Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs

Heins, Volker M. Working Paper Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs Global Cooperation Research Papers, No. 5 Provided in Cooperation with: University of Duisburg-Essen, Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21) Suggested Citation: Heins, Volker M. (2014) : Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs, Global Cooperation Research Papers, No. 5, University of Duisburg-Essen, Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21), Duisburg, https://doi.org/10.14282/2198-0411-GCRP-5 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/214698 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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Heins Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21) Global Cooperation Research Papers 5 All Global Cooperation Research Papers are available online. To learn more about the Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research, please visit www. gcr21.org. DuEPublico Issues are permanently fi led at the public online archive server of the University of Duisburg-Essen, http://duepublico. uni-duisburg-essen.de. © Duisburg 2014 Copyright is held by the contributing authors. ISSN: 2198-1949 (Print) ISSN: 2198-0411 (Online) DOI: 10.14282/2198-0411-GCRP-5 Editorial Board Rainer Baumann Frank Gadinger Volker Heins Silke Weinlich Editorial Offi ce Martin Wolf Tina Berntsen Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21) Managing Board Markus Böckenförde Tobias Debiel Claus Leggewie Dirk Messner Schiff erstr. 196 47059 Duisburg Germany Tel: +49 (0)203 29861-100 Fax: +49 (0)203 29861-199 E-Mail: [email protected] Internet: www.gcr21.org A Central Research Institute of the University of Duisburg-Essen License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY-ND 4.0 Attribution Please cite the work as follows: Volker M. Heins 2014. Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs (Global Cooperation Research Papers 5). Duisburg: Käte Hamburger Kolleg/ Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21). doi: 10.14282/2198-0411-GCRP-5. License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY-ND 4.0. 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Global Cooperation Research Papers 5 Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 5 1 Third-party Interveners ............................................................................................... 7 2 NGOs and Harm Conventions .................................................................................. 10 3 Varieties of Bad Recognition ................................................................................... 12 4 Cooperation in a Moral Maze .................................................................................. 15 Conclusion: The Rise and Recognition of the Unelected ....................................... 18 References ....................................................................................................................... 19 Abstract Transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are commonly regarded either as agents of empire or as manifestations of the progressive enlightenment of humankind. This paper takes a different view, arguing that they are best characterized as versatile factors of global cooperation across regional, ideological, and sectoral boundaries. Whilst recognizing that multilateral cooperation is sought not as an end in itself but as a means of intervening on behalf of oppressed groups who are engaged in struggles for recognition, I argue that the physical and psychological distance of many NGO activists from these struggles can distort patterns of cooperation and practices of recognition. I conclude that, far from simply being lauded as harbingers of a transnational, post-Westphalian democratic order, NGOs should be seen as the human face of the ‘global rise of the unelected’, with deeply paradoxical implications for the future of transnational governance. Keywords Global governance, international NGOs, theories of recognition, practices of intervention, ethical witnessing, harm conventions Author Volker M. Heins is currently interim head of Research Unit 2, ‘Global Cultural Conflicts and Transcultural Cooperation’, at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research. He is also Associate Professor of Political Science at the Ruhr University Bochum and head of the ‘Interculturality’ research unit at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen. Global Cooperation Research Papers 5 5 Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs Volker M. Heins Introduction1 Humiliation is the single most powerful human emotion, and overcoming it is the second most powerful human emotion. Thomas Friedman (2011) There is a growing consensus that the key to social and global justice is to overcome the sense of powerless and the lack of self-respect that prevails among impoverished, marginalized, and oppressed populations. As political theorist John Rawls puts it, self-respect is a ‘primary good’ whose production depends on the make-up of basic social and political institutions. More precisely, justice is the name of behaviours that form the ‘social bases of self-respect’ (Rawls 1993: 319). Like Rawls’s liberal theory of justice, neo-Hegelian theories of recognition emphasize the centrality of mutual respect and esteem in the development of human relations and identities (Taylor 1994; Honneth 1995; Ricoeur 2005; Ikäheimo 2014). The core notion underpinning theories of recognition is that human autonomy and agency are not givens but are the result of a continuous and dynamic process of mutual recognition between persons and groups. Recognition is about constituting and performing inclusion, actorness, and membership. To be recognized as a legitimate actor and a full member of society implies more than simply having legal rights. In modern societies, there is a wide range of social relations based on respect, esteem, and affection, which, taken together, constitute ‘the opposite of practices of domination or subjection’ (Honneth 2007c: 325; see also Honneth 2014). Recently, theories of recognition have begun to venture into the realms of International Relations and international political theory (Lebow 2008: 62–9; Ringmar and Lindemann 2011; Wolf 2011; Honneth 2012; Heins 2012; Burns and Thompson 2013; Geis et al., forthcoming). However, there are limits to the degree to which recognition theory can be internationalized. This is essentially because such theory deals only with subjects that are both recognized and recognizers, 1 A version of this paper was given at a workshop of the Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’ at Goethe University in Frankfurt. I am particularly indebted to Caroline Fehl and Anna Geis for specific suggestions. The text has also benefited from discussions with David Chandler, Tobias Debiel and Birgit Schwelling at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg. A slightly different version of the paper will be published in Geis et al. (forthcoming). Heins | Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs Global Cooperation Research Papers 5 6 allowing a struggle for mutual recognition to take place. Thus, only human beings are relevant units of moral concern, not states, nations, cultures, principles, or similar phenomena dear to IR scholars.2 This focus on natural as opposed to artificial persons restricts the purview of the ‘new paradigm’ (Ikäheimo 2014: 11). On the other hand, recognition theorists make claims that resonate with much of the research on global cooperation and conflict. In particular it is argued that protest and opposition to domestic and international institutions cannot be explained as a consequence of deviant behaviour, political indoctrination, or economic deprivation but is ultimately driven by persons and groups experiencing moral injuries in the form of disrespect, denigration, or undue indifference. Moreover, it is argued that experiences of humiliation do not just drive conflicts but also justify them in the eyes of witnesses and distant publics. The empirical ways in which people respond to humiliation and oppression tell us something about the underlying norms that have been infringed and that are worth defending. It is this genuine interest in the dynamics of real struggles, as opposed to mere argument and deliberation, which makes theories of recognition potentially interesting even for IR researchers with realist inclinations. In this paper, I will focus on one particular group of non-state actors— transnational non-governmental organizations—and explore how recognition theory may help us to better understand them. NGOs are of relevance not only to scholars interested in the role played by citizens and activists in the construction of global governance and new forms of diplomacy (Alger 2007; Willets 2011; Cooper 2013; Ruggie 2014) but also to researchers studying the impact of real or fabricated collective feelings of humiliation in international relations. Unlike states, non-governmental advocacy organizations can plausibly claim to be fighting for the recognition of the rights and needs of all human beings, regardless of their national belonging. For this reason, these groups are natural candidates for an analysis in terms of recognition theory. In fact, there appears to be broad convergence between the intentions of NGOs and the ‘project of moralizing world politics’ (Honneth 2007a: 198) championed by recognition theorists. The remainder of this paper outlines the connections between NGOs, patterns of global cooperation, and different practices of (mis)recognition in international politics. The first section offers a new definition of NGOs in relation to global demands for recognition. Section 2 discusses the role of NGOs in facilitating global cooperation on international harm conventions aimed at dissuading states and other actors from using their enormous destructive power against humans or other sentient beings. In section 3, I distinguish different sorts of recognition and ask how these shape patterns of cooperation and how practices of recognition can turn out to be ambivalent, pointless, or even pernicious. Section 4 provides a brief overview of the ways in which transnational NGOs can themselves become agents of ‘bad’ recognition. I conclude that far from simply being lauded as harbingers of a transnational democratic order, NGOs should be seen as the human face of the ‘global rise of the unelected’ (Vibert 2007), with deeply paradoxical implications for the future of transnational governance. 2 On the difference between natural persons and the agency of states and other corporate entities, see Wendt (1999: 221-224). Heins | Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs Global Cooperation Research Papers 5 7 1 Third-party Interveners Much has been made of the fact that NGOs are voluntary civil associations independent of state power. Both descriptions are valid, if applied correctly. NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières—MSF), Human Rights Watch, or Oxfam are certainly independent in the sense that they are not competing for a share of governmental power and do not have a governmental mandate either for their existence or for their activities. There is also no doubt that they depend to a large extent on the voluntary commitment of supporters and donors who are willing to spend time and money on a particular moral cause. The only reason transnational NGOs are able to play an increasingly prominent role in global governance is because there is a deeply rooted culture of giving throughout the world. Such groups are both receivers and givers of gifts, initiators of, and elements in, worldwide chains of aid.3 However, NGOs are also involved in global social struggles—which I accept are ultimately rooted in the experiences of groups that are not only materially disadvantaged but also feel that they have been treated with contempt or indifference. These feelings run deep and are largely impervious to argument. Many kinds of social suffering have normative meaning in the sense that they result from the violation of well-founded moral expectations or principles. Acting as ethical witnesses, NGOs transform these violated principles into ‘issues’, around which they attempt to mobilize distant, sometimes global, publics. They are key agents in the global amplification of feelings of humiliation and disrespect. More precisely, they are third-party interveners in global struggles for recognition. Their personnel is typically recruited not by or from amongst local victims of injustice but by and from amongst distant sympathizers who speak and act on behalf of, but without authorization from, others. NGOs are rallying round an ever-expanding range of issues, calling on spectators to takes sides and bear moral witness. However, when they and their supporters pledge their backing, they do so without ‘becoming one’ with the victim groups they are supposedly protecting and defending. Indeed, NGO activists often know very little about the groups concerned or their culture—only that they are oppressed or disenfranchised. They do not join them in the way foreigners signed up to fight in the Spanish Civil War, or in the way the sons and daughters of the European bourgeoisie became committed communists after the October Revolution in Russia. Nor do they represent their beneficiaries. Representation would entail an authorization procedure that would make it possible to ascribe the activities of NGOs to those on whose behalf they were acting. The representational activities of NGOs are symbolic not political: what such organizations claim to do is fight for global change for victims symbolically depicted as innocent, oppressed, neglected, dispossessed, excluded, disenfranchised, or forgotten. Instead of a genuinely representational relationship, what we see is a tension between imagined 3 The World Giving Index ranks nations according to the time and money they donate to NGOs. Its 2013 Top 20 list, though headed by the United States and Canada, features Myanmar in third place and a number of other Asian countries and African nations within this top group. Only 5 of the countries in the ranking are members of the Group of Twenty (G20), which comprises 19 of the world’s largest economies plus the European Union (Charities Aid Foundation 2013). Heins | Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs Global Cooperation Research Papers 5 8 closeness and physical separation. I suspect that this fundamental disconnect between transnational NGOs and the victims of injustice whom they claim to defend harbours a considerable potential for unintentional disrespect. Before I explore this further, I should like to make three observations that may serve as corollaries to my definition of NGOs as voluntary civil associations, ethical witnesses, third-party interveners, and institutional expressions of cultures of giving. Firstly, NGOs cannot be seen merely as conventional interest groups or as ‘selfsacrificing knights in shining armour’ (Bloodgood 2011: 94). Rather, they combine the pursuit of moral causes with a constant jockeying for funding and turf. What makes them different from interest groups is the nature of their core constituency. This is drawn from amongst a strongly value-oriented pool of ‘true believers’ and ‘public-spirited zealots’ who want to work in a non-commercial environment and whose own well-being depends on their being able to contribute to the well-being of others (Feinberg 1984: 73, 76; Frantz 2005: ch. 4; Hopgood 2006: ch. 2; Heins 2008; Mitchell and Schmitz, forthcoming). NGOs are other-regarding agents in so far as their members typically defend the interests of groups they do not belong to. The ‘others’ in question are: a) people in need living in geographically distant regions; b) temporally distant strangers such as members of future generations or individuals who have died as victims of forgotten or under reported crimes by the state; and c) non-human species and their habitats. NGOs do not follow in the footsteps of self-liberation movements; rather, they emulate the abolitionists who fought against the transatlantic slave trade and against bonded labour in the American South—and whose success depended on white non-slaves publicly empathizing with the black enslaved. In a similar way, today’s transnational NGOs call on the well-off to help the poor, on citizens to support refugees, on adults to act for children, on humans to protect animals, and on the generations of today to have regard for those of tomorrow. Tocqueville’s general remarks about ‘private associations’ in many cases apply to transnational NGOs: they ‘renew the opinions’ and ‘enlarge the hearts’ of citizens (Tocqueville 2003: 599). Secondly, transnational NGOs should be seen as institutional expressions of a broader shift—away from a politics based on the pursuit of national, imperial, or class interests and towards one that is less self-centred and more ethical. There is a trend—not only among NGOs but also among powerful states and transnational organizations—to counter narrowly conceived national objectives by invoking universal human rights, human security, and the welfare of populations around the globe. This rhetoric is not purely ideological, but it should not be taken at face value either. The disorientation has arisen because interests today are more diffuse, contested, and interwoven than in earlier phases of the development of national and international societies, when states, and groups within states, faced one monolithic enemy, as they saw it, rather than a panoply of threats ranging from home grown terrorism to environmental disaster. It is not that ethics have triumphed over interest. More accurately, strong, absorbing, and clearly legitimate interests have been weakened by the advent of new constellations of power and powerlessness. One unfortunate consequence of this has been a rise in the number of international interventions and foreign policy adventures marked by a dearth of strategic clarity, inter-ally dependability, and long-term commitment. Examples here are the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, the alleged war for women’s Heins | Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs Global Cooperation Research Papers 5 15 4 Cooperation in a Moral Maze By constructing, adopting, or suppressing certain issues, transnational NGOs add an additional layer of interpretation and choice between the alleged victims of injustice and the global public. They speak for victims by re-narrating their experiences of injustice and by filtering them through cognitive frames. To determine whether NGOs contribute not just to more effective cooperation but also to a genuine moralization of world politics, I shall now apply my four-fold typology of bad recognition to the world of NGOs. Evidence of organizations campaigning for the recognition of ‘undeserving’ subjects or intentionally recognizing people as a way of turning them into ‘Uncle Tom’ types (see types 1 and 2 above) is thin on the ground. By contrast, examples of NGO campaigns that make no difference to the situation of victims on the ground (type 4) are easy to find. In regard to the latter, there are two possible reasons for the ineffectuality: either we are dealing with narcissistic, ‘feel-good’ activism, which by its nature is ineffectual; or the activists in question are serious but not committed deeply enough to the issue in hand—their outward devotion to universal benevolence conceals a managerial indifference. Since NGOs are typically not accountable to a large membership base with well-defined interests, nor bound by a mandate from the alleged beneficiaries of their activities, they are free to hop from one cause to another without addressing any of them in a systematic and effective manner. In such a situation, the recognition of the rights and needs of distant strangers is unlikely to have any lasting consequences in terms of the freedom of those strangers. While all the foregoing dangers are real, the trap into which transnational NGOs are most likely to fall is that of engaging in practices and discourses of recognition that have unintended harmful consequences (type 3). These consequences may flow from either of two related characteristics of other-regarding global activism. The first is a tendency on the part of NGOs to emphasize the inability of victims of injustice to help themselves and the consequent need for outside intervention. This message, and the accompanying rhetoric, can be appropriated by foreign political and military elites to justify or rationalize otherwise illegitimate intervention. The implication of this is that NGO activism can have the unintended side effect of strengthening and legitimating already powerful states, which in turn can be harmful to global justice. The second characteristic is the tendency of NGOs not to be content with identifying victims and always to look for ‘evil-doing’ perpetrators to carry the blame. This approach is inherently problematic, because it oversimplifies real-world situations, ignoring these in favour of misleading moviestyle clichés of villains cooking up nefarious plots. What is more, there is a danger of grievances and wrongdoers being misidentified—as the recent history of the European-sponsored anti-biotechnology movement in developing countries shows. A few years ago, a global coalition of NGOs tried to mobilize the Indian and global public against the globalization of agriculture, the activities of multinational corporations, and the introduction of hybrid seeds by arguing that these were the root causes of misery and dependence among Indian farmers. The mobilization failed because the activists misjudged the needs and attitudes of the farmers, who preferred a cautious wait-and-see approach to the new biotechnologies—and in some cases actually started growing Heins | Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs Global Cooperation Research Papers 5 16 genetically modified cotton before it was officially approved. As Ron Herring writes, ‘the interests of farmers’ were incompatible with ‘the perceptions of farmer interests by activists’ (Herring 2006: 483). What is worse, urban NGOs were guilty of the ‘cultural denigration of rural people’ (Herring 2006: 474) in that they underestimated their diffuse power and their capacity to think and decide for themselves. Notwithstanding all the talk about ‘the weapons of the weak’, NGOs can be patronizing, lacking in accountability, and indeed dismissive of their basic obligation to get the data right. In cases where it is difficult to single out perpetrators, there is a tendency to blame entire cultures. In the United States, for example, young African women have been granted political asylum on the basis of their fear of genital mutilation and forced marriage. The flip-side of this welcome gesture of recognition has been the construction and indictment of ‘African culture’ as cruel, misogynistic, and essentially oppressive (McKinley 2009). This is a case of manufacturing consent by cultivating hostility towards an incorrectly identified cause of suffering. More generally, there is a streak of misanthropy in the Western obsession with global victims. The paradox is that NGOs risk misrecognizing entire societies because they see little that is positive in the environments from which they draw their issues— environments that are made up exclusively of passive victims and their abusers. For example: contemporary cosmopolitan activists tend to single out ‘poverty’ as the sole cue for thinking about entire continents such as Africa, not realizing that Africans may interpret this compassionate representation as a form of denigration. Referring to anti-poverty campaigns in Britain, a well-known South African businessman made the point that ‘[i]n a continent of nearly 700 million people, 50 very different countries and hundreds of different languages … there is another Africa, vibrant and full of potential that also demands recognition’ (Oppenheimer 2005). The core problem here is the weakness of the organic ties of most transnational NGOs to the groups they claim to be defending from harm. The causal arrow usually points, not from shocking experiences that profoundly affect the lives of individuals to the foundation and growth of advocacy organizations, but the other way round. Instead of victims creating the conditions in which particular claims about their suffering resonate with a wider audience, we have distant non-victims making representational claims in regard to victims and seeking ‘authenticity rents’ (Herring 2006: 483–6) by asserting that their critique comes ‘from below’. NGOs are normally run by restricted circles of unelected professionals and are externally funded through private donations or public sponsorship. This tendency to bypass broader constituencies has obvious strategic advantages in terms of flexibility and networking. Whilst well-suited to the environments in which international policy deliberations take place, NGOs often prove less than effective at channelling the aspirations of ordinary citizens who want to get involved in political life. The ‘diminished democracy’ (Skocpol 2003) of NGOs mirrors and reinforces that of international organizations, and vice versa. Because of their specialist knowledge and their carefully crafted air of authenticity and democratic rootedness, NGOs make interesting partners for international and supranational organizations. Conversely, NGOs are attracted to international organizations because they are not the handmaidens of the governments that created them and because they are engaged in global rule-making, often without being accountable to electorates and parliaments (Barnett and Finnemore 2004). As a result of their Heins | Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs Global Cooperation Research Papers 5 17 efforts to secure legal recognition, NGOs have managed to expand their influence in tandem with the rise of international organizations and other unelected bodies vested with official powers. Two aspects of the growing influence of NGOs on international public policy need to be distinguished. Over recent decades, particularly in relation to the United Nations system and through processes of improved ‘vertical’ recognition, NGOs have been able to expand and consolidate their formal standing with all relevant treaty bodies (Alger 2007). With regard to individual states, formal consultative and financial relations between governments and NGOs have been strengthened— even in countries such as France, where the state long balked at the idea of funding or lending its ear to non-state partners (Cumming 2009). The move towards increased formality is reflected in the current humanitarian system, which is increasingly driven by state money and contractual arrangements between governments and NGOs (Coyne 2013). In the field of advocacy campaigns, NGOs have also initiated or participated in various informal coalitions with states, mostly with the aim of establishing or bolstering harm conventions. The successful international campaign to ban landmines and the campaign for the creation of the ICC are well-known examples of informal coalitions of this kind, in which NGOs join with some states to counter others (Kirkey 2001; Sending and Neumann 2006). Whereas states—which have a tendency to talk only to other states—are traditionally ill-equipped to function in complex multi-stakeholder environments, NGOs have proved to be exceptionally good at facilitating and brokering coalitions, particularly between small states and non-state actors (Neumann 2013: 83–4). From the normative standpoint of critical recognition theory, there is no way to tell a priori whether all this is good or bad news. However, what the analysis presented here suggests is that it would be precipitate to conclude that NGOs are by definition forces for good, provided they are not corrupted by state power. My point, rather, is that states and international organizations can also be corrupted by NGOs—if, for example, they buy into the false authenticity claims and ill-informed agendas of what may be seen as self-appointed guardians of global morality. NGOs are not born morally superior to states, or indeed to businesses. Their critical, creative, and attention-focusing role has a dark side too. In the new global separation of powers currently emerging, all these actors—states, businesses, and advocacy organizations—deserve recognition to the extent that they limit each other’s power to harm. Since 9/11, for example, states have been instrumental in eliminating jihadist NGOs and bringing transnational Muslim NGOs into the mainstream of professional advocacy groups and global service providers (Bloodgood and Tremblay-Boire 2011; Petersen 2012; Thaut et al. 2012). Other groups are playing an important role in speeding up corporate change in the fields of climate and environmental politics and in exposing the unjust nature of state policies relating to vulnerable populations (Skocpol 2013). Heins | Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs Global Cooperation Research Papers 5 18 Conclusion: The Rise and Recognition of the Unelected There are various ways of conceptualizing NGOs in democratic and international relations theory. In this paper I have suggested a definition of NGOs as civil and cooperative associations working on behalf of, and for the recognition of, others. The irony is that these inclusionary efforts have an exclusionary side. International NGOs are unelected authorities wielding considerable power both in the public sphere and in the context of regulative and law-making institutions. Much has been written about governments remaining impervious to the moral rhetoric of NGOs, but the more important point is that the beliefs and preferences of NGOs are often not shared by the people either. While NGOs may see themselves as agents of moral redemption in international society, they are also unelected authorities whose legitimacy is permanently open to question. They should therefore be regarded as the human face of what Frank Vibert (2007) has called the ‘global rise of the unelected’—in other words, entities who govern the globe for and on behalf of, but without being authorized by, the people. Given this status, NGOs cannot be expected to contribute to transnational forms of democracy (Greven 2005). Their value in relation to new forms of governance lies elsewhere. Apart from helping to facilitate global cooperation, they are good at anticipating crises and are willing to say what is unsayable in the arena of electoral politics. Like other expert bodies, they are cut off from the noise of representative democracy; but unlike technocrats, they are well-attuned to the sound of impending danger. Recognition theory can serve as a resource for assessing contrasting claims about the legitimacy of transnational NGOs. In principle, there is nothing wrong with the notion of third-party intervention in global struggles for recognition. The fact that NGOs are unelected is also not in itself a problem. In modern societies, unelected professionals and agencies working in areas such as food protection, aviation security, and child support are vital in protecting citizens from harm. The same is true of statisticians, auditors, and central banks. These agencies rely for their legitimacy not on civic participation but on their specialist knowledge (Vibert 2007). Similarly, truly civic-minded NGOs distinguish themselves from elected bodies in a democracy by their eagerness to gather and disseminate harm-related information that is not skewed by governmental or corporate bias. Unlike the ‘bad’ NGOs mentioned before, these organizations are ideally characterized by ‘a more open acknowledgement of the incompleteness, uncertainties and disputes that accompany facts and empirical knowledge’ (Vibert 2007: 168). Another way in which NGOs can contribute to the quality of democracy is by fostering organic, cooperative relations with the sections of global society they speak for. This is best achieved when victims of perceived injustice take the initiative in creating their own international advocacy groups. Although historically NGOs have had a tendency to engage in advocacy on behalf of victims of abuse who cannot, or are not expected to, speak for themselves (political prisoners, for example), there have been cases where marginalized victims have successfully ‘gate-crashed’ established NGOs and persuaded their leaders to embrace new issues (see the examples in Bob 2009; Mertus 2009). In order to be effective and Heins | Global Cooperation and Economies of Recognition: The Case of NGOs Global Cooperation Research Papers 5 19 legitimate interveners in struggles for recognition, NGOs need to be seen to have deeply anchored roots. Organic ties do not have to be based on elections, but they do require openness, reciprocity, and mutual trust. They require what Edmund Burke called ‘a communion of interests, and a sympathy of feelings and desires between those who act in the name of any description of the people, and the people in whose name they act’ (cited in Eagleton 2009: 62). 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Wolf, Reinhard (2011). ‘Respect and Disrespect in International Politics: The Significance of Status Recognition’, International Theory 3 (1): 105–42. Global Cooperation Research Papers ISSN 2198-1949 (Print) ISSN 2198-0411 (Online) The Research Papers series is intended to reflect the latest state of research at the Centre. Individual issues are based on ideas that have emerged from in-depth exploration at the Centre’s research colloquiums. Papers may be submitted either by permanent Centre staff or by visiting academics and their research partners. Dirk Messner, Alejandro Guarín, Daniel Haun, The Behavioural Dimensions of International Cooperation Global Cooperation Research Papers 1, Duisburg 2013 Dirk Peters, Rethinking the Legitimacy of Global Governance. 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