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4 - Denationalizing Civic Activism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Sheila Carapico
Sheila Carapico
Affiliation:
University of Richmond
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Summary

This book opened with a vignette. Police were investigating aggressively what foreign democracy brokers were doing in Egypt, how funds were being channeled to Egyptian advocacy groups, and whether these operations were lawful. The Minister of International Cooperation, Fayza Aboulnaga, alleged there was an “unauthorized” transfer in 2011 of nearly $48 million to local offices of American or international agencies and $6 million to twelve Egyptian organizations, and questioned whether they were properly accredited under the infamously restrictive Law 84 of 2002. By March 2012, Aboulnaga said the amount of American aid piped to NGOs in Egypt during the previous ten months reached $150 million.

This case, as it unfolded, demonstrated how political aid, especially through non-governmental conduits, could be deeply disputatious inside non-democratic polities and in the international arena. It was especially so during the extraordinary circumstances of social upheaval and regime transition in 2011. But fights over NGO registration had been going on in Egypt and other countries with similar legal and regulatory systems for a couple of decades. In 2011, the White House’s show of support for a post-Mubarak “transition to democracy” ran afoul of previous negotiations. After Mubarak’s resignation on February 11, the Obama–Clinton State Department decided to fast-track $65 million in budgeted official aid to four American groups and selected liberal Egyptian NGOs. This allocation reversed an earlier concession to Mubarak that permitted his ministers to vet grantees. The new policy skirting the Ministry of International Cooperation’s aid distribution pipelines drew kleptocrats’ ire.

Type
Chapter
Information
Political Aid and Arab Activism
Democracy Promotion, Justice, and Representation
 , pp. 150 - 198
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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