Are U.S. Government-funded NGOs Promoting Democracy Abroad? The Cases of Egypt and Honduras

Two activist conservative U.S.-funded non-governmental organizations were among the seven NGO offices raided by the Egyptian authorities last December 29. The attempts to bring publicity to the work of these organizations by the Egyptian military rulers escalated January 26 , when Sam LaHood and other employees of the International Republican Institute’s program in Egypt were refused permission, at the airport,  to leave the country. As the story continues to unfold, the U.S. embassy has now decided to protect some of the NDI and IRI employees in the large embassy compound in Cairo.

Tahrir Square One -Year Anniversary – Jan. 25, 2012

Early in 2011 Egyptian democratic activists challenged their government’s status quo, and their hard work paid off when Mubarak fell from power on January 25, 2011. Democracy has not looked so powerful in many decades. After this first anniversary, the question becomes ’what are the conditions of democratic governance at the one-year mark?‘


If we measure democracy in terms of elections, many commentators have noted that the rapid move to elections guaranteed the already well-organized Muslim Brotherhood an advantage at the early, formative stage of the transition to an electoral system. And the election results announced this past Sunday show why. The young activists whose organizing overthrew Mubarak gained only 7 seats in the People’s Assembly, while a new tech mogul billionaire’s party won over 7% and long-established Islamist and liberal parties won the rest of the seats.

Moana Nui and Fair Trade Partnerships in the Pacific

Important travel and trade practices that have long formed extended exchange communities of Oceania will be the focus of the upcoming Moana Nui summit of Pacific Islanders to be held in Honolulu, Hawaii November 9, 10, and 11, 2011.

These practices are endangered by a proposed trade agreement comparable to NAFTA, but encompassing countries on the Pacific Rim rather than those in North America. The proposed agreement, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), would have the same devastating impacts on local production networks, trading practices, and populations in the Pacific Rim, as NAFTA on jobs, farms, and other sectors in North America. The United States has drafted Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam into developing the TPP; the number of nations might increase as the conservative trade organization, Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), meets in Honolulu to attempt to finalize language for the TPP.

The topics and the content of the many preliminary discussions leading to the APEC meeting in Honolulu have been kept secret, thereby violating transparency protocols of democratic governments and U.S. President Obama’s explicit promise that the TPP discussions would usher in a new era of transparency in international trade agreement discussions.

Decolonizing Democracy

The Egyptian Democratic Academy in Cairo is one of the local organizations that made the Jasmine Revolution possible, educating Egyptians about alternatives to dictatorships and military rule under Mubarak. A recent story in The Nation describes one of the teachers at the Academy, a 25-year-old woman, Esraa Nouh, whose father was imprisoned under Mubarak for many years. Nouh believes in liberalism and John Stuart Mill, and teaches the history of liberalism beginning with the Greek origins (more on them in a moment) and John Locke, drawing a thread connecting that history to recent Egyptian political trends.

The irony is that J.S. Mill’s views on politics and economics were dominant in Britain and other countries at the height of the colonization of Egypt. In fact, John Locke was as strongly supportive of slavery as the Egyptian pharaohs were, which makes him even less of a pretender to democracy than Mubarak was. Locke’s profits from his investments in English slave trade ships led him to support private property as a central right in democratic representational governance.

Other Sovereignties

Subaltern populations achieve autonomy in many ways under globalization and the War on Terror. Their sites of autonomy rarely come to global public awareness, but when they do they are shaped by the terms under which they make sense to largely bourgeois, news-viewing and academic readers and viewers.  What other terms and logics might be useful for understanding subaltern autonomy?