Configurations of Ambiguity
The near impossibility of identifying the common qualities of global organizations probably follows from the fact that their most publicly visible features seem to assemble into contradictions. They tend to be sources of popular prestige and gathering points of NGO activism, yet in the media every major calamity of international relations and global finance becomes a failure of global governance (the examples are too numerous to mention, though Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraq, and Syria come instantly to mind). Many of their goals involve correcting the wrongs of states, yet they are persistently, almost defiantly state-centric; and even with the creation of new norms and the dramatic rise of NGO participation in their initiatives, their decision-making remains dominated by states (Weiss and Daws Reference Weiss, Daws, Weiss and Daws2007: 3). They trumpet their efforts to be transparent and accountable, yet regularly generate documents that heighten obscurity, while producing ideas and policies behind closed doors. They are commonly seen as epicenters of an oppressive neoliberal world order, associated with a dramatically widening global income gap between rich and poor, while being called upon to lead the way in ending hunger, reducing poverty, and promoting development. The list could go on.
The complexity of these organizations can also be seen in the challenge of naming them. Clearly they are international in the sense that states are always central to their structure and procedures; and they are multilateral in the sense that states coordinate their policies in groups or blocs and occasionally in consensus. Strictly speaking, the organizations that we consider in this volume are not all United Nations specialized agencies, even though they are all closely interconnected – the World Bank Group, for example, was created in the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 before the Charter of the United Nations was drafted a year later; and the World Trade Organization is one of four officially designated “Related Organizations” created between 1957 and 1997.Footnote 1 Our intention, therefore, is not just to offer a set of ethnographic studies of the UN, but to take a new approach to those entities often referred to as “global organizations.”
The sense in which these organizations are global, however, is particularly complicated. In some respects, they are not global at all. State interests are often a deciding, and limiting, factor in what they are able to do. They struggle to transcend strictly national or even international frameworks, yet, as institutions of “global” governance, remain clearly dependent on them, and therefore take on qualities that are neither entirely global nor post-international (Fleischman and Kalman Reference Fleischmann and Kalman2015). In these global spaces, particularities are asserted. The concept of indigenous peoples, for example, is very much based on the existence of distinct rights and identities. Forums of pastoralists and farmers in the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) similarly bring locality into universal space; and there are many more similar examples to be found. International law has universal aspirations, but often in support of locality, while the UN as a whole is now (together with the NGO boom of the past several decades) promoting a bottom-up approach in its advancement of human rights and development.
In other ways these institutions achieve their intended universality. Nothing they do can be in conflict with universal human rights, and an overarching sense of humanity is a more general reference point for their work. Certainly globality can be seen in the elaborate alchemy of actors that they bring together: bureaucrats with cosmopolitan backgrounds and identities, state-sponsored diplomats, and a bewildering array of NGOs, some with their own global mandates and others that are part of global networks and social movements. The common denominator of the contributions to this volume, then, is a distinct kind of institution, situated in intersections of the “local,” the “national,” and the “global,” in which globality emerges as the central point of reference (although as much in the realm of ideals as in reality).
By setting ourselves the challenge of exploring these institutions using the methods of ethnography, the first obstacle we face is this seemingly deep-seated ambiguity. Or perhaps it is not an obstacle at all, but a place to begin, the kind of thing that characterizes the terrain that, as ethnographers, we want to explore.
Despite a growing awareness of their social and historical density, bureaucracies, (global organizations in particular) are still commonly reified, still seen as essentially rational, efficient, and dispassionate – or their opposite: dysfunctional and arbitrary. Only the people who work within structures of institutional incoherence can tell us how things actually work – or fail to work – as they act on multiple, sometimes conflicting interests. The ethnographic studies included in this book each question the monolithic representations of international institutions produced by their mandates and by the outside perspectives that focus only on the content of their documents and public statements. Instead, ethnographers portray institutions by starting with the people who populate them, above all the ways that they maneuver through structural obstacles and opportunities, and in the process reveal the tensions and contests behind formal appearances. Reflecting on the contributions of the ethnography of institutions, Colin Hoag finds that, simply by shifting attention away from the products of bureaucratic process and toward the period of time before decisions are rendered, “bureaucratic practices appear not as the product of logics (a contextualized rational choice), orders of discourse, or superordinate powers, but as a tangle of desires, habits, hunches, and conditions of possibility” (Reference Hoag2011: 86). The institutions of global governance as depicted by anthropologists are social worlds with distinct characters, influenced by their connections with civil society, states, transnational corporations, and publics. They are also influenced by the visions and personalities of the people who work in them, situated in an ebb and flow that includes diplomats, consultants, activists, lawyers, interns, translators, media representatives, office workers, archivists, housekeepers, and security personnel. They are worlds apart, united by cosmopolitan ideals in their inspiration and commitment to diplomacy in their methods.
As with any organized, goal-oriented setting of human interaction, much of what happens within global organizations is like a theater production. Everyone plays a role, some of course more important than others, but each indispensable. As with the unfolding of a good story, there are unexpected alignments of interests that complicate the usual division of roles. Diplomats, civil servants, and activists (NGOs, the private sector, etc.) do not always stay tidily in their places, but sometimes form alliances that cross boundaries, or come into conflict in efforts that are meant to be collaborative.
Finding themselves in the middle of this drama, ethnographers aim at unraveling and revealing the internal structures and unwritten rules and practices that are not always discernible to the outsider but that nevertheless establish the framework for the actions that follow. Following the interactions of experts through administrative or activist networks reveals the porous boundaries of institutions, their extensions of influence into other administrative and social realms. Listening to these experts talk about what they do and why they do it reveals the dominant attitudes that influence the priorities of policy – but that also dissent from them: the palace intrigues, resistance to dominant ideas, the contradictions internal to institutions, the thoughts that never find their way into the media or official publications. Whether their research involves tagging along with diplomats as they rush between office buildings in Manhattan, collating stacks of documents, listening for hours on end to NGO delegates delivering their prepared statements in UN meetings, or participating in any number of things that take place in global organizations, ethnographers at the same time develop a kind of “double vision” that picks up on informal exchanges, snippets of conversation, small, accidental insights that accumulate to reveal the complexity, diversity, and irrationality of organizational life.
Even in the process of rationalizing the world, of making (often excessive) use of numerical indicators, legal categories, and formal procedures, global organizations cannot help but take on some of the qualities of the people who create them and work in them. In essence, these institutions are expressions of human determination, ingenuity, error, and frailty in ambitious projects of human betterment. As subjects of anthropological inquiry, they appear quite different from the way they present themselves, in much the same way that individual persons, considered closely by a sympathetic observer, almost never appear quite like their self-representations.
Crossing the Gate
It is now taken for granted that ethnography takes for its subject matter a wide range of quintessentially “modern” settings, including courts, police forces, laboratories, and nongovernmental organizations, and, moreover, that this methodological approach is no longer the exclusive province of anthropology but is taken up by scholars in a wide range of disciplines. At the same time, it is a bit surprising how long it took for ethnography to make a transition in its subject matter, from people on the margins of states and empires to the “modern” institutions that sometimes exercised power in those settings. The anthropology of institutions – a term that includes both the sub-field and method at the foundation of this book – has been a legitimate part of the discipline for only a few decades. This development, Marc Abélès finds (Chapter 2 in this volume), is an outcome of globalization, of the rapid flow of information and images, which contributed to erasing the mythical and “exotic” qualities that once favored different societies as ethnological subjects. In these changed and rapidly changing circumstances, institutions have become the legitimate subject matter of anthropological inquiry.
An early example of institutional ethnography – one that is remarkable in its audacity, yet rarely acknowledged as part of the history of the discipline – comes from a series of “shop floor studies” by the Manchester School in the 1950s and 1960s, in which Max Gluckman’s classic study of colonial ritual and relationships in Zululand became a source of inspiration for interpreting the dynamics between workers and managers in a British factory (Wright Reference Wright1994: 10–14). This kind of extension of anthropological research methods to “modern” subjects did not occur with any regularity in the discipline until, in essence, it became impossible to ignore. In a globalized world, people could no longer be understood in isolation from transnational activist networks and powerful institutions. In the 1970s, the subject matter of anthropology, with its focus on former (or current) colonies and marginalized people, was being called into question, in a shift Laura Nader referred to as “studying up.” “What if,” Nader exhorted, “in reinventing anthropology, anthropologists were to study the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty?” (Reference Nader and Hymes1972: 289). Corresponding with the tenor of this question, a new direction took place in anthropology, which eventually made it possible (and legitimate) to include such things as business, scientific enterprises, and government institutions among the “field sites” of anthropology (Gellner and Hirsch Reference Gellner and Hirsch2001). A literature (almost a sub-field in itself) emerged specifically dedicated to the “anthropology of the state” (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan Reference Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan2014; Sharma and Gupta Reference Sharma and Gupta2006; Trouillot Reference Trouillot2001). The limits of the subject matter of anthropology, once defined largely by colonial projects, were transformed by applying the tools of ethnography to the loci that can be considered the essence of modernity: the sources of the power of states, courts, legislatures, financial institutions, the European Union, and, ultimately, institutions of global governance.Footnote 2
A particularly important source for the ethnography of global institutions, and another kind of challenge to colonial projects, came from a direction that we might call “from below,” with its origin in local settings – the people and communities on the margins of states that constitute the “classic” subject matter of anthropology. The invasion of global organizations into fields where anthropologists did research, usually among people on the margins of states, was suddenly evident in the form of projects, advisors, and funds (Müller Reference Müller2013: 3–4).Footnote 3 In some cases, ethnographers also found catastrophic conditions of dispossession and displacement that accompanied this invasion, and that added powerful feelings of indignation to their research motivations. Anthropologists were able to see how local actors were both impacted by and able to navigate the agencies that appeared in their midst with the goal of their improvement. At this point it was almost to be expected that the anthropologists’ curiosity would turn to these agencies themselves as part of the subject matter they were trying to understand, using the approach of “the ethnography of organizations.” The participation of anthropologists in international development projects and the human rights movement especially favored this shift to the study of global bureaucracy. These researchers were ideally situated to investigate the movement from interventions and activism in the margins of states to meetings sponsored by major agencies based in Geneva and New York. This starting point tended to emphasize the networks that create links between local settings and global agencies (see Riles Reference Riles2001). In these circumstances, the participation of anthropologists as observers in UN agencies was less a matter of finding the centers of power being exercised in local settings and more the challenge of following activists and experts as they moved through networks that converged into international meetings. That is to say, having discovered new forms of networking among the people with whom they worked, some anthropologists “followed” the people and their networks to the institutions of global governance, and, from there, developed research agendas that began from the institutional vantage point.Footnote 4
Regardless of what combination of motivation, curiosity, and serendipity brought them to enter a multilateral agency as an observer, each of the contributors to this book at some point “crossed the gate” following a decision to better understand an organization with powerful impacts on peoples’ lives. In some cases, the fundamental contradiction between power and participation (that key distinctive feature of the UN and its related bodies) stimulated their interest in institutional research, acting as both a basic finding and a source of impetus. As anthropologists, each found a way to stay or to keep coming back, to extend the time and depth of their observations. And to do their research, each developed a method or a regime of observation tailored to their unique circumstances as investigators. To put it simply, they not only had to cross the gate, they had to figure out what to do once they got to the other side.
Central Themes
This leads to a question that now allows us to introduce the central themes of this book: what are the main qualities of global organizations, aside from their structures and mandates, that emerge from close attention to their human composition, to the shifts between formality and informality, the discreet sidebars and cafeteria conversations, and all the other accumulated experiences and observations that follow from long-term involvement in the daily life of the institution? Of course, the sub-headings that we provide in answer to this question are not intended as a complete list of traits. Taken together, however, these different points of discussion help us to arrive at a complex picture of global institutions, in some ways an ethnographic account in itself, one that departs from the classic reifications of bureaucracy or knee-jerk reactions to their most visible powers and incapacities.
Method
One of the common themes of the papers assembled in this book centers on the distinct problems of entry and access to information associated with the ethnography of global institutions. Once they collect their badges and find their way beyond the gates, past security, and into the hallways, meeting rooms, offices, archives, and cafeterias of global institutions, what is it that makes an ethnographer different from other kinds of scholar, some of whom might be sharing the same space and working on the same topic? What is the ethnography of the United Nations and its related organizations?
Knowing the human qualities of institutions well enough to report on them in detail requires deep familiarity. An ethnographic approach therefore involves, above all, long-term research: time in the field is ideally measured not in weeks, but in months and years. This approach is also participatory. Even when the focus of inquiry is on one meeting, one brief event, the ethnographer engages in as much self-exposure to institutional work and collective activity as possible. Ethnographers set themselves the goal of practicing a kind of empathy, putting themselves “in the shoes” of others, understanding them as human, with their own motives, emotions, areas of competence, fields of action, and moral dilemmas. Their central task in institutional ethnography is to situate this personal empathy in its context, to “unpack” or “translate” the actions and attitudes of human actors within their professional setting. And, in so doing, they ideally approach their judgments at a remove, not content with basing them on public political contests or institutional policy statements. This empathy involves a process of critical immersion, learning the way things work from the inside, the terminology, procedures, values, and relationships. Such immersion is critical in the sense that, despite a shift in anthropology toward greater proximity of ethnographers to their objects of study, there is never fully a release from the perspective of the observer, the note-taker and would-be writer. Footnote 5 Admittedly, there are some who become completely immersed in the roles they take on as part of their entry to the field, in their professional lives as fieldworkers. But at some point there is a distance involved in observation, which means that one is never fully part of what one is observing, even as a participant. The inner voice of the writer intrudes, takes note, and situates the unfolding of social life in an exterior project.
There is wide variation in terms of the particular regimes of access within which the contributors to this volume did their work. Every organization, as a subject of inquiry, calls for boundaries and identities to be negotiated, and the duration of stay and focus of research to be formally approved, sometimes in ways that reflect the formalism of management consultants (Gellner and Hirsch Reference Gellner and Hirsch2001: 5). In meeting these requirements, the contributors to this volume differed in the periods of time in which they made use of their access and the roles they filled, whether as “researcher,” “intern,” “consultant,” “delegate,” etc. Several drew attention to the challenge of doing ethnography with interlocutors whose backgrounds were similar to their own, to the point of being able to collaborate with anthropologists in their observations and interpretations.Footnote 6 This experience is discussed by Holmes and Marcus (Reference Holmes, Marcus, Ong and Collier2005) and Deeb and Marcus (Reference Deeb and Marcus2011) in reference to what they call “para-ethnography” in “para-sites” in which there is a basic “epistemic partnership” with subjects whose perspectives, curiosity, and intellectual ambitions closely resemble those of the ethnographer. This collaboration occurs in a sometimes difficult situation, a bit like attempting to be at the same time both a fish and an ichthyographer (Modzelewski Reference Modzelewski and Flores2001: 133).
This is not to say, however, that as sites of inquiry, global organizations are always readily familiar to the ethnographer, even when they share many things in terms of outlook and professional training with their interlocutors. Global institutions each possess their own culture, language, and daily practices, sometimes taking on deeply distinct, seemingly indecipherable forms. They are places where the ethnographer needs to actively cultivate understanding of the seemingly impenetrable. Familiarity is not a given that follows from the common qualities one might have with the people who occupy the agency’s offices.
The ways to accomplish such familiarity constitute the foremost challenge of ethnography. The models offered by those contributors who discussed method as a central part of their work share a central concern with how to begin to investigate the wide-ranging, complex, rife-with-contradictions reality of global institutions. For Marc Abélès, this challenge was addressed through a team approach to the World Trade Organization, using a diverse, international team of ten researchers to cover a variety of institutional activities and to conduct interviews from various starting points or premises of interlocution. For Maria Sapignoli, the preferred approach was to diversify her roles and points of engagement with an institution (the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues). And for Jane Cowan, the solution involved entering the UPR (Universal Periodic Review) with a small team of researchers, which included Julie Billaud and another collaborator, taking on various statuses and roles while examining different aspects of the review process. These are only a few examples of the basic initial methodological challenge faced by every institutional ethnographer – establishing a regime of access in conditions of bureaucratic hierarchy, systemic secrecy, and control or “management” of knowledge.
These examples also reveal that methodological problems and their solutions are inseparable from the very nature of the organizations under investigation. The anthropologists’ conditions of entry and engagement reflect significant qualities of bureaucratic hierarchy, cosmopolitan staffing, and rhizomatic extension of institutional activities and ideas through (and beyond) the institutional system. “Method” in this sense is more than a technology of research; it is also deeply informative, revealing in itself something essential about the institutional Other.
Officialdom, Expertise, and Experience
Mark Malloch-Brown, reflecting on his long career that culminated in the position of Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, observed a Jeckyll and Hyde quality to the UN, manifested in a permanent tension among its different employees, whom he classifies as the “people who work there who just want to get by” and those “who have a personal sense of commitment to making a real difference” (Malloch-Brown Reference Malloch-Brown2015). The stereotype of “Gucci-shoed bureaucrats taking long lunches,” he observes, is more than offset by the work of individuals acting on a sense of purpose, whose efforts, taken together, make the UN a “force for good.” Hope for the betterment of the world, his reflections make clear, can be grounded in the visions and dedication of civil servants.
One of the things that sets apart global organizations from other kinds of institution is the tremendous variety of personal experience in officialdom. These agencies are made up of people with a starting point of cosmopolitan life experience and values, and who come together from many parts of the world, resulting in a kind of diverse, institutionally oriented statelessness, brought into being through a full range of human variety and life experience. To this diversity among officials we can add the variety of organizations in which they live and work, with their very different regimes or “cultures” of expertise, ranging from the econo-centrism of financial agencies such as the World Bank to the legal expertise favored in the Human Rights Council, along with the particular specialisms of smaller agencies such as the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) or the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC).
At the same time, it is possible to arrive at the impression that there is something distinctive about their employees, that there are certain qualities they commonly share. The civil servants who populate UN agencies in particular often begin their careers motivated by personal idealism. Often they have chosen their careers not only because of the prestige and benefits that come with UN officialdom, but because they genuinely want to make the world a better place, starting with their small corner of responsibility. They might recognize from the outset that there will be obstacles to projects of human improvement, but in the midst of efforts being made to save lives and make them better they see themselves as agents of possibility.
Then the pressures of conformity to institutional agendas make themselves felt. They are sometimes called upon to apply policies with which they fundamentally disagree, or required to be diplomatic in circumstances in which they are personally outraged. The agency can act like a magnet applied to the wrong side of their moral compass. More often than not, they respond by subverting their personal convictions and passions and simply getting on with the job. After all, no UN employee wants to be responsible for a failure of diplomacy by straying from the limits of sanctioned policy discourse. So the language they use in public communication tends toward the cautious and conciliatory, replicating the patterns in place.
It is, of course, to be expected that there would be resistance to this repression of conscience. Officials might use different methods to express their frustration, such as subtly inserting their own opinions into documents, infiltrating the flow of information that appears in the form of such things as Internet postings, newspapers, reports, and policy recommendations. Or they might break the rules by arranging closed door meetings intended to facilitate dialogue between stalemated states and NGOs that were otherwise only supposed to communicate through formal mechanisms. These are the conditions in which the private experience of officials encounters the moral hegemony of the institution. Given such conditions, it is important to consider the possibilities for collaborative resistance on the part of officials, whether their private opinions might be at odds with the dominant goals and policies of the agency, and, if so, the extent to which they are able to collaborate with other officials in somehow acting contrary to the trajectory of the agency’s official policy and practice.
There is a paradoxical ethic of statelessness among those who administer organizations that are centered upon the concerns of states. Ironically, states are sometimes the initial reference point for recruiting those who seek careers as UN civil servants, with preference given to hiring those from under-represented regions, and relatively fewer opportunities given to those from powerful and influential states, particularly in starting positions at the UN Headquarters.Footnote 7 But once a potential employee is vetted and approved, they go through a process of denationalization, swearing loyalty to the organization and its goals above any rival personal, organizational, or national interests or sources of membership.Footnote 8 The purpose is to eliminate, to the extent possible, the kind of state-oriented politicization that stands opposed to the principle of neutrality among international civil servants. An identity transformation ideally takes place, in which the employee’s country of origin is made secondary to their institutional belonging. This is physically evident in the fact that some 30,000 UN employees carry light-blue United Nations laissez-passer identity cards, which accompany or supersede (depending on the policy of the state they are entering) state-issued passports at border crossings. Both the occupational and legal identities of the employee are ideally oriented toward statelessness.
One of the distinguishing things about global organizations is the extent to which labyrinthine bureaucracies are infused with experts, permanent or temporary appointees whose specialized knowledge goes beyond the requirements of bureaucratic administration, and is applied to the tasks of program design and implementation. To the extent that international institutions intervene in the world, they require expert knowledge about the world. Experts have distinct roles in the bureaucratic system, including permanent, hierarchically ranked, agency-specific staff and temporary consultants hired for specific, limited tasks. Special Rapporteurs are a distinct category of autonomous expert in the UN’s human rights system, a cadre of highly qualified “volunteers,” responsible for independent, victim-oriented, on-the-ground reporting of state compliance with human rights (see Piccone Reference Piccone2012: ch. 1). Experts also have professional identities that influence one another, interpenetrate, and, at times, come into conflict and produce tensions. In David Mosse’s (Reference Mosse, Mosse and Lewis2005) terms, these are “transnational epistemic communities,” networks of experts with common foundations in training and knowledge. These epistemic differences can have important consequences for the ways that policies are developed and programs implemented. Disciplinary norms can have profound influences on the inner workings of the institution and the wider impacts of its policies and projects (Sarfaty Reference Sarfaty2012: ch. 3).
At the same time, it is important to stress that, in the UN system at least, the boundaries between these epistemic communities and the various roles that fall into the categories of “official” and “activist” are porous. In practice, officials are sometimes able to push an agenda in their area of responsibility, becoming, in small ways, “activists” from within the UN civil service. Experts and expert knowledge are created by the institutions in ways that can be applied (in quintessentially diplomatic ways) to so-called activist causes; and activists in turn, as they learn to navigate the UN system and acquire the language and etiquette of diplomacy, sometimes, by incremental steps, take on careers as UN experts and officials (as in the case of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous issued discussed by Sapignoli).
The Fiction of the Non-Political
Global organizations have a remarkable capacity to conceal the uses (and abuses) of power that take place through the initiatives that they sponsor, downplaying their deeply rooted value judgments as they apply their policies and programs. They do this in part by employing the sanitized language common in the social science of development, which banishes explicit reference to politics through the use of such concepts as governance, best practice, and the language of managerialism (Mazower Reference Mazower2009: 11). Policy makers of all kinds often depend on making their unstable social products appear apolitical and self-evident, concealing from view both the origins of institutionalized actions and the contested, untidy ways in which they are received (Shore and Wright Reference Shore, Wright, Shore, Wright and Però2011). If anything, the distance between the managerial language and sources of policy and those whose lives are shaped by them are more significant in those institutions with field programs, such as the World Bank or the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), where “headquarters” can be especially remote and unreachable from “the field” (see Hitchcock, Chapter 8 in this volume).
Self-evidence and apolitical appearances also take the form of numbers, or “indicators.” As Sally Engle Merry (Chapter 7) puts it, “numbers are political resources,” meaning that those who decide what to count and what not to count are influential in ways that are disproportionate to the limited attention given to the emerging global architecture of statistics and its impacts on procedures of “evidence based decision-making,” audit, and standards of accountability. Indicators constitute a form of knowledge with “quiet power” that in the process of categorizing, counting, and analyzing, is able to “not only make sense of the messy social world, but also help to manage and govern it” (Davis, Kingsbury, and Merry Reference Davis, Kingsbury, Merry, Merry, Davis and Kingsbury2015: 2).
The fiction of the non-political also takes the form of participatory values and superficial structures of equality, including the techniques used to conduct business without reference to disparities of power among states, or to create spaces of inclusion and dialogue that turn into blind alleys, with the actual results of participation going nowhere. Global agencies commonly promote a formal display of equality among nations that are in reality profoundly unequal. The UPR of the Human Rights Council, for example, is structured according to principles of strict equality among states, yet states are informally grouped by diplomats into two categories: those from the Western European and Others Group (WEOG), which constitute the “confident,” “criticizing” countries, and those that are constrained by a lack of resources and “capacity,” as well as obligations to donors and lenders such as the IMF (Cowan Reference Cowan, Charlesworth and Larking2014: 58). The arrangements by which states participate in agency initiatives and interact among themselves may indeed be equal, but at the same time misleadingly encourage the idea that states pursue their interests on a level playing field. Even the Security Council, with the explicit advantages it gives to its permanent members, masks the power disparities among states through formal structures of impartiality and egalitarianism (see Schia, Chapter 3 in this volume). The same can be said of NGO participation in UN initiatives, particularly those involving indigenous peoples. These are peoples and organizations whose aspirations toward self-determination and the remediation of state abuses of power are given expression in meetings that formally encourage equal participation with states, but in ways that do not reflect actual disparities in power, that ultimately distort the extent to which states participate from positions of control.
A basic tension can be felt in some degree in every global agency between the voluntary structure of many initiatives – which gives states the liberty to abandon or sabotage efforts with which they disagree – and the reforming mission of the organization, oriented toward changing the behavior of states when it departs significantly from the agency’s (and the world community’s) standards of state conduct. Global agencies regularly conceal their primary goal of influencing the behavior of those states that, sometimes on specific issues, are out of step with or even contemptuous toward international norms. They are rarely in a position to further their political goals directly, but are required to constantly engage in the more oblique politics of diplomacy and persuasion. Hence, one of the common agendas (sometimes built into the mandates) of the agencies of global governance is their avoidance, on the surface at least, of obstructing (or even offending with reference to) the political agendas of states. Their success depends heavily on collaboration with states, making use of those states that are constructive participants in particular global initiatives while avoiding the alienation and enmity of those that are not. If the central guiding moral imperative of bioethics is non-maleficence, expressed with the term “do no harm” (primum non nocere), that of the global organizations might well be expressed as “cause no offence” (ne scandalum), or, perhaps better, do not offend states (non pecces civitates). In keeping with this frame of reference, they aim to promote peace and the eradication of poverty through the particular means at their disposal: negotiation, mediation, transitional justice initiatives, humanitarian intervention, and the gathering and dissemination of information. Diplomacy from this starting point is an ethic that originates in the relational qualities of international law. If the behavior of non-compliant states cannot always be influenced by compulsion, and if directly invoking the wrongs of the state are likely to produce no other result than defensive denial and justification, then other means of persuasion must be found, means that do not cause offense but that at the same time communicate concerns and offer avenues to reform without losing face. Given this element of state voluntarism, the political nature of global initiatives is pushed into the background, with emphasis placed instead on the benefits of development and conformity with norms intended to apply universally.
Another way to consider the fiction of the non-political is provided by Máximo Badaró (Reference Badaró and Abélès2011) and Marc Abélès (in Chapter 2 of this volume), through their use of the concept of regimes of visibility. Badaró, a member of Marc Abélès’s research team in the WTO, considers the ways that high-level experts engage in forms of diplomacy and publicity that reduce attention to the political nature of their work. They see themselves as having to act with “discretion” and “prudence” in their interactions with diplomats, NGO representatives, and journalists. “Even though the role that they play in the political dynamics of the WTO grants them a certain level of visibility, the need for neutrality prevents them from leaving explicit traces of their practices” (Reference Badaró and Abélès2011: 84). These experts, Badaró finds, all have very similar professional backgrounds, with previous experience in diplomatic corps, international organizations and/or NGOs, and/or universities. They are globally linked in their professional activities with other professionals like them who work on similar issues, a fact that connects them to powerful networks and that at the same time gives the organization a flexible boundary, projecting its internal political dynamics toward other institutional and political domains. They also share a similar tension in their work, between their high level of qualifications and experience in their chosen fields, reinforced by their connections to global networks of like-minded experts, which are suppressed by the vital need for professional “neutrality” and restraint in applying their powerful expertise or invoking their global access to knowledge and political influence. This tension leads them to create, and be subject to, a regime of visibility (or, depending on one’s perspective, of invisibility), a manner of presenting and distributing their technical and political skills and the results of their efforts. “The intervention of these agents in social reality,” Badaró writes, “is first founded on its transformation in a visible and intelligible field, with precise limits, and which demands the application of a specific technical expertise” (Reference Badaró and Abélès2011: 85–86). This is to say, there is no stark divide between the technical and the political. The interstices of international politics can be found in informal processes (in those less structured spaces to which ethnographers seem to gravitate), including the workshops, meetings, informal documents, and activities sometimes referred to as “technical assistance.”
Audit and Accountability
The fiction of the non-political can also be seen in the rise of accountability as a basic criterion of institutional success. International organizations have a distinct capacity to divert highly political decisions into the supposedly neutral realms of measures and technical procedures. This diversion is especially significant when state practices come under direct scrutiny, as in the UPR of states’ human rights records, with audit taking the form of a ritualistic, interrogative examination of state assertions (Authers Reference Authers, Charlesworth and Larking2015; and Cowan and Billaud, Chapter 5 in this volume). Marilyn Strathern (Reference Strathern2000: 1) describes this phenomenon as “the twin passage points of economic efficiency and good practice” that make up the basic criterion of institutional success. “Audit culture” as an institutional phenomenon, she argues, “has broken loose from its moorings in finance and accounting; its own expanded presence gives it the power of a descriptor seemingly applicable to all kinds of reckonings, evaluations and measurements” (Reference Strathern2000: 2–3). The calculative rationalities of modern financial accounting are proliferating, more commonly being applied to contexts far removed from the world of bookkeeping and corporate management (Shore and Wright Reference Shore and Wright2015: 2–3). There is, therefore, a close affinity between audit culture and the growing use of indicators (as discussed by Merry in Chapter 7). “Contemporary forms of governance,” Garsten and Jacobsson (Reference Garsten and Jacobsson2011: 384) observe, “build to a large extent on the assumption that what is critical and valued can also be measured and compared. By pushing for enhanced transparency, for openness and visibility, the valued objects may be rendered accessible to measurement and comparison.” The impersonal, technocratic, and neutral representation of regulatory technologies reduces the complexity of social reality and translates ethical dilemmas into manageable formats (Garsten and Jacobsson Reference Garsten and Jacobsson2011: 387–388). Perhaps most significant for our purposes is the observation that there is a socially constitutive element of audit that goes well beyond the concern with numbers, that brings particular things into focus and renders others invisible or unsayable. Audit culture recognizes (and thereby creates conditions for) certain social practices, those that will convince, that “will persuade those to whom accountability is to be rendered” (Strathern Reference Strathern2000: 1), whether they be the government or the taxpayer/public.
These insights into the political field of auditing mechanisms suggest that they can have a wider impact in international organizations than merely their influence on global policies and pressures on states; they can also influence the ideas at the foundation of global initiatives. This includes not only the way that auditing mechanisms seek precision in selecting what is to be measured and how; they also, as Halme-Tuomissari points out in Chapter 6, reinforce concepts such as “universality” through the tangible presence of participants in auditing processes. A recurring theme in the chapters assembled here concerns how the turn to accountability, together with the measures on which it is based, are “having subtle but powerful effects on the way the world is understood and governed” (Davis, Kingsbury, and Merry Reference Davis, Kingsbury, Merry, Merry, Davis and Kingsbury2015: 21).
Fragility
It is only few short years ago, it seems, that Hardt and Negri (Reference Hardt and Negri2000) published Empire, a hugely best-selling, post-Marxist study of what they saw as an emerging global order. To them, and to their numerous supporters and sympathizers, Empire was a “total” phenomenon that included the United Nations as a whole, along with a variety of international organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, and even nongovernmental organizations. At the time that they wrote, it seemed conceivable to many that global organizations of the kind that are the subject of this book constituted a key element of a totalizing form of power. Hardt and Negri’s work is perhaps the most extreme example of a common, persistent error that applies to global organizations, that exaggerates their control over political power. It is true that some agencies have mandates that supersede those of others. The Security Council, the IMF, the WTO, and the World Bank all do have far-reaching influence on world affairs. But it takes particular form, and the contributions to this volume offer another picture to that of centralized, unchecked, and unknowable forms of global power. Even the most powerful agencies as described here have their points of vulnerability. And few of the organizations in the UN system have direct influence on the actions of states and transnational corporations. Beyond this, most operate within the limits of structural fragilities, a sense of impermanence, and vulnerability to the collective politics of their constituent states.
“Fragility” is a term used by the World Bank (2014) to describe those unstable countries that are on the verge of both possibilities for growth or descents into violence and chaos. The fragility of states in the aftermath of social and political upheaval is a realm of possibility and peril, and, for some, ideal points of insertion for global governance initiatives. While fragility is a significant part of the discourse of state failure, it applies in analogous ways to global agencies themselves. The difficulties faced by prosecutors in constructing and communicating an evidence-based narrative of mass crime are discussed by Richard Wilson (in Chapter 12) as a clear illustration of the institutional fragility of international justice. Incompletion, fragility, and reversibility are universal features of global institutions as they come into being.Footnote 9 Well-established procedures can also be incapacitated. The moral persuasion behind torture monitoring processes, for example, is readily diffused by arguments about procedure, much to the advantage of non-compliant states (Kelly Reference Kelly2013a: 24). Human rights and international development agencies in particular tend to be pulled in different directions by other transnational actors, sharing with them many of the same humanitarian goals, but finding themselves in struggles over the different means to be employed, in the context of an emerging transnational normative pluralism (Goodale Reference Goodale, Goodale and Merry2007: 3). Each organization, according to its mandate, has some potential to make important differences to conditions of poverty, insecurity, and displacement, yet each, including the most powerful, faces perils that could plunge it – and, in some cases, the world – into chaos. Depending on their mandates, their room for maneuver in implementing programs, above all in terms of the cooperation they can rely on from states, is often narrowly circumscribed.
States are more direct sources of what is arguably the most significant peril faced by global organizations: funding. Global institutions and initiatives are financially supported by and dependent on states, notwithstanding the occasional, very public donations made by billionaire “philanthrocapitalists” such as Ted Turner and Warren Buffett. If states together decide that an agency, a forum, or a project is not in their interest, they can simply cut or dramatically reduce their support for it. Country offices can be closed, forums are no longer able to hold meetings, or if they do, only in diminished form, with limited civil society participation and minimal impact. This is a source of fragility that goes beyond budgetary considerations, that influences the scope and possibilities of organizational influence, the extent to which they are able to bring about change through meaningful sanctions, or even to present ideas and actions that are discomforting to the most powerful states.
The concealments of the agencies’ political agendas include a rough covering-over of their own fragilities, contradictions, and incapacities. Consistent with their ambitions, they tend to exhibit an attitude of publicly soldiering on without revealing the weaknesses imposed on them. These are private failings, the kinds of thing that never make headlines, that are not part of the sterile discourse that questions the usefulness and capacities of international organizations in the twenty-first century.
NGOs, Activism, and Publics
Much of what takes place in global organizations cannot be properly understood without considering public opinion as a source of conscience or point of reference for those who wish to bring attention to abuses of power, and in equal measure for those who wish to achieve political goals by indirect means. Public outreach is therefore a prioritized practice of international institutions. Even when presenting seemingly banal information on such things as new initiatives and upcoming international meetings, international agencies have a certain flair for media. Like all political entities, they are concerned with image, or “optics,” usually in the form of carefully crafted press releases, tweets with up-to-the-minute news on world affairs, and seemingly neutral Internet postings presented to a global audience. Exercises of knowledge control and “spin” shape the way that global agencies present themselves to the world.
NGOs tend to be less concerned about the politically impartial representation of information and more concerned with having a political effect. Rights claimants and protesters try to make simple, persuasive cases to mass audiences about the urgency and appeal of their causes. The politics of shame influences the work of global organizations through NGOs, with their heightened capacities for media outreach, and, by extension, their potential for influence on public audiences with messages of crisis, victimhood, and illegitimate uses of power (Niezen Reference Niezen2010: ch. 2). Shame, Tobias Kelly (Reference Kelly and Müller2013b: 134) remarks, is for states and other institutions a deeply political process, the impact of which lies in the social implications of the exposure of wrongdoing. States tend to be sensitive to opinion, if for no other reason than that their power cannot survive long in naked form, with global visibility now being unavoidable whenever their police and military are used en masse against their own citizens.
The ability of NGOs to convey information and make claims through media is, sometimes against the limitations of state-sponsored censorship, creating unprecedented avenues of rights-consciousness. With this will to make injustice known, we have entered an age of “democratic” access to the tools of persuasion. NGOs are themselves primary, interested public consumers of injustice and arbiters of global policy, each with their own target audiences of sympathizers. The success of global initiatives, in turn, can be highly dependent on the willing participation of NGOs (as Johnson and Rojas illustrate in Chapter 10 with reference to the strategic choices made by NGOs in their participation in global climate change conferences). Through the ideas and technologies available to NGOs, the sense of indignation as a response to collective injustice is increasingly expressed in relation to a wider awareness of human rights, environmental justice, and an ideal of a global just society.
Global organizations and forums differ widely in terms of their regimes of NGO access, with some, such as the Security Council and the World Bank, almost hermetically sealed from NGO influence while others, such as the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the treaty body hearings, and the UPR of the Human Rights Committee, are reliant on NGOs, to the point that they would cease to function without them. Beyond the work of individuals, NGO participation in global initiatives is mainly contingent on the possibilities they have for furtherance of their specific goals. Non-participation suggests either closure or, where NGO participation is intended but not achieved, exhaustion of the venue.
Knowledge
Global organizations are not just sources of global policy, and are not merely concerned with the politics of mediation between states; they are also primary producers of knowledge. One of the basic findings shared by several of the studies in this book is that the experts who in almost every respect resemble the ethnographer are deeply engaged in (sometimes to the point of obsession) a knowledge system, one that in some respects seems familiar, but that in other ways, on closer examination, appears as alien to an uninitiated observer as the so-called savage or primitive thought systems described by the pioneers of French structuralism or British social anthropology. Exposing to view the knowledge foundations of institutions is one of the distinct contributions of anthropology, in part because ethnography makes it possible to clear aside the formal reports and public statements, to reveal the thinking and activity behind them, as (un)expressed by their authors.
The fragility of knowledge in global institutions (revealed particularly clearly in Wilson’s discussion of international tribunals) cannot be generalized as a feature of “institutional thought,” circumscribed as this knowledge is by standards of evidence and court procedure. Institutions are commonly secure in their understanding of the world. In fact, one of the most disconcerting aspects of the ethnographic encounter with global organizations derives from the fact that bureaucratic/legal thought, more than any other form of expert knowledge, has a remarkable power to produce certainty where it does not exist – or, better (as Brumann demonstrates), to attempt to arrive at it where it is inherently out of reach. What is more, the ideas that they produce are sometimes widely popularized, becoming part of our everyday speech through processes of entrenchment or naturalization.
The knowledge systems of global institutions have important and occasionally direct implications for the rights of those whose essential qualities are debated and defined. While the critical acumen of activism remains oriented toward the actions and policies of those states and corporate entities that have direct impacts on the lives of marginalized and victimized peoples, the management of diversity by global institutions articulates the basic ideas and creates the institutional arrangements for this activism.
As rights claimants become involved in picking up on the concepts and priorities of institutions and shaping their own legal and cultural identities, they incline toward self-knowledge and representation (as discussed by Niezen in Chapter 13). For this reason, controversies about group rights have centered on the validity and scope of such self-definition in the context of the centralizing projects of states. This would seem to imply a certain amount of claimant-based input into the way differences are expressed and represented in the defense of rights – human rights in particular. Recognizing the proclivity of global institutions to exercise conceptual authority also calls for considering the acts of making oneself heard by those who represent the conceptualized, the intended beneficiaries and claimants of rights and policies of development.
Hope and Disenchantment
Finally, we turn to a theme that in one way or another is included (even if latently) in each contribution, which makes it appropriate to refer to global organizations as “palaces of hope.” These organizations tend to have a disproportionate sense of mission, to be infused with their own peculiar kind of utopianism, a kind of piecemeal ambition for the betterment of the world, with goals that are sometimes not only hopeful and ambitious, but willfully and blindly impossible. They are driven by the typically utopian intention to construct a better world using only human ingenuity and agency, without reference to any form of divine intervention (see Todorov Reference Todorov, Carli and Flores2001: 3–4). In one sense, the hope of global institutions is unlike other this-worldly ideals in the utopian tradition: it does not intend to bring about a perfect world – it is clear to all that this cannot ever exist – but finds a simulacrum of perfection in an ideal of constant perfectibility.Footnote 10 In another essential respect it arguably goes further than its utopian predecessors: it is firmly grounded in legalism, scientism, and technologism, in the expectation that crises have a rational solution based in the almost limitless possibilities of human genius. The underlying principle in this utopianism goes beyond the intervention in crises; it tries to cultivate and harness new forms of knowledge that have the potential to transform the world.
As our discussion of fragility has already suggested, a contradiction arises from the fact that the utopianism inherent in these agencies is structurally incapacitated. Extrapolating from Mark Mazower’s (Reference Mazower2009: 27) historical reappraisal, the UN is suspended between its twin functions as an instrument of the great powers and bastion of state sovereignty, while serving as a supporter of postcolonial liberation and human rights across the world, in accordance with the rousing moral language of the Charter. This incapacity manifests itself in, among other things, the UN’s limited ability to intervene effectively in human rights violations. As Ted Piccone (Reference Piccone2012: 4) observes, “Political resolutions that condemn violations may be massaged for months and ultimately watered down to have little effect or blocked entirely.” What is more, international jurists are basically agreed that fundamental restructuring of the UN “will not materialize in the next decades or even within this century” and that all its relative merits and deficiencies are set and likely to remain in place for years to come (Cassese Reference Cassese, Cassese and Oxford2012b: 648). Of course, many (if not most) activists who regularly attend meetings sponsored by the UN are aware of the limitations of its agencies, knowing full well that its “soft” processes operate in the absence of meaningful compulsion. Certainly the civil servants who organize these meetings have insight into the structural incapacities of the bodies they work for. Yet, almost miraculously, there continue to be impressive numbers of NGOs that participate in UN programs, comprising a “veritable army of ‘moral fieldworkers’” (Strathern Reference Strathern2000: 3). The annual UN General Assembly meeting in New York has increasingly become a destination for a particular kind of tourist, those who want to “connect themselves with the excitement” of an event referred to by one tourist/participant as “the Super Bowl of do-good space” (Krueger Reference Krueger2015). This kind of participation goes together with a profound disjuncture between, on the one hand, the groundswells of activism that emerge from a global (and seemingly growing) sense of humanity united by ideals of accountability, democracy, and justice, and, on the other hand, the limited capacities of those organizations tasked with formulating and acting on them.
Each global institution works at its own pace, with its own regime of possibility, in which the idea of the future and the way it can be shaped is expressed in different form. International agencies are known above all for their slow pace of work. Legislative projects sometimes take decades to accomplish. Consistent with the stereotypes of molasses-like progress or “mission creep,” those engaged in such projects often express the idea that the outcome of institutional effort is something that arrives far in the future, that “we need to be patient,” that change will eventually be accomplished through the everyday work of people, through persistent collaboration. Incremental slowness, distant vision, and calls for patience, however, are not to be found everywhere. There are also those who are driven by an urgent sense of sympathetic justice that goes no further than setting to right the greatest of wrongs, protecting the children, feeding the hungry, engaging in a kind of damage control wherever and whenever the world goes awry. The crisis units of peacekeeping missions, famine relief, and epidemic intervention easily lose sight of the future, engaged as they are in emergencies that take precedence over the longue durée of remaking the world. Then there is the fast pace of development agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme or financial institutions such as the World Bank that work with the artificial crises of contracted time, that need to spend money quickly, with the ideals behind the sponsored projects, along with their human costs, often pushed into the background.
Hope is most front-and-center in the publicity produced by global organizations, including their reports of the results of scholarly meetings. Like all visionaries, their intellectual leaders encourage belief in a kind of possibility-beyond-capacity as a source of motivation for the realization of grand designs. Jeffrey Sachs, in his capacity as the Secretary-General’s Special Advisor on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, for example, expressed the utopian aspirations of the UN succinctly when he said, “this generation has the ability to eliminate poverty altogether by 2025, and to make the world safe and prosperous for all” (cited in Tharoor Reference Tharoor, Stauffacher and Kleinwächter2005: 12). It is in fact rare for UN leaders to put things quite so explicitly. The usual expression of grand aspirations involves a combination of great ambition in the face of equally great obstacles, in a form something like “together we can achieve X” (an unprecedented condition of human betterment), “if only we overcome A, B, C, etc.” (a daunting list of impediments). The obstacles, in fact, go together with the utopian vision by providing an element of apparent realism and clarity about what must be overcome before “we” can usher in the new world order and propel humanity as a whole toward conditions of betterment. There is a way in which the grand vision and the struggle against obstacles go together in this vision, as in Shashi Tharoor’s (Reference Tharoor, Stauffacher and Kleinwächter2005:11) simple, succinct words, “ending poverty is no simple task.” Hope in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles is the indispensable leitmotif of almost every undertaking, every expression of institutional accomplishment and aspiration.
At the same time, the publications and reports that express such grand visions of global betterment do not reveal the extent to which their authors actually believe them. The acuteness of the tension between agency directives and the individual consciences of their employees makes global organizations different from other kinds of institution. It is not difficult to find those who populate the so-called corridors of power who are not really motivated by hope at all, just by prestige and an interesting job, not to mention overcome by disillusionment. One of the consistent findings of ethnographers in global organizations is that the further one gets from the content of public relations, and the closer one approaches the opinions of those responsible for converting policies into practice, the more we find expressions of frustration, disaffection, and cynicism. They are sometimes witnesses to the human costs of failure in “the field,” in the form of destruction, destitution, and death. For many UN employees at all levels, a structural condition of hypocrisy is manifested in the disconnection between grand aspirations and the day-to-day reality of intervention in the lives of people in conditions of poverty and crisis. The reality that they eventually encounter can be profoundly disenchanting.
If we look closely, however, we can see that hope – even in its extravagant forms – still often lies hidden behind the sordid reality of humans in conflict, in crisis, in poverty, in sickness, in conditions of injustice – behind all the ills of the world that together make up the agendas of global organizations. As we now see in the collection of papers that follows, hope even lies hidden behind institutional impediments, the slowly grinding wheels of law and diplomacy, which stand between imagination and intervention.
Overview of the Chapters
During the workshop in which early versions of the chapters of this volume were first presented, we were struck by the discovery that each paper offered several kinds of insight and could be discussed under several subject headings. We have arranged the contributions in the absence of organizational categories, both to avoid restricting them to their labels and to encourage the sense that these very different bodies have essential qualities in common, that a collection of ethnographic essays of this kind can, taken together, form an overarching ethnographic description.
We begin with several chapters on the most powerful of these organizations. Marc Abélès’s discussion of the WTO begins with a description of an unusual international collaboration and method of entry into the WTOs various spaces of diplomacy. He then emphasizes the interconnectedness of technical discussions, secret diplomatic meetings, and public spectacle that constitute nothing less than the “power relations that condition the economic future of the planet.” His focus on the World Trade Organization’s July 2008 Ministerial Conference, aimed a completing the Doha Round of negotiations after seven years of effort, reveals the multifaceted practices of negotiation, the uses of power and diplomacy, which constitute the most significant field of activity in the WTO. Throughout these negotiations, a new balance of power between “emerging” and “developed” countries appeared as the Director General, Pascal Lamy, led efforts to achieve consensus among states with divergent interests, all within the frenzied atmosphere of rumor, phone calls to capitals, private meetings, and press interviews. The WTO’s negotiation process, as Abélès describes it, is both a private and public drama that provides a forum for the expression of divergent interests and tensions between developing, emerging, and developed countries – all of this occurring within a slow, cyclical temporality in which failure is an ever-present possibility, “consubstantial with the life of the organization.”
The significance of expertise and experience as a source of global power is revealed particularly clearly in the case of the Security Council, as portrayed by Niels Schia. Here, as with the WTO, the exercise of power occurs within the complex interconnections between several kinds of interactive space, which interpenetrate and are not so easily defined as might appear from a simple look. The formal space is marked by strict rules of procedure and a complex diplomatic etiquette that can only be acquired by officials through years of experience. Less apparent to those who consider the Security Council only from the perspective of the interactions at the famous horseshoe-shaped table are the spaces that leave room for an “informal working culture.” Schia focuses on these informal processes to reveal how experienced actors in the Security Council are able to switch between different levels of formality and effectively engage in interrupting the processes of conflict and their internal paradoxes. These experienced actors acquire dexterity and influence in the Security Council that give significant advantages to the permanent member states that they represent in international diplomacy. Schia’s discussion of the relationships among diplomats reveals the significance of shared values and conformity in the work of powerful agencies such as the Security Council, even in a wider context of political differences among states. The “world community” is in this sense an elite group of diplomats who frequent the same bars and cafes in New York.
Another approach to gaining some measure of control over the priorities of the UN system from the inside has been through a kind of mass participation in the acquisition of expertise and experience. Maria Sapignoli, using an ethnographic method based on “multi-positioned” roles, starting with the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), follows various avenues and kaleidoscopic patterns in which the indigenous agenda is pursued, from the training of experts in an International Labour Organization initiative to the development of new programs and forums in receptive UN agencies. United Nations’ civil servants sometimes engage with the causes of indigenous peoples by abandoning their apparently apolitical and diplomatic attitude to become effectively part of the indigenous movement. Indigenous delegates readily take advantage of opportunities to be socialized and professionalized in the UN system as they bring their own experiences and objectives to a wide range of initiatives. The spaces in and around the Permanent Forum are not just loci of diplomacy and activism, not just gathering points of states, international civil servants, and civil society, but are places of education and training, an integral part of the way people learn to be experts on the UN and on indigenous peoples’ rights. The people, documents, and Internet data that flow in and out of the meeting rooms of the Forum constitute a vast network of education, advocacy, knowledge, interests, and expertise, some kept purposefully in the background, others expressed though delegates vying for a chance at persuasion, influence, or at least a place in the report. Sapignoli’s chapter thus looks into the role of international organizations in the production of knowledge, expertise, and justice-oriented social movements, illustrating the ways that issue-focused experts/activists quite possibly contribute to changes in the structures and priorities of the UN system, adding programs, protections, measures, guidelines, and forms of representation intended, despite seeming futility and persistent frustration, to break open the UN’s closed doors of state centrism.
Jane Cowan and Julie Billaud explore the “audit culture” of human rights in the UPR (see also Charlesworth and Larking Reference Charlesworth and Larking2015). The Secretariat and states have primary influence over UPR, shaping how people can intervene in the process – enabling and disabling what can and cannot be asked or formulated as a recommendation. Nonetheless, civil society actors are present and active in the UPR. Starting out with the intuition that the UPR could productively be approached as a “public audit ritual,” Cowan and Billaud in the course of their research gradually discovered the institutionally specific yet diverse meanings of “public” and of the related notion of “transparency,” including how access to various sites was managed. This “management” was marked by constant struggles among actors involved in producing the UPR over what should be revealed and concealed, and to whom. Their work thus illustrates the ways that human rights norms are asserted, promoted, and resisted within the practices of diplomats, social activists, NGO lobbyists, and international civil servants, interacting – expressing their own motivations, values, and interests – within the framework of the UPR.
Miia Halme-Tuomisaari examines another aspect of human rights monitoring, with a focus on universality as a myth that is actively promoted and realized through the complicity of participants. Her ethnography builds on recent work on human rights monitoring as an example of contemporary “audit cultures,” contextualized around ethnographic data on national and international NGOs at the sessions of the UN Human Rights Committee – the treaty body monitoring compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). What she finds there is not the abstract universalism that is often opposed to relativism or particularism, but one in which the range of human diversity is tangibly represented in the process of reviewing human rights compliance. As they sit in the public sessions of the main meeting room of the Palais Wilson, the NGO participants “embody” the world, thus bringing to life “the international” as something dependent on this monitoring mechanism. It is revealing to see how few people are actually involved in the participatory aspect of the hearings. In particular, she focuses on the actions of a Geneva-based umbrella NGO as it invites NGOs dispersed around the world to participate in UN monitoring proceedings, thus “embodying universalism” and bringing to life “an effect of the real.” Such efforts are not always successful, and civil society presence can be desultory. The Finnish hearing, to which she pays particular attention, was minimally participatory only because of the fact that a state employee went to great lengths to solicit and support NGO participation. Paradoxically, the universal comes to life in human rights monitoring through the efforts of a few individuals.
Sally Merry takes this volume’s observations and concerns about audit culture and accountability into the realm of the statistical data that is designed, generated, and circulated by institutions of global governance. A genealogical approach to such quantitative knowledge reveals the rise of what she calls “indicator culture”: the progressively growing use of the technologies and rationalities of quantitative data as a foundation for decision-making (Merry Reference Merry2011; Reference Merry, Goodale and Oxford2013; Merry, Davis, and Kingsbury Reference Merry, Davis and Kingsbury2015). Her ethnographic approach to this phenomenon reveals some of its other, more often overlooked qualities, including its far-reaching political influence. Outside the UNSC, she finds, the politics of measuring is consistently disregarded, concealed by mistaken assumptions of technical neutrality and the objectivity of numbers. The UNSC lacks the burgeoning activity of NGO participation that we find in many other agencies and programs. In part this could be because it deals largely with technical issues relating to the quality of data, with its central concerns seemingly remote from the life-and-death circumstances of people in crisis, following rather from its narrow role of facilitating the work of national statistics offices and developing comparable statistics across nations. Her ethnography of the UNSC emphasizes how statistical knowledge is created and by whom. Measurement, she argues, is a deeply political process, centered most explicitly on the goal of protecting statistical knowledge from interference by states. Considering the influence of the UNSC further, the statistical competence of states is connected to their credibility and in some cases to their qualification for aid. Metrics and measurement also have political implications in and of themselves, in the sense that determining what and who gets counted has important consequences for recognition and resource allocation.
Tobias Berger introduces us to the structures of “legibility” that take form through documentary practices in his study of a project in which the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the European Union, and various local NGOs try to “activate” the so-called Village Courts in Bangladesh. These courts are a colonial institution that never really materialized in the local practice of conflict resolution; the project “Activating the Village Courts in Bangladesh” tries to change this through systematic efforts toward justice reform. The thrust of this chapter is an ethnographic exploration of the ways in which the United Nations and the Village Courts in Bangladesh become interconnected within the project, with a particular focus on the circulation of written documents that move up and down hierarchical structures, between UN staff in Dhaka, EU bureaucrats in Brussels, NGO fieldworkers in rural communities, and local village court applicants. He shows how these documents, which were explicitly designed to neutrally record village court proceedings, also fulfill a less overt purpose: they render informal justice institutions legible to international donor agencies and thereby link global and local institutions.
Understanding the effects of managerial intervention in “the field” poses its own methodological challenges, which Robert Hitchcock meets with a long-term study of two large-scale UN-sponsored initiatives in southern Africa. Here the method has a long-term, multi-stranded, comparative dimension that considers the relationships between UN Headquarters and country teams, “the boardrooms and the field,” between two loosely interconnected agencies, the UNHCR and the World Bank, and between these agencies and their sponsoring states, all of which he assembles to reveal the hidden pathways of power, misunderstandings, and sources of disillusion as global organizations undertake major initiatives of humanitarian intervention and development. Hitchcock finds that “where there is a convergence of local and global scales in institutions such as the UNHCR and the World Bank, the offices of the headquarters usually dominate” (p. 175). In both instances (though perhaps more overtly in the case of the Bank), those who reported their experiences of displacement confronted the façade of the non-political, the assertion, expressed one way or another, that “this is not an issue for us.” The expertise that went into formulating refugee intervention in these two projects was startlingly ignorant of the local contexts in which the projects were being implemented, concerned as they were with the pre-eminent goal of reinforcing the powers of states and global organizations.
The relationship between the local and the global is also present in Noor Johnson and David Rojas’s comparative study of the viability of NGO participation in the UN’s global climate change standard-setting, focusing on the ways activists engage with the UN in international and regional climate change conferences. Their starting point is the observation that the environmental perspective on climate change is losing footing in the UN, and is being replaced by an economic approach more in line with neoliberal state and corporate interests. Here, a recently devised system that is best known by its abbreviation, REDD+ (Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation), places landholders at the center of a policy approach in which forests, as natural resources, are monetized. By contrast, policy makers have been unable to create an analogous system of value to protect the Arctic. Quite simply, there is no way to economize ice and snow. The motifs of forests and ice are vastly different in the ways that they appeal to publics and influence global climate change policy. Under these circumstances, the obstacles to an Arctic-oriented climate change policy are a central problem, addressed here by considering the ways that the UN channels activist energy and creates (or fails to create) legal expressions of meaning and value that leave room for the aspirations of civil-society participants.
The struggle for certainty in the context of inherent ambiguity receives sustained attention in Christoph Brumann’s account of UNESCO’s efforts to arrive at official criteria for the designation of World Heritage sites (see also Brumann Reference Brumann2014a and Reference Brumann2014b). Central to the World Heritage project is the idea that some sites have “outstanding universal value” (OUV) and deserve a place on the illustrious World Heritage List, meaning that they rightfully belong to, but must also be taken care of by, humanity as a whole. An operational definition of OUV, Brumann points out, is nowhere to be found in the texts of the World Heritage Convention, the World Heritage List, or anywhere else in the agency’s founding documents. There is no consistent logic that can be applied in practice in UNESCO meetings, and when political considerations do not provide guidance, the agency’s expert bodies and delegates subscribe to a mystical ideology in which they follow nothing more than personal intuitions. Like the use of indicators discussed by Merry, the World Heritage endeavor seeks standards of authentication and certainty where they cannot necessarily be achieved. The heritage project is unique, however, in its recourse to human experience, the poetry of place, enchantment, and the promise of greatness, all subsumed within a pseudo-objective exercise of assessment and comparison.
A very different struggle for certain knowledge can be seen in the prosecutorial goals of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), as described by Richard Wilson. Epistemology, he argues, is not an epiphenomenon of geo-politics and structural factors. Legal fact-finding and the knowledge it produces have important influences on “the contingent and shifting assumptions, principles and strategies of the legal actors.” It is revealing, for example, to see the difficulties faced by judges and prosecutors in the ICTY, particularly in their efforts to establish a causal link between speech and criminal acts (see also Wilson Reference Wilson2011). The court’s difficulties are illustrated by the case against Vojislav Šešelj, accused of inciting paramilitary groups to commit atrocities (or violations of international humanitarian law) during the Balkan wars of 1991–1995. The causal connection between Šešelj’s speeches and the violence that followed them was not approached through statistical correlation nor through expert witnesses, but through a tenuous use of chronology: again and again, the utterance of hate and threats was closely followed by acts of violence. The limitations of the court’s use of legal rationality would not be so significant were it not compounded by a more obvious limit to the effectiveness of the tribunal: it relied on states to collaborate with the prosecution, often those very states with a vested interest in an acquittal. Under these circumstances, it was difficult to conduct an effective investigation, or even to protect witnesses. The fragility of the ICTY is therefore both epistemic – relating to the limits of law in achieving the standards of knowledge needed for successful prosecution – and political, relating to the ability of those states that are indirectly implicated in crimes against humanity to thwart the prosecution of the individuals standing trial for those crimes. For those of us who are used to thinking of courts as the epitome of power, it can be surprising to see the limits within which a court such as the ICTY does its work, with implications for institutional power and knowledge.
Finally, Ronald Niezen provides an overview of the UN’s uses of anthropological knowledge, with his main examples coming from UNESCO, the (now defunct) Working Group on Indigenous Populations, and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. He draws attention to the categories and norms of human belonging that are produced in global institutions, arguing that the discipline of anthropology has, to a great extent, been superseded by these institutions as the primary source of popular knowledge of human life. His paper is party historical and partly ethnographic in its examination of how international experts approach their conceptions of human rights and, in turn, how they categorize the beneficiaries of these rights. The conceptualization of humanity and its communities is accomplished in more publicly persuasive ways by international agencies, in part through their use of new media, but above all by connecting categories of belonging with the rights and political recognition that apply to those categories. The anthropology of global governance is instrumental and strategic in its ideas about human belonging, involving identification of beneficiary peoples, groups, and communities, including conceptions about the nature of their oppression and their distinct human qualities that make them proper subjects of the rights and benefits of global governance initiatives. This is a mode of conceptual development in which connections are made between rights and identities, in which specific categorizations of people are given legal recognition and then naturalized through participatory, collaborative forms of justice lobbying.
