During the last ten years, many states around the world have taken measures to restrict or openly resist the activities of foreign governments and non-state actors that support local civil society groups. The 2011 raid on foreign and foreign-funded NGOs in Egypt and the harassment of what are now called “foreign agents” in Russia are only the most prominent cases of a trend that is manifold and covers all world regions and regime types. This phenomenon, which has been dubbed the “closing space” , is part of a general increase in resistance against the international promotion of democracy and human rights.
Given that external civil society support constitutes a key element in existing strategies of democracy and human rights promotion, the closing space is of immediate relevance for governments, international organizations and NGOs that have committed themselves to this endeavor. Correspondingly, in recent years, the phenomenon has received increasing attention by civil society activists, policy-makers and academics. Yet, as we argue in a PRIF report on which this contribution draws, existing studies on the closing space largely ignore, or deliberately downplay, the normative dimension of the problem at hand. To the extent that the justifications offered in order to defend restrictions on foreign funding are considered at all, they are almost immediately dismissed as poorly veiled rationalizations for violations of international law uttered by some incumbent governments that solely want to remain in power. Politically, this is understandable given that the closing space phenomenon usually pits vulnerable civil society groups against much more powerful governments. And, yet, this one-sidedness is both remarkable and problematic.
A promising response to the spread of closing spaces cannot but include a serious engagement with the concerns raised by those many governments that are pushing it.It is remarkable because the critique of external interference in the name of national sovereignty and collective self-determination points to well-established, if certainly not uncontested, international principles. The international norms on which external civil society support is based, in contrast, are informal and implicit. It is problematic because the proliferation of closing spaces around the world suggests that this problem cannot be handled by simply trying to convince, marginalize or, if need be, fight a few “misguided” governments. A promising response to the spread of closing spaces cannot but include a serious engagement with the concerns raised by those many governments that are, in one way or another, pushing it. This is all the more crucial because the international practice of civil society support, and with it the political debate about foreign funding and closing space, is embedded in fundamentally asymmetric power relations and shaped by deep-seated post-colonial legacies.
