About this item
Highlights
- What is it about nonprofits that inspires so many to passionately support their agendas and others to adamantly seek their control?
- About the Author: Erica Bornstein is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon.
- 296 Pages
- Social Science, Anthropology
Description
About the Book
"What is it about nonprofits that inspires so many to passionately support their agendas and others to adamantly seek their control? In India, laws regulating the nonprofit sector were dramatically reformed between 2010-2020, reconfiguring relationships between corporations, nonprofits, and the government. Thousands of nonprofits, including powerful NGOs, lost their ability to receive foreign funding, and in 2015 dozens more were put on a state-sponsored watch list. While many assume that nonprofits are defined by the causes they champion, A Revolution of Rules demonstrates that the nonprofit form is shaped primarily through its regulation, in a dynamic process of democratic and political negotiation. Erica Bornstein argues that the scrutiny of nonprofits in India must be understood in a wider, global context of political judicialization and regulatory reform. She examines how members of nonprofit organizations are the unsung heroes of democracy as they navigate a shrinking stage for rights-based work and struggle to protect civil society. The protagonists featured in this book include nonprofit workers, lawyers, accountants, philanthropists, and civil servants who conduct their work on the sidelines--at workshops, in modest offices, through report-writing and petitions. To understand nonprofits and their relationship to democracy in the world, Bornstein asserts, one must look to the deceptively unassuming sites of struggle over the nonprofit form and its regulation"--Book Synopsis
What is it about nonprofits that inspires so many to passionately support their agendas and others to adamantly seek their control? In India, laws regulating the nonprofit sector were dramatically reformed between 2010-2020, reconfiguring relationships between corporations, nonprofits, and the government. Thousands of nonprofits, including powerful NGOs, lost their ability to receive foreign funding, and in 2015 dozens more were put on a state-sponsored watch list. While many assume that nonprofits are defined by the causes they champion, A Revolution of Rules demonstrates that the nonprofit form is shaped primarily through its regulation, in a dynamic process of democratic and political negotiation.
Erica Bornstein argues that the scrutiny of nonprofits in India must be understood in a wider, global context of political judicialization and regulatory reform. She examines how members of nonprofit organizations are the unsung heroes of democracy as they navigate a shrinking stage for rights-based work and struggle to protect civil society. The protagonists featured in this book include nonprofit workers, lawyers, accountants, philanthropists, and civil servants who conduct their work on the sidelines--at workshops, in modest offices, through report-writing and petitions. To understand nonprofits and their relationship to democracy in the world, Bornstein asserts, one must look to the deceptively unassuming sites of struggle over the nonprofit form and its regulation.
Review Quotes
"Powerfully reframes the study of nonprofits, focusing not on the impact of their work but on the laws and rules that shape who they are and what they can and cannot do. In brilliantly analyzing the recent history of the legal regulation of NGOs and charitable purpose in India, this book speaks to an emergent global trend--the increasing surveillance of civil society groups and narrowing scope of political action--and is far-reaching in its implications. A must read for anyone interested in the NGO form, state power and governance, corporatized charity and welfare, judicialized activism, and democratic politics today." --Aradhana Sharma, Wesleyan University
"Erica Bornstein is one of the pioneers of the anthropology of nonprofit agencies, philanthropy and civil society. This sharp and innovative account offers a fresh perspective on how policy is constituted through negotiation and the vital role played by activists and staff in the face of an increasingly authoritarian Indian state. An important contribution." --David Lewis, London School of Economics
About the Author
Erica Bornstein is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi (Stanford, 2012).