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PhD Candidate Kendra Dupuy, Prof. Aseem Prakash & their colleague James Ron discuss the government crackdown on NGOs on openDemocracy.net

Submitted by Caterina Rost on May 5, 2016 - 4:43pm

On April 22, 2016, UW Political Science Ph.D. Candidate and researcher at Norway’s Chr. Michelsen Institute Kendra Dupuy, UW Political Science Professor Aseem Prakash and their colleague University of Minnesota Political Science Professor James Ron published an article discussing the governmental crackdown on NGOs on the independent global media platform openDemocracy.net. In the article, they point out that “39 of the world’s 153 low and middle-income countries enacted restrictive laws on foreign funding to civil society organizations […] from 1993 to 2012.” To explain what triggered these crackdowns as well as what possible remedies are, they cite their paper “Hands Off My Regime! Governments’ Restrictions on Foreign Aid to Non-Governmental Organizations in Poor and Middle-Income Countries,” which was recently published in the World Development journal. The statistical analysis of original data on these new laws brought the researchers to the conclusion “that higher levels of foreign aid inflows are associated with [a] higher chance of legal crackdowns” and that “the risk of a crackdown increases when the country faces nationally competitive elections.” 

You can read the full article “What drives the crackdown on NGOs, and how can it be stopped?” on the openDemocracy website. OpenDemocracy is a non-profit federation that was established in 2001 to “challenge power and encourage democratic debate across the world.” 

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