Globalization from Below: AIDWA, Foreign Funding, and Gendering Anti-Violence Campaigns

Abstract

Social movements and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) fight on the frontlines of neoliberal development policies, for their constituencies and for their own survival. These groups’ proximity to neoliberalism, through their funding sources and decision-making structures, has come under increasing scrutiny marked by the critical description of their “NGOization.” This globalization from below into the fabric of grassroots resistance marks an important site of departure for one national women’s organization, the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA). Member-sustained and independent from outside donor funding, but deeply marked by World Bank/International Monetary Fund development demands, AIDWA sheds light on those organizational forms that refuse to compromise their goals even as they recognize changing political conditions. This paper looks at their analysis and politics to combat violence against women, an approach that never wholly leaves its local battles against domestic violence even as it directly implicates neoliberal capitalism in women’s intimate relationships with violence.