Looking for Solidarnosc in Central Asia: The Role of Human Rights Organizations in Political Change
Author(s)
Grodsky, Brian
Abstract
According to scholars of resource dependency, foreign funding can weaken rather than strengthen civil society abroad, ultimately impeding its effectiveness. Yet the spate of recent “democratic revolutions” in semiauthoritarian, postcommunist states suggests that pumping foreign money into the nongovernmental sphere can be an effective strategy. In this paper Brian Grodsky argues that a critical factor in assessing the likelihood that a given organizational movement will succumb to the ills of resource dependency is the type of politicization within that movement. Those organizations composed of members primarily motivated by ideology are logically less likely to succumb to resource dependency than those organizations dominated by political aspirants intent on converting democratization into their own political power. Two case studies, communist-era Poland and contemporary Uzbekistan, provide support for this theory.
