Nongovernmental actors on the world stage

A large number of people throughout the world regard themselves as participants in the international arena, because they are involved as members in one or more of the literally thousands of "nongovernmental organizations" (NGOs). These are private international actors whose members are not states, but are instead volunteers drawn from the populations of two or more states who form organizations to promote their shared ideals and interests by influencing the policies of national governments and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). These NGOs tackle many global problems such as disarmament, crime, environmental deterioration, and human rights abuses. Their contribution has often been impressively constructive to the promotion of high ideals. For example, NGOs such as Amnesty International, the International Chamber of Commerce, Greenpeace, the Red Cross, Save the Children, the World Wildlife Federation, and the Union of Concerned Scientists work with both states and IGOs, and their efforts have led to the successful creation of regimes or sets of rules that help to regulate many transnational problems. At the same time, a large number of NGOs are composed of minority racial or religious groups whose demands shake the sovereign control of fragile or failing states and lead to a devolution of power within many other strong states.

This unit will bring into perspective nonstate entities as actors in world politics, a category that includes many types of actors.

The term "nonstate entity" covers an enormously broad range of groups. On the most basic level, nonstate entities are associations of individuals and/or groups that are not established by agreements among states. This broad definition includes such disparate entities as transnational corporations and the business associations they establish to promote their interests, professional associations, ethnic groups, major religious organizations, terrorist groups, and social movements.

While the stories of these diverse groups of NGOs are rich (and growing), this unit will concentrate only on the major NGOs whose political pressure on states to accept their claims arouses the most debate worldwide. This selective focus is justified because today a small subset of increasingly active and self-assertive major nonstate actors provoke the most controversy. To simplify our task, we will thus examine the most visible politically active non-state actors (ethnopolitical groups, religious movements, terrorists, and multinational corporations).

In examining these major categories of NGO actors, consider whether world politics is undergoing a transformation as these political units compete for influence with the territorial state, which has been dominant for the past three centuries. The question is critically important because if, in the future, nonstate actors gain greater autonomy and power over states' resources and policy making, the state-centric structure of the international system will corrode, and the consequences of eroding state sovereignty are difficult to predict. The activities of these NGOs have been responsible in many ways for increasingly calling into question the idea that the state has full and exclusive control over its destiny. NGOs are making borders porous and states vulnerable both to external pressures and to challenges from within their boundaries.

Today the state-centric world no longer predominates. The skill revolution, the worldwide authority crises, and other sources of turbulence have led to a bifurcation of the international system into two global structures, one the long-standing state-centric world of sovereign states and the other a complex multicentric world of diverse, relatively autonomous actors replete with structures, processes, and rules of their own in "globalized space". The actors of the multicentric world consist of NGOs, multinational corporations, ethnic minorities, subnational governments and bureaucracies, professional societies, incipient communities, and the like. Individually and sometimes jointly, they compete, conflict, cooperate, or otherwise interact with the sovereignty-bound actors of the state-centric world.

Let us look at the major NGOs to better evaluate whether they are contributing to the erosion of state sovereignty.

Politically active minority groups: ethnopolitical nationalists and indigenous peoples in the fourth world

On the surface, the images of the all-powerful state and of governments as sovereign and autonomous rulers of unified nations are not very satisfactory. These images exaggerate the extent to which the state resembles a unitary actor [1], as realists often ask us to picture it. In truth, the unitary actor conception is misleading, because many states are divided internally and highly penetrated from abroad, and few are tightly unified and capable of acting as a single unit with a common purpose.

Many political scientists see a pressing "need to deal with the consequences of the declining ability of various governments to govern," and to confront the fact that one of the main forces contributing to "the erosion of effective government and of public confidence in government is the seeming insolvable nature of ethnic and religious differences that make political and social peace in more and more states a problematic exercise" (Shultz and Olson). It has also been suggested that we must face the possibility that the "omnipotent state" of this century is a "historical anomaly" that "may be sickly and pale" because "nationalism is on the rise" (Mead).