The righteous and the rightful: The technomoral politics of NGOs, social movements, and the state in India

Abstract

Civil society groups today are honored and relied on by governments, as well as tightly regulated and scrutinized for challenging state policies and agencies. In contemporary India, political dynamics of collaboration and confrontation between state and nonstate actors increasingly unfold in legal‐social fields, taking “technomoral” forms. Mixing technocratic languages of law and policy with moral pronouncements, these actors assert themselves as virtuous agents, marking their political legitimacy as keepers of the public interest. Using ethnographic research with Indian NGOs, social movements, and a political party, we show that as civil society groups interact with state bodies, they redefine institutional boundaries and claim moral authority over public stewardship. Technomoral strategies are neither depoliticized nor antipolitical, but constitute a righteous and rightful form of politics. [NGOs, state, India, morality, activist politics, neoliberalism, law]

Understanding Contemporary Challenges to INGO Legitimacy: Integrating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Perspectives

“…Although INGOs themselves are equipped to draw insights from these multiple perspectives through their everyday operations, few academic studies of INGO legitimacy are designed to capture these dynamics. Such an approach may imply tracing how, for example, the current backlash against INGOs in India is connected both to localised concerns about INGOs' practices and accountability as well as to wider geopolitical changes relating to the country's changing international status and priorities (see, for example, Bornstein and Sharma 2016).…”

Digital Politics in the Diaspora: U.K. Aam Aadmi Party Supporters Online and Offline

“…Styling itself as a second freedom movement and deploying nationalist imagery, activists gathered behind the figurehead of the veteran social activist Anna Hazare (see Chowdhury, Banerjee, and Nagarkoti 2017). The series of spectacular protests demanding anti-corruption legislation staged by the IAC across 2011-12 (see Pinney 2014;Webb 2014;Bornstein and Sharma 2016), were made all the more forceful by being contemporary with the "Arab Spring" (Werbner, Webb, and Spellman-Poots 2014).…”

Keywords and key words in AE

“…In Ahearn's () data, the word occurs in AE only in 2012 (used five times as a keyword), when it might have still been considered a trendy buzzword rather than the key dimension in anthropological thinking that it has become since. In AE ’s articles of the past four years, neoliberalism indexes a range of subjects, including the technomoral politics of NGOs, social movements, and the state in India (Bornstein and Sharma ), bread‐and‐butter politics in English council estates (I. Koch ), postneoliberal statecraft in Brazil (Biehl ), merit‐based financial aid for undocumented students in the United States (Flores ), audit culture in food production in Italy (Cavanaugh ), anthropology's role in critiquing the neoliberal university (Gusterson ), the racialization of US law schools (Tejani ), affective responses to the ruination of place in Algeria (Goodman ), and citizen science in the governance of radioactive contamination in Japan (Polleri ), among many other fascinating subjects.…”

“…That this ethnographic commitment creates its own impact becomes clear if we return to the download figures. Besides the articles in the two popular forums, those articles with more than 2,000 downloads include Lila Abu‐Lughod's () “The Cross‐Publics of Ethnography: The Case of ‘the Muslimwoman’” (downloaded 3,705 times), Felicity Aulino's () “Rituals of Care for the Elderly in Northern Thailand: Merit, Morality, and the Everyday of Long‐Term Care” (downloaded 3,049 times), Erica Bornstein and Aradhana Sharma's () “The Righteous and the Rightful: The Technomoral Politics of NGOs, Social Movements, and the State in India” (2,649), and Perry Sherouse's () “Skill and Masculinity in Olympic Weightlifting: Training Cues and Cultivated Craziness in Georgia” (2,544). Besides illustrating that captivating article titles might do more to attract readers than SEO‐focused keywords, these articles show that the anthropologist's authority in the field, built over many years of hard ethnographic labor, is still the best guarantee of impact.…”