NGO Activism in the "Shrinking Space": Engaging with Restrictions, Coping Resourcefully

In the recent years, international human rights organizations (e.g. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Freedom House) have been reporting on shrinking civic space and deteriorating conditions for NGO activism in Tajikistan – the country, which has continuously scored among the bottom 10% on V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index from 2008 to 2018 . Yet, the complexities on the ground cannot always be reflected fully in a quantifiable score. NGO activism is not paralyzed in the country: project activities keep running, services are delivered to target audience, and dialogue with authorities continues. And statistically, there has not been any substantial drop in the number of registered non-governmental organizations in the recent years. The research on civil society activism in restricted political settings had already explored various modes of activism in unconducive environments. For instance, Pedro Ramos Pinto argued that during times of Franco and Salazar in Spain and Portugal, the ‘everyday citizenship’ helped citizens maintain their claims to the basic rights (Pinto, 2013). Peter Ho and Richard Edmonds studying civil society activism in China, argued that it took a shape of embedded social activism. And O’Brien in his study of contentious politics in China and apartheid-era South Africa coined a phenomenon of ‘rightful resistance’. Yet, original research on civil society activism in Central Asia, particularly Tajikistan, is hardly found. In my contribution, I describe how NGO activists cope with challenges on the ground in order to keep working on their cause. To do so, I use a concept of securityscapes (Von Boemcken et al., 2016), i.e. perceptions and everyday practices that people follow when responding to insecurities. I describe the risks activists confront in their daily routines, and practices they follow to mitigate those risks. My research findings suggest several observations. Firstly, activists face ambiguity of environment around them. Predictability of risk for activists is much lower than for ordinary citizens. Secondly, activists accept risk as a reality of their daily lives. These two conditions shape two major streams of coping practices in use: passive and proactive engagement with environment. On the one hand, activists conform with the environment (distance from sensitivities, self-censor), whereas on the other hand, they reinforce their capacity (accumulate social capital, draw boundaries). I argue that these two streams of practices give way to a particular pattern – resourceful activism that allows activists to withstand pressures, finding smart ways to overcome risks and maintain capacity to function. The paper is based on a field research conducted in 2016/2017 in four major urban locations in the country, where more than 50 NGO activists were interviewed.