Klees 1998; Martens 2002), it needs to be made clear that I refer to local organizations rather than the foreign and transnational organizations also called NGOS that were perceived more in this context as donors and representatives of the international community than as local actors. This is not to say that foreign NGOS were not also participants in local processes, but to point out that they were not often referred to in these terms: usually "NGOS" referred just to local groups. Second, although foreign donors and intervention agencies tended to label any independent group as an NGO and every group of women a women's NGO, everyday understandings of community engagement, organized groups, donors, and gender underpinned a more complex set of categories used to describe what groups called women's NGOS were doing. I thus argue for a more precise use of terminology, including the concepts of "NGO," "women's," and "activism."

My analysis is based on ethnographic research among women's organization participants conducted since 1997, most intensively in 1999–2000, when I was based in the town of Zenica for two years, and continuing since then in stays of several days to several months (see Helms 2013). The research included participant observation at NGO activities and gatherings where NGO leaders interacted with each other and with donor representatives; formal and informal interviews with NGO women and donor representatives; collecting...