This text engages with the debates on the influence of NGOs on transnational and internationalized politics, which were particularly intense and controversial in the 1990s and 2000s. In the wake of the current revival of national authoritarianism and polarization of social conflicts in many contexts today, the questions raised during that period have been somehow pushed aside. Nevertheless, the effects generated by processes of NGOization remain an important issue for forms of organizing, especially for the transformative agendas of social movements. And they continue to be fundamental issues for a critical theory of the state.

In the 1990s the broad activism and visibility of feminist and environmental NGOs, in particular on the UN policy stage, was associated with intense political contestation. The references ranged from an idealization of the transformative power of ‘global governance’ to a radical critique of the appropriation and dilution of political struggles. The background to my engagement with these questions is in particular my research on what became known as the Cairo Consensus of 1994. This refers to the agreement between an influential section of feminist women's health NGOs and the representatives of a multilateral network of population policy agencies. The Cairo Consensus led to the Cairo Programme of Action, which on the one hand established important feminist concepts such as sexual and reproductive health and rights on the stage of multilateral politics. On the other hand, however, it closely interlinked and framed these concepts within the project of an antinatalist policy designed to lower birth rates in the Global South. That NGOs simultaneously advanced feminist reforms and supported a continuity of demographic crisis narratives is thus illuminating in understanding the flexible persistence of processes of demographization.

The main focus of this text is to approach the question of NGOization in general—with special reference to the Marxist theoretical frameworks discussed by the German left when the debate on NGOization was intense. However, it goes beyond these frameworks from a gender theoretical and anticolonial perspective. The text is written for teaching in political science and therefore introduces the fundamental concepts of state theory it refers to.

The phenomenon of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) has become an integral part of international politics. But how can this phenomenon be made accessible to political science?