Nongovernmental Organizations Worldwide

Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) worldwide have grown tremendously in the last several decades and play an increasing role in international politics. Through the consultative status granted to NGOs at the United Nations (UN), and through the UN global conferences beginning in the 1970s, more NGOs were created. By the turn of the century, NGOs had begun to use the strategy of forming coalitions, increasingly influencing international politics and women's lives.

NGOs are not a homogenous group. They can be local, national, or international; international NGOs are often referred to as INGOs. While the term NGOs is sometimes used interchangeably with “grassroots organizations,” “social movements,” and “civil society,” NGOs differ from these. Grassroots organizations are generally locally organized groups of individuals that have spring up to empower their members and take action on particular issues of concern to them. Some NGOs are grassroots organizations, but many are not. Social movements are broader and more diffuse [Page 1016]than organizations; a social movement encompasses a broad segment of society that is interested in fomenting or resisting social change in some particular issue area, such as disarmament, environmental, civil rights, or women's movements. A social movement may include NGOs and grassroots organizations. Finally, the term civil society became popularized at the end of the Cold War to describe what appeared to have been missing in state-dominated societies: broad societal participation in and concern for governance, but not necessarily government. Civil society is thought to be the necessary ingredient for democratic governance to arise. NGOs are one part of civil society.

The long list of acronyms that has accumulated around NGOs illustrates their diversity. People speak of NGOs, INGOs (international NGOs), BINGOs (business international NGOs), RINGOs (religious international NGOs), ENGOs (environmental NGOs), WINGOs (women's international NGOs), GONGOs (government-operated NGOs—which may have been set up by governments to look like NGOs in order to qualify for outside aid), QUANGOs (quasi-nongovernmental organizations—that is, those that are at least partially created or supported by states), and many others.

While some other groups are nongovernmental, and are generally included as nonstate actors, they are not usually included under the term NGO. The term usually explicitly excludes for-profit corporations, and private contractors, and multinational corporations (MNCs), although associations formed by MNCs, such as the International Chamber of Commerce, are considered NGOs. Similarly, political parties, liberation movements, and terrorist organizations are not usually considered NGOs. Recently, however, some from outside the field of international organization, especially military writers, have begun to refer to terrorist movements as NGOs, some would say in order to discredit NGOs. Peter Willetts, an authority on NGOs, argues in defining NGOs that a commitment not to use violence is a basic characteristic.