During the 1970s, religious activists were heavily involved in national and international campaigns against multinationals and urged firms to adapt their behavior to align with Christian ethics. This article analyzes the strategies of Nestlé in addressing religious activism at three levels: national, international, and organizational. The analysis examines Nestlé’s collaboration with other Swiss and European multinationals and high-ranking church representatives in establishing dialogue platforms that sought to improve mutual understanding and promote tolerance for global capitalism. Nestlé also contributed to the creation of guidelines for the main churches in Switzerland that were aimed at their partial depoliticization. When Nestlé’s executives faced religious shareholder activists during its shareholders’ annual general meetings, they chose to engage with them to avoid their radicalization, although most of their demands ultimately remained unanswered. Overall, Nestlé contributed to the reorientation of religious discussions to small-scale ethical problems and business self-regulation rather than to substantial reforms of the capitalist economic system.

The study of global politics is frequently organized around fields, but the boundaries of these fields are little understood. We explore the relationship between two proximate fields, human rights (HR) and democracy promotion (DP), in order to understand the emergence and maintenance of field boundaries. The two fields are closely linked in international law and practice, yet they have remained largely separate as fields of action, despite vast changes in global politics over four decades. The disjuncture has been largely maintained by HR organizations who police the boundary to keep DP out. We identify differences in anchoring norms as the key factor driving boundary maintenance. Actors in the two fields hold different foundational ideas about how to protect and advance rights, norms that we describe as cosmopolitan and statist. This account is superior to alternate explanations that emphasize functional demands or resource flows, and complements historical institutionalist accounts. Our research offers a theoretical contribution to the study of fields and practical insight into two important areas of global practice. Our qualitative research is supplemented by digital annotations, supported by the Qualitative Data Repository.

This article examines three Japan–South Korea postwar compensation cases: the comfort women issue, the Sakhalin Island forced labor issue, and Korean atomic bomb survivor issue. These compensation movements produced vastly different results, even though the basic policy directions for compensation provision in all three cases were similar. Japan's approach toward the comfort women problem has been a complete failure, while its treatment of the Sakhalin forced labor issue and the atomic bomb issues has been more successful. This article's explanation of the different outcomes focuses on the character and geographical base of the civic groups leading these compensation movements. In South Korea, women's rights activists spearheaded the comfort women compensation movement and related victim-relief activities. The Korean non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that assisted the comfort women treated this problem not only as a women's rights issue, but also as a nationalist issue. In contrast, the Red Cross, a politically neutral international organization, promoted the Sakhalin forced labor and atomic bomb issues. In short, the different receptions accorded to those championing the comfort women issue and those promoting the Sakhalin forced labor and atomic bomb issues depended on the principal agent of each compensation process. This article aims to provide some implications for successfully implementing postwar compensation policies. It suggests that, if successful postwar compensation policy depends on successful perpetrator–victim reconciliation, establishing solidarity between perpetrator and victim countries’ civic groups is important. This can only be facilitated through the depoliticized and transparent operation of leading NGOs both inside and outside the redressal-seeking nation.

Several decades of scholarship on international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have established their important role in leading cosmopolitan political projects framed around moral ideals of global justice. But contemporary legitimacy crises in international liberalism call for a reexamination of NGOs’ global justice activism, considering how they should navigate the real-world moral contestations and shifting power dynamics that can impede their pursuit of justice. Recent work by deliberative-democratic theorists has argued that NGOs can help resolve disputes about global justice norms by facilitating legitimate communicative exchanges among the diverse political voices of subjected global communities on the correct interpretation and implementation of global justice norms. In response, this essay argues for an expanded account of the political roles of NGOs in global justice activism, which reflects greater sensitivity to the multifaceted political dynamics through which power in real-world global politics is constituted and contested. It is shown that in some NGOs’ real-world operational contexts, structural power imbalances and social division or volatility can undercut the operation of the ideal deliberative processes prescribed by democratic theory—calling for further attention to work focused on mitigating power imbalances, building solidarity, and organizing power in parallel or as a precursor to deliberative-democratic processes.

In this article, we reflect on the current socio-political context of the 1972 World Heritage Convention after 50 years rather than its significant achievements and trials throughout its turbulent history. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has already documented and publicized these formative episodes. Instead, we consider the World Heritage milieu today, embedded as it is within a much broader landscape of non-governmental organizations and civil society preservation initiatives than it was five decades ago. Like other United Nations agencies, UNESCO now faces challenges arising from various types of re-spatialization beyond the nation-state that further impact its effectiveness. Those challenges encompass not only the expansive force of globalization but also regionalization and localization, all of which have given rise to a new diplomacy. We discuss the proliferation of competing international agencies and individual donors, then describe the dilemmas facing World Heritage, including the rise of non-state actors and post-conflict remediation in the Middle East, the limited recognition of Indigenous Peoples and their role in decision making, and the persistent failures to remedy the inequitable position of Africa as a priority region.

The share of basic services that NGOs deliver has grown dramatically in developing countries due to increased receipt of aid and philanthropy in these countries. Many scholars and practitioners worry that NGOs reduce reliance on government services and, in turn, lower demand for government provision and undermine political engagement. Others argue that NGOs prop-up poorly performing governments that receive undeserved credit for the production, allocation, or welfare effects of NGO services. Using original surveys and a randomized health intervention, implemented in parallel to a similar universal government program, this article investigates the long-term effect of NGO provision on political attitudes and behavior. Access to NGO services increased preferences for NGO, relative to government, provision. However, political engagement and perceptions of government legitimacy were unaffected. Instead, the intervention generated political credit for the incumbent president. This study finds that citizens see NGOs as a resource that powerful government actors control, and they reward actors who they see as responsible for allocation of those resources.

The security-migration nexus is ubiquitous throughout Europe and beyond. An avalanche of scholarship has explored the construction of migration as a security threat in general and, in the UK, the creation of the ‘hostile environment’ in particular – the problematic nature of each being well documented. Yet, far less attention has been paid to activities that contest this process. Deploying Balzacq's four modalities of contestation – desecuritisation, resistance, emancipation, and resilience – this article addresses the imbalance, exploring how asylum and refugee sector NGOs engage in and contest security-migration politics. Using Scotland (2018–19) as an illustrative case and analysing discursive and predominantly non-discursive activities, findings demonstrate that NGOs are successfully contesting the security-migration nexus in Scotland across four principal categories, supporting the ‘surviving’ and ‘thriving’ of asylum seeker and refugee communities, problematising previous conceptualisations of ‘UK’ asylum and refugee politics, with implications extending globally. The article helps refine the theorisation of contestation, demonstrating first, the need to move beyond studies of ‘desecuritisation’, with consequences for understandings of ‘success’ in securitisation, and second, the potential blindness of single-modality studies to vital, meaningful contestation, resulting in the production of less comprehensive visions of the security world.

This article examines the conditions under which non-governmental organisations (NGOs) gain access to defence administrations when campaigning for transparency around the use of military force. We theorise that gaining access in this traditionally secluded domain is a matter of supply and demand. NGOs can gain access through technical and political information, yet not without demand for these resources, dependent on the politicisation of concerns about the use of force. We focus on the activities of Airwars, an international NGO, and its campaign in the Netherlands (2015–20) to foster transparency about civilian casualties caused by Dutch airstrikes. Our analysis shows that their credible information about air strikes led to access to the defence administration and allowed them to effectively advocate for transparency, mediated by the politicisation of the issue through parliamentary and media attention. Our findings contribute both to the literature on NGO advocacy and to the field of civil-military relations.