In this book, Patrice McMahon aims to critically examine the mixed achievements of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in peacebuilding by proposing to study them in terms of what she calls “the NGO game.” This is the game played by Western donors (governments, international aid organizations, and international NGOs, or INGOs) and local NGOs (LNGOs) that try to take advantage of aid monies and opportunities by playing along according to the donors’ rules and visions.

In the first two chapters, McMahon explains the emergence of the NGO game in many postconflict situations through a combination of structural changes in post–Cold War international politics (Chapter 1) and those in the NGO world (Chapter 2). Specifically, in the post–Cold War period marked by the prevalence of intrastate wars and ethnic conflicts, the international community developed an ambitious approach that aimed to transform the societies in question by addressing the “root causes” of the conflicts. This process of comprehensive conflict transformation often initiated by the United Nations raised expectations for NGOs to cover diverse peacebuilding needs. They were also deemed central to ensuring the bottom-up nature of peacebuilding and thereby signaling a radical departure from the erstwhile predominant top-down approach.

The author suggests that the changing expectations for NGOs corresponded with several changes in the NGO world, including (1) the increase in the number of NGOs worldwide, including local NGOs in non-Western countries; (2) the expansion of private financing for international assistance that now dwarfs governmental funds; (3) the international recognition of NGOs as important partners; and (4) the widening of NGO mandates to include broader assistance areas and more intrusive approaches. While these factors pushed major INGOs to become powerful actors in liberal peacebuilding in the 1990s and onward, the author’s verdict is a fairly critical one: They mostly work to reflect Western and/or their own agendas and interests, failing to engage meaningfully with local grassroots actors. This applies with equal force to other international stakeholders. As repeated throughout the book, the core problem with the NGO game is the inability of international actors to support the emergence of domestically embedded, self-sustaining LNGOs.

Why this is the case is demonstrated by detailed case studies in Bosnia (Chapter 3) and Kosovo (Chapter 4). In Bosnia, donors ostensibly adopted the consensus of developing democratic civil society through the empowerment of LNGOs that were thus treated as shorthand for a vibrant civil society. This consensus spurred the creation of hundreds or even thousands of Bosnian NGOs mostly dependent on external funding, but evidence points to little actual investment in Bosnia’s NGO sector. This, coupled with the rapid waning of international interest, led Bosnian NGOs to either disappear or end up chasing donors’ preferences rather than local needs simply in order to survive. With few concrete achievements and no effective coordination among themselves, NGOs in Bosnia were also seen as lacking legitimacy in the eyes of the local public.

A remarkably similar game played out in Kosovo after the NATO intervention, but unlike Bosnia, Kosovo was home to vibrant civil society organizations that had operated even before the intervention. As a result, the NGO game there distorted and weakened the local NGO sector by ignoring these indigenous organizations and instead supporting a host of new organizations that cater to international demands.

In both cases, the author attributes this state of affairs to (1) the presence of too many international stakeholders; (2) the lack of strategic consensus among them on the peacebuilding objectives and end states; and (3) their ignorance of and insensitivity toward local perceptions, norms, and experiences (pp. 115–21, 146–55).

This book can be read either as a critique of liberal peacebuilding from the NGO perspective or as a study on the behavior of NGOs in peacebuilding. Based on numerous visits and interviews in the Balkans, this work powerfully challenges a number of fallacies that characterize the practice of international peacebuilding. Furthermore, McMahon argues that the NGO game is deeply entrenched and unlikely to disappear because of four gaps in funding, empowerment, accountability, and motivation (pp. 176–78).

It is indeed true that peacebuilding—at least that modeled on liberal principles of governance and development—is increasingly criticized for its undesirable consequences, unintended effects, or misguided premises. Not only does this debate make it clear that peacebuilding is not working; moreover and troublingly, we also seem to be increasingly at a loss about how to envisage its future (see, e.g., David Chandler, Peacebuilding: The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1997–2017, 2017). However, as McMahon points out, NGOs have received little sustained attention in this debate as the mainstream focus tends to be on formal actors such as governmental agencies and international organizations. In this context, the book makes an important contribution to understanding the problematic consequences of international peacebuilding on the level of NGOs.

Analytically speaking, however, the author’s argument still leaves open the question as to what extent the NGO game and its consequences are attributable to NGOs themselves. When discussing the role of international stakeholders in Chapters 3 and 4, for instance, the author mostly takes up major governmental agencies and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) rather than INGOs (pp. 99–101, 115–18, 131–33, 136–37). Insofar as these formal actors take the lead and INGOs behave as part of this broader “international community,” the game is a fairly open one and may be seen as part of a rather familiar picture characterized by international-versus-local tensions.

Another point I should make is related to the author’s observation that after having gone through the NGO boom and bust during the 1990s, local groups in Bosnia now recognize their past dependence on international donors and are more determined to take initiatives on their own (p. 156). If this is typically what comes after the NGO bust, it may mean a new round of the game that involves LNGOs as more strategically minded actors rather than mere “victims” of the international moves—a theme that could have deserved more attention in the book.

The aforementioned difficulties in isolating the INGO–LNGO dynamics from the broader international–local one is closely related to the challenge of studying NGOs. For one, there are difficulties in getting the right data—and they are exacerbated by the problem of definition. The term itself says nothing beyond what they are not (nongovernmental); moreover, and as amply demonstrated in this book, even this distinction between governmental and nongovernmental actors is increasingly problematic in the context of their mutual dependence in practice. NGOs can therefore range from being anti-, a-, or quasi-governmental.

Another interesting observation in the book is the NGOs’ ability to operate as domestic, international, and transnational actors simultaneously (p. 21). For the international relations discipline, with its state centrism and international (in the sense of intergovernmental) focus, NGOs therefore present themselves as amorphous actors that defy its analytical assumptions. McMahon’s study highlights the complex nature of this analytical challenge without necessarily suggesting a solution (p. 178). However, by demonstrating the organizational, behavioral, and ideational diversity of today’s NGOs in the concrete process of peacebuilding, The NGO Game provides a useful empirical ground for IR scholars who are interested in unpacking the black box of NGOs.