NGO Responses to Government Pressure: A Study of the Information Politics of Reporting on Violent Political Conflict

How do NGOs that report on violent political conflicts respond to information challenges, and how do these responses shape these NGOs’ reporting? This paper examines how a particular type of civil society actor – NGOs with mandates to constructively address violent conflict such as International Crisis Group and International Alert – respond to pressures from the governments of countries on which they report. It thus contributes to section theme 4 on Political Actors, Strategies, and Democratic Resilience. This study explores the mechanisms that underly these NGOs’ information politics: the political goals and organizational interests on the basis of which they choose what to report, what to leave out, and how to write up the information they report. By doing so, this study contributes to a broader understanding of political communication in three ways. First, it focuses on pressures inherent to reporting on topics that are inherently politically contentious. Second, it broadens our understanding of how information becomes distorted beyond a focus on disinformation: it demonstrates how self-censorship and other choices lead NGOs to (re)produce omissions and bias. Third, by studying contexts characterized by fluctuating sensitivities, negotiated access, and highly contingent regimes for regulations of NGOs, the paper contributes to our understanding of these responses not as static, but as active navigation of a changing environment. I identify three main mechanisms that shape these NGOs’ information politics. The first, navigation of red lines – topics defined as forbidden or taboo by the regime – responds to government pressures that are exercised through indirect signaling rather than clear directives. The second and third mechanisms are defined by these NGOs’ organizational aims to inform policy. Simplification is used to ensure that information is comprehensible for individuals who lack background knowledge and cannot be assumed to have appetite for this detail. Dramatization is used to gain attention and argue for the urgency of action and entails emphasizing the dramatic consequences of past as well as possible future events. The paper combines qualitative content analysis of 60 reports by conflict NGOs with 25 expert interviews with individuals involved in producing reports. It uses within-case analysis in order to enable the depth necessary for identifying and verifying mechanisms and focuses on NGOs that report on violent political conflict in Nepal. Nepal is a useful case due to its hybrid position between democracy and authoritarianism, the negotiated regulatory regime facing NGOs, and the author’s in-depth knowledge of the context which enables identification of fluctuating red lines and fine-grained analysis of how NGOs navigate these red lines. The main theoretical argument of the paper is that these NGOs prioritize organizational interests that incentivize risk avoidance and self-censor rather than navigating red lines in a way that is finely attuned to shifts. However, navigation of red lines does not on its own result in major distortions of information: instead, distortion and bias come about through combined operation of the three mechanisms and the ways in which simplification and dramatization reinforce shortcomings in NGO reporting.