Regulating NGO funding: securitizing the political
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117818782604 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117818782604
International Relations
2018, Vol. 32(4) 430 –448
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117818782604
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Regulating NGO funding:
securitizing the political
Scott Watson and Regan Burles
University of Victoria
Abstract
Securitization theory (ST) has succeeded in putting the relation between politics and security at
the forefront of research in security studies. Despite this success, little attention has been given
to the way states themselves produce the boundaries of legitimate political activity, particularly
in relation to the boundaries between civil society and the state and between the foreign and
domestic. This article is concerned with how states see the boundary between the political and the
non-political as a matter of security. It investigates this question by examining the international and
national efforts to restrict the financing of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society
actors. It demonstrates that these entities are deemed threatening to the established boundaries
of legitimate political activity and thus subject to harassment, increased regulation, and eradication.
This is done by the depiction of their activities as political, rather than humanitarian/cultural/social,
demonstrating that the concepts of politics operative in the ST literature are already delimited
through processes of securitization and depoliticization. Continued research into the relation
between politics and security must therefore consider the ways that the political itself is securitized.
Keywords
civil society, desecuritization, foreign funding, non-governmental organizations, securitization
Introduction
In March 2017, the Turkish government revoked the license of Mercy Corps, an American
non-governmental organization (NGO) that provides aid to refugees in the region.
Turkish efforts to curtail the activities of NGOs follow a recurrent pattern in a growing
number of states. In this case, Western newspapers suggested that Mercy Corps was
banned due to Turkish concerns it was offering support to groups carrying out armed
Corresponding authors:
Scott Watson, University of Victoria, David Turpin Building (DTB) A348, 3800 Finnerty Road, Victoria, BC
V8P 5C2, Canada.
Email: sdwatson@uvic.ca
Regan Burles, University of Victoria, David Turpin Building (DTB) A313, 3800 Finnerty Road, Victoria, BC
V8P 5C2, Canada.
Email: rburles@uvic.ca
782604IRE0010.1177/0047117818782604International RelationsWatson and Burles
research-article2018
Article
Watson and Burles 431
resistance to the Turkish government. The same day Western newspapers carried reports
of the Turkish government’s ban on an American NGO; they also reported that Michael
Flynn, the former national security advisor for the Trump administration, had registered
as a foreign agent of Turkey – this shortly after having been removed from his position
due to alleged contact with Russian authorities during the 2016 US election.1 Besides the
Turkish connection, both developments aptly demonstrate the securitization of foreign
influence in domestic affairs, and the way that securing the boundary between politics
and civil society is one of the primary means of dealing with the threat of foreign
influence.
Perhaps just as telling is that in both cases, the security threat was handled by routine
bureaucratic procedures. In the case of Turkey, it was enforcement of registration require-
ments and Mercy Corps’ incomplete documentation that resulted in expulsion. In the
case of Flynn, he and his firm had to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents
Registration Act (FARA), a routine procedure for many lobby and consultancy groups in
the United States. The ‘bureaucratic’ process further demonstrates how ‘institutional-
ized’ or ‘technocratic’ forms of securitization function, while also bringing into relief the
complicated relationship between the inter-related spheres of security, politics, and the
activities of civil society. Rather than draw attention to the fraught boundary between
politics and security that has been a core area of concern in securitization studies, we
suggest that these developments require greater attention to the legal distinction states
that draw between political and non-political activity to depoliticize civil society and
secure the state against foreign influence.
In this article, we advance three general claims. The first is that preserving civil soci-
ety as a distinct realm of non-political activity legitimizes state authority and its security
practices, even when civil society actors are not actively participating in the securitiza-
tion process. This is accomplished through civil society’s active participation in the
maintenance of a non-political realm as distinct from the realms of politics and, there-
fore, security. The state’s regulation of civil society through tax law, registration, and
foreign funding reporting requirements enables it to enforce a political/non-political
binary. These mechanisms also allow states to garner support for security practices by
denying certain actors the ability to participate in activities deemed to be political. This
leads to our second contention, that civil society is constrained in its securitizing and
desecuritizing potential due to the restrictions enforced through the political/non-politi-
cal binary, in which violation of that boundary is itself a matter of security. Third, this
reinforces the importance of addressing less visible security practices, in which existing
bureaucracies are empowered to police and enforce the boundary between politics and
non-politics.2
This article interrogates these connections through an examination of the regulation
of foreign funding to NGOs and civil society organizations (CSOs). Notably, state efforts
to depoliticize civil society by securitizing foreign funding to NGOs is frequently done
by classifying the activities of NGOs that receive foreign funding as engaging in political
rather than social, cultural, or humanitarian/charitable activity. By deeming NGOs that
receive foreign funding to be engaging in ‘political’ activity, the state justifies increased
regulation, thereby enforcing an ‘internal’ boundary between politics and non-politics
and between the state and civil society with reference to the ‘external’ boundary between
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