How do female activists based in the global North, and working on behalf of women in and from the global South, think about themselves, their work, and the women they serve? In her thought-provoking book, Sara de Jong explores the intersection of North and South, gender and “culture,” theory and practice, through a careful reading of the reflections of northern nongovernmental workers on their own complicated positionings.
De Jong conducts in-depth interviews with female NGO workers based in a number of European cities, all of whom address women’s and gender issues through their work. This includes women working for international NGOs headquartered in the North but with operations in the South, as well as women working for NGOs that assist migrant populations located in Europe. The author asks her interviewees to describe how they view their own roles within these organizations (the Self), how they view the intended beneficiaries of their work (the Other), and how they conceptualize the relationship between the two.
Complicit Sisters proceeds in a discursive fashion. De Jong organizes the texts of her interviews around related themes, such as privilege, power, and distance, and then analyzes these texts by weaving together insights from multiple critical literatures—feminist theories, postcolonial theories, global civil society theories, and critical development literature. In the process, she reveals the tensions inherent in performing work that is ostensibly for the benefit of (distant) populations marginalized by sex, race, class, and nation, and she does so in a way that is deeply engaged with theory and at the same time empirically grounded—no small feat.
With respect to interviewees’ understandings of the Self, de Jong articulates how many of the women in her study appear aware of their various forms of privilege, and indeed draw from this understanding a sense of responsibility to help others, but without necessarily acknowledging the ways in which their privilege is dependent on the marginalization of others and in which doing NGO work gives them additional opportunities and status. She notes an incongruence in the fact that the interviewees see themselves as simultaneously similar to those they are helping—there is a responsibility to help because all are women—and different from them, as the interviewees’ greater opportunities put them in a position to assist the disadvantaged Other. De Jong also makes a particularly insightful point about the “false binary” of altruistic versus self-interested motives for doing gender and development work (p. 55): While many of the interviewees seemed to be justifying their careerism in light of a long-running critical discourse about how the professionalization of (feminist) NGO work undermines its altruistic impulse, she argues that workers who acknowledge self-interest may in fact reduce inequality between themselves and those they seek to assist because both are getting something out of the relationship, rather than one party bestowing benevolence upon the other.
With respect to interviewees’ understanding of the Other, de Jong notes a tendency to both reference colonialism and simultaneously relegate its effects to the past. Yet she sees the colonial-era racialization of the Other continuing on in a less explicit fashion in present-day activism, where now the “civilizing” mission targets “culture” and “traditions” rather than “race” as holding back women from the global South (p. 195). This is problematic in part because this brand of cultural relativism creates a distance between northern and southern women and enables the interviewees to explain southern women’s disadvantages without having to acknowledge broader structural forces that maintain power imbalances.
In considering the relationship between the Self and the Other, de Jong speaks to critiques of global civil society’s ability to engage in true representation. She observes her interviewees using trips to the field and access to beneficiaries’ stories as mechanisms for bridging the distance between their location in the North and the beneficiaries in the South, but suggests that these mechanisms are inadequate, especially insofar as southern “partner” organizations become “replacement” beneficiaries. She further describes a “race to innocence” among many of her interviewees, in which the activists, in reflecting on their identities, highlight their own subordination as women and implicitly ignore other ways in which they are implicated in structures of dominance, thus enabling them to claim a sisterhood with disadvantaged southern women based on a problematic concept of shared victimhood (p. 133). Yet the author does not simply offer a critique here; she goes on to provide an affirmative set of strategies for building solidarities among women across the North–South divide that can go beyond global sisterhood, a step that I particularly appreciated.
In presenting her arguments, de Jong engages in textual analysis of a sort that is not often seen in political science outside of political theory, in some cases providing long transcribed passages from her interviews and then parsing them for meaning. She considers both text and subtext, and even reflects on things unsaid, providing a richly detailed interpretation of her interviewees’ words. The analysis draws from only 21 interviews, raising some concerns about generalizability, but de Jong makes good use of the data she does have. Indeed, a particular strength of the book is the vivid portraits she paints of her interviewees. They are not simply interchangeable suppliers of pithy, isolated quotations, but well-defined individuals. Even as she maintains interviewees’ anonymity, she nonetheless manages to convey a lot of information about specific interviewees’ backgrounds, characteristics, and present employment, and also does a nice job of drawing a through-line that connects different statements by a given interviewee at different points in the book.
As she interrogates the positionings of the northern NGO workers interviewed, de Jong also does well to reflect on her own positioning. As a former NGO worker herself, she notes that she is “positioned as neither more ‘innocent’ nor more ‘progressive’ than the women [she] interviewed,” and indeed recalls being confronted by her “own complicity in perpetuating different structures of inequality . . . inside this space of ‘doing good’” (p. 3). She also reflects on her relational positioning vis-à-vis her interviewees, noting how her own status as a white, Western, educated, middle-class woman likely put many of her predominantly white, Western, middle-class, educated female interviewees at ease and encouraged them to engage in more honest reflections (though it may also have encouraged them to view her as a “white ally” in problematic ways, as she notes at p. 7).
De Jong thus does a lot of important work to provide context about her interviewees and the relational dynamics between herself and them, allowing the reader some insight into what prompted the interviewees’ reflections and how those reflections might reasonably be interpreted. This is critical to the overall persuasiveness of the book, though some other relevant contextual details of the interviews are missing. De Jong does not discuss the setting of the interviews, their duration, or whether multiple interviews were conducted with the same interviewee over time, all of which might speak to the rapport between interviewer and interviewee. Also missing was a discussion of how the individual interviewees were selected from among the many thousands of northern NGO workers tackling women’s issues, which would address the representativeness of the sample. Because so much hinges on the quality of these narratives, a bit more information about the research context would have given me increased confidence in her interpretation of the data.
Nonetheless, de Jong makes a number of valuable contributions to the literatures with which she engages. First, the very micro-level approach taken in Complicit Sisters is interwoven with meso- and macro-level arguments from the critical development literature, allowing the reader to see how critiques of NGO structures and broader global structures of inequality are understood by individual NGO workers and can situate their ideas and actions.
Second, by looking specifically at female activists who work on women’s and gender issues, de Jong effectively ties the insights of the critical development literature with related insights from feminist theories. Employing an intersectional perspective, she shows convincingly that postcolonial feminist critiques of the concept of “global sisterhood” and the impossibility of true representation of less powerful women by more powerful women parallel development critiques of North–South structural inequalities and the inadequacy of “participation” by southern beneficiaries as a solution to such inequalities.
Third, the author pushes for a reevaluation of the role of “space, distance, and transnationality” in the critical development literature (p. 10), as she identifies many of the same tensions in the efforts of NGO workers based in the North that other scholars have found in the work of northern NGO workers operating in the South. She persuasively argues “that the issues and concerns that have been identified in the field of development should not be understood as emerging from the international mobility of aid workers and from an imposed presence of Northern workers in the global South, but rather from the structures [of inequality] that make this possible” (p. 192).
Finally, within her focus on northern NGOs, de Jong links the work of international development and humanitarian NGOs with primary operations in the South to the work of national NGOs working with migrant populations in the North. She emphasizes the comparative novelty and indeed necessity of this approach, because keeping the international and domestic wings of the third sector artificially discrete “relies on a refusal to recognize the linkages between global trade, migration, poverty, and development, as well as on a postcolonial insistence on distinguishing the ‘developing’ from the ‘developed’ world” (p. 10).
Ultimately, de Jong produces an incisive book that blends insights from multiple critical literatures with original findings. As such, it will be useful to scholars of development, migration, and the transnational women’s movement.
