Civil society from abroad: United States donors in the former Soviet Union (Kyrgyzstan, Russia)

This dissertation analyzes US civil society assistance for post-Soviet Russia and Kyrgyzstan. Since the early 1990s, civil society assistance provided by public and private American donor organizations has centered on promoting the development of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and resulted in the creation of thousands of post-Soviet NGOs. I argue that US civil society assistance is a mechanism for diffusing the organizational and cultural form of the professional NGO to receiving societies and that, more generally, donors are important, but under-appreciated, agents behind the worldwide diffusion of Western organizational and cultural models.; The donor-driven diffusion aims at imposing a familiar conceptual order on an unfamiliar institutional and cultural terrain. When US donors first set foot in the former Soviet Union, the organization of post-Soviet society was illegible to them. Populating the post-Soviet terrain with familiar organizational forms has made it more legible and created clients for donors' funds. After more than a decade of assistance, American donors became institutionalized having established a universe of post-Soviet NGOs vying for their continuing support. At the same time, although NGOs appear natural to US donors, they represent an institutional form unfamiliar to post-Soviet society and their activities are determined by donors' preferences and priorities. Post-Soviet NGOs derive their legitimacy from Western donors' financial and moral support; when the former seek to influence the post-Soviet state, they do so by appealing to donors. As the earliest, largest, and most vocal promoters of NGOs, US donors in particular act as mediators between post-Soviet NGOs and the post-Soviet state.; US civil society assistance constitutes a small share of the overall foreign aid flow for the former Soviet Union. Since the early 1990s, Kyrgyzstan has become heavily dependent on foreign aid, while Russia has not. In Russia, NGOs live off foreign assistance; in Kyrgyzstan, both NGOs and the state do. Therefore, in Kyrgyzstan, unlike Russia, foreign aid itself structures the context in which US donor-supported NGOs operate, and the latter have to confront both the illiberal post-Soviet state and the multiple flows of foreign aid.