Sara de Jong’s review highlights some important insights related to issues of hypothesis testing and qualitative data analysis, and to the ways in which our two books speak to alternative literatures.
First, de Jong questions whether, given the cohesiveness of the book’s narrative, I encountered any surprises in the process of data collection or analysis. Because in many ways I was venturing into new scholarly territory with this research, my approach was by necessity heavily inductive, and so the book does not engage in the kind of explicit hypothesis testing that might have resulted in “surprise” findings. However, my time in the field certainly involved many surprises, both enlightening and adverse. I was, for instance, surprised to discover how well attuned many of my subjects were to the normative commitments and even to the jargon of the international aid regime, and just how strategically both local NGOs and ordinary community members used this knowledge. At the same time, I was surprised at the willingness of some community members to pay high local social costs as the price of their genuine commitment to an international norm like the one against FGM. While the discussion of the qualitative findings was by necessity streamlined, requiring some sacrifice of complexity in order to leave space for the accompanying quantitative analysis, I nonetheless believe that the qualitative analysis reveals both unexpected and rich insights into local actors’ decision making.
The book’s methodological appendix also discusses some surprising challenges I faced in conducting both the interview and survey research, at some length. Indeed, I view it as critical to be transparent about problems that arise in the course of fieldwork, both because it allows the reader to assess the validity of the findings with more complete information about the quality of the data, and because I think it is important that more researchers acknowledge that fieldwork never goes perfectly as planned (especially so that new scholars entering the discipline may gain insight into how other researchers have adapted to the inevitable difficulties that arise).
Second, it is certainly true that de Jong and I are speaking to different core literatures in our books—while she primarily engages the postcolonial, critical-development studies, global civil society, and feminist literatures, I primarily engage international relations, NGO, and social psychology literatures. I certainly do not reject the insights developed by the former set of more critical literatures. I discuss the connections between my work and the literature on the politics of culture in the book’s conclusion (as de Jong notes), and also incorporate critical feminist literature on the international women’s rights campaign into the introduction. But ultimately, some choices have to be made where many relevant literatures apply, and de Jong is right that I have chosen to prioritize my contribution to the IR literature on norms.
Despite speaking to different primary literatures, I believe our books provide complementary approaches to the challenges and problematics associated with NGO work and activism that originates in the global North but that hopes to produce meaningful change in the global South, and to the complicated relationships between northern and southern activists. De Jong’s focus on northern NGO workers’ perspectives harmonizes with my focus on predominantly southern activists and the communities in which they work to provide a more comprehensive picture of the complexity inherent to transnational mobilization around women’s and gender issues.
