Between conflict embracement

and tension avoidance

An ethnographic study of conflict transformation in the NGO
scene

Olivia Forat Montero

Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies

Master’s Thesis 30.0 hp
Latin American Studies
Master’s programme in Latin American Studies 120.0 hp
Spring term 2022
Supervisor: Thais Machado Borges
Between conflict embracement
and tension avoidance

An ethnographic study of conflict transformation in the NGO scene

Olivia Forat Montero

Abstract
Seeking to expand the repertoire of nonviolent ways through which conflict can be addressed,
this dissertation analyses the discourses and practices of a Mexican non-governmental
organization engaged in conflict transformation through dialogue facilitation and capacity-
building services offered to other civil society organizations and networks. By confronting
this ethnographic data with a literature review on both conflict transformation theory and
NGO anthropology, this study underlines the tensions between engagement and neutrality, as
well as the contradictions between the constraints of the project form as the basis of funding
and the dynamics of long-term progression of conflict and building toward peace.
It also observes that, by positioning itself as a facilitator of advocacy and enabler of processes
of change, the organization not only acts as a mediator between the existing order and social
movements, but its own participation as a political actor is mediated in turn by a focus on
methodologies rather than concrete agendas for social policy. These findings contribute to our
understanding of the link between peacebuilding and the international development industry,
and the roles played by NGOs in this arrangement.

Keywords
Ethnography of NGOs, conflict transformation, peacebuilding anthropology, anthropology of
resistance, nonviolence, dialogue facilitation.
Acknowledgments
Dedico esta dissertação às pessoas com quem eu aprendi a fazer perguntas melhores, e que eu
espero continuar a ter como companhia busca por respostas: Ana, Dri, Luís, Maria, Rafa, e
também Ciano, Laura e especialmente Renata.

Agradeço infinitamente aos meus pais e amigos daqui e daí, por me inspirarem e apoiarem
mais do que seria possível pôr em palavras. Em especial, à minha mãe e à Andrea, que
generosamente me ajudaram a revisar este texto.

À Helô e ao Klaus, pela torcida e pelas conversas que ajudaram muito a começar a me
orientar no universo complexo e variado da facilitação.

À minha orientadora Thais, toda minha gratidão pelas leituras atenciosas, pela inesgotável
paciência e compreensão e pelas orientações valiosas.

Esta investigación no hubiera sido posible sin la abertura y generosidad de mis colegas e
interlocutores en el PCI. Muchas gracias a todes por la acogida calurosa y en particular a
María Fernanda, Eugenia y Citlalli por los enseñamientos y el cariño.

Finally, I would like to thank Luna N.H. and the January 2022 Conflict Skills cohort, who
shaped the directions of this study in profound and unexpected ways, as well as Marta and the
DDS community, for cheering me on and making me feel seen.
Contents
List of figures .......................................................................................... 1

Introduction ............................................................................................ 2

Background ....................................................................................................... 3

Aim and key concepts ......................................................................................... 5

Research question and hypotheses ....................................................................... 7

Literature review..................................................................................... 9

Peace and conflict studies .................................................................................... 9

NGO anthropology .............................................................................................11

Theoretical framework .......................................................................... 14

Peacebuilding ....................................................................................................14

On “NGO-ing”, temporality, and the mediating role ................................................16

NGO entanglements and issues ...........................................................................18

Methodology.......................................................................................... 21

Participant observation .......................................................................................21

Written sources .................................................................................................21

Intensive microsurvey procedures .......................................................................23

Organization and presentation of the data ............................................................23

Reflexivities: opportunities and risks ....................................................................23

Conditions of the study: in-betweenness and strong implication ..............................24

What I chose to leave out, and why .....................................................................26

Digital ethnography ...........................................................................................27

Analysis ................................................................................................. 29

General organizational overview: structures, team profile and funding .....................29

The Public Collaborative Institute’s theoretical and conceptual framework.................31

The projects .....................................................................................................34

 1. Collectives of disappeared persons' family members .....................................35
2. Civil society organizations and networks......................................................36
3. A feminist pro-abortion coalition .................................................................37

Social movements, NGOs and “target groups” .......................................................39

Moving towards timeframes of social change: a question of “educating the donors”? ..40

Three meanings of “neutrality” ............................................................................41

An unexpected discovery: the importance of humor and festiveness ........................46

Final discussion ..................................................................................... 51

Limitations and future research possibilities ..........................................................51

Conclusions ......................................................................................................52

Closing remarks ................................................................................................54

Reference list ........................................................................................ 56

List of figures
Figure 1. Lederach’s nested paradigm of the time dimension in peacebuilding. ..................... 17
Figure 2. PCI organizational chart. .......................................................................................... 29
Figure 3. The PCI’s ”substantive themes”. .............................................................................. 31
Figure 4. Meme made by the PCI staff. ................................................................................... 47
Figure 5. Meme made by the PCI staff. ................................................................................... 48

1
Introduction
When accessing the website of the Mexican non-governmental organization Public
Collaboration Institute (PCI)1, just below the name of the NGO and a button that links to its
projects, I am met with this presentation: “we are a non-partisan, non-profit civil association
with almost fifteen years of experience in collective bargaining, mediation, dialogue
facilitation and consensus building”. Next to it is a peaceful picture of the El Triunfo
biosphere reserve in Chiapas, displaying the green water forest and cloud-covered blue
mountains.
The background is a larger and eye-catching picture. It shows a whiteboard, in the
middle of which is a drawing of a girl with four rectangular word balloons captioned with
different parts of the girl’s body (feet, hands). Most of the space on the board is taken up by
the word balloons, which are covered in square neon sticky notes, all written on with different
handwritings: the picture was taken during an activity based on the Metaplan methodology, a
widely-used facilitation technique designed to “ensure that good communication, cooperation
and high levels of understanding are achieved” (Metaplan SIG, 2022). The writing on some of
the notes is legible: they include concepts (mediation, empathy, patience, active listening,
justice), challenges (lack of preparation, frustration) and suggestions (go back to concepts,
review, keep practicing NVC [Nonviolent Communication], always have a BATNA [Best
Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement]).

This thesis results from an ethnography conducted at Public Collaboration Institute

during a mostly virtual three-month internship at the Ciudad de México-based organization,
which was founded in 20052. The association’s page LinkedIn, a professional networking
online platform, states its mission thusly:
To foster a culture and capacities for dialogue, collaboration and peaceful conflict resolution
in Mexico, as well as to enable processes of change that –through plural dialogue– promote
the strengthening of democracy, sustainable development and the rule of law.

1
The names used for the organization and its staff are pseudonyms. The organization’s original name is in
Spanish.
2
The ”almost fifteen years of experience” on the homepage of the PCI’s website is outdated. Though the
Public Collaboration Institute is an organization with expertise in effective communication as a means of
preventing and nonviolently responding to conflict, none of the staff members are specialized in external
communication through technological tools. Strengthening their communication strategy is one of the
goals the organization is currently working towards.

2
To these ends, it offers workshops and facilitation services, as well as specialization courses
in collaboration with academic institutions. It also maintains long-term projects in specific
regions of the country, funded by international cooperation development aid. The main public
for all these activities is made up of other civil society organizations or networks.
My activities within the association focused on the systematization of experiences of
political advocacy at the local level, the elaboration of a diagnostic document on the
sociopolitical situation with regards to forced disappearance in the state of Sonora, and the
facilitation of an in-person meeting of a feminist pro-abortion3 coalition aimed at strategic
planning and institutional conflict transformation.

Background
Both chronologically and in terms of my fundamental aims, before envisioning
facilitation as a possible career path or a research topic, I see it as a possibility for socio-
political transformation. My interest in learning (about) methodologies for building dialogue,
consensus and peace comes from a concern with violence and oppression. Specifically, three
emblematic events of state violence can be identified as indirect influences on the path that
led me to facilitation: the Detroit race riot in 1943, the Carandiru massacre in 1992, and the
murder of George Floyd in 2020.
The second of these events occurred in Brazil, two years before I was born. The São
Paulo House of Detention, popularly known as Carandiru Penitentiary, was the largest prison
in Latin America, holding prisoner nearly 8000 people (Rohter, 2002). The massacre of 111
unarmed inmates on Friday, 2 October 1992, became a symbol of Brazil's brutal prison
system and human rights violations by the military police. In 2011, different NGOs, social
movements, associations and individuals formed together the October 2nd Network (Rede 2 de
Outubro), which – amongst subsequent activities – organized a yearly procession in protest
and rememoration of the dead. From 2017 onwards, through contact with the Network and its
successor, the Herzer Autonomous Collective (Coletivo Autônomo Herzer), I became
politically attuned to the subject of imprisonment as a form of state violence. This then
developed into an academic sensibility when I conducted an ethnography with the Catholic
Church’s Penitentiary Pastoral (Pastoral Carcerária) and encountered the works of
criminologists, sociologists and other scholars who are specialized in punishment and
incarceration (Melossi and Pavarini, 1981; Garland, 2001; Foucault, 2003; Wacquant, 2009;

3
Although in English-speaking countries the preferred term by such movements would be ”pro-choice”,
this coalition defines itself as ”abortionist” [abortista].

3
Fassin, 2017; Borges, 2019) and/or engaged in the prison abolition movement (Davis, 2003;
Gilmore, 2007; Hulsman and Bernat de Celis, 1982; Mathiesen, 2015; Zaffaroni, 1991).
The other two tragedies mentioned above happened in the United States of America.
The 1943 Detroit race riot left 43 people dead and 433 injured, most of them black and at the
hands of the white police force (Capeci and Wilkerson, 1990). Marshall Rosenberg, who at
the time was a young boy living in Detroit, refers to the experience as the onset of the
Nonviolent Communication program he developed. The author describes this approach as “an
intention to contribute to our own well-being, and the well-being of others, compassionately”
(Rosenberg, 2020). My contact with NVC, starting in 2018 with an introductory course by
Dominic Barter and continued through practice groups in São Paulo in the following years,
has deeply influenced the aims, questions and theories that inform this research. Amongst
other effects, it opened to me the possibility of a path of engagement with social issues that
isn’t mainly based in political opposition, but in dialogic action and the creation of dialogical
social systems.
Finally, in the aftermath of the protests following the murder of George Floyd by the
Minneapolis Police Department in 2020, prison abolitionist positions – whose most visible
advocates in the United States are professors and activists Angela Y. Davis and Ruth Wilson
Gilmore (co-founders, with other activists, of the organization Critical Resistance in 1997) –
reached for the first time the mainstream of political discussion in the US (Bagaric, Hunter
and Svilar, 2021). This is how I discovered, initially through social networks, other
abolitionist-oriented organizations and activists such as INCITE!, Generation Five, Bay Area
Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC), Mariame Kaba, Mia Mingus, adrienne maree
brown, and Luna N.H., who have developed in their practices and discussions the concept of
transformative justice, created by Canadian activist sociologist and member of the Quaker
Committee on Prisons and Justice Ruth Morris.
I highlight this background because it helps situate the position from which I am
formulating my research. First, the predominant influence of North American currents of
thought is something that is important for me to be aware of so that it does not prevent me
from contextualizing the knowledge present in my field, even if my interlocutors are also
impacted by these influences.
Second, to acknowledge the debt of this university research project to ideas produced
outside of the university, and its goal of writing from a dialogue with them. While many of
the individuals mentioned above are also academic researchers, the intellectual and political
project to which their work contributes, and to which I hope to contribute as well, is

4
collective. The reclaimative context of these perspectives is important because the theoretical
questions that occupy me are inescapably political.

Aim and key concepts

The central aim of this study is to expand, for myself and the readers of this dissertation,
the repertoire of nonviolent ways through which conflict can be addressed. Beyond my
personal motivations outlined above, I will not attempt to justify the relevance of such a
project for the world we live in today, particularly in Latin America, as its broadness borders
self-evidence. As stated by Vilalta (2020, p. 702) to conclude an overview of research on the
matter, “violence is now a necessary concept for explaining where the region is headed in all
areas”.
However, as Judith Butler highlights in The force of nonviolence: an ethico-political
bind (2020, pp. 14–15), violence is a very difficult concept to define, as “it is subject to
instrumental definitions that serve political interests and sometimes state violence itself”, and
yet “there is no way to avoid the demand to interpret both violence and nonviolence, and to
assess the distinction between them”. Butler’s first proposition to these ends is to move the
argument for nonviolence from a question of individual morality to “a social philosophy of
living and sustainable bonds” (2020, p. 20), understanding it as “a social and political practice
undertaken in concert, culminating in a form of resistance to systemic forms of destruction”
(2020, p. 24).
Besides “nonviolent”, the aim stated above requires a definition of “conflict”. I will
complement Butler’s observation that “conflict is a potential part of every social bond” (2020,
p. 53) with conflict facilitator Luna N.H.’s (2021) formulation: “conflict is a natural,
continuous dynamic within social environments that signals a need for change”. The
framework for this definition is that of conflict transformation, which will be discussed
extensively in the next sections.
Finally, a brief detour is necessary to make clear what I mean by “expanding the
repertoire”, and how such a goal is in my view central to the anthropological project. In a
2017 issue of HAU: Journal of Anthropological Theory, an article titled “Why read the
classics?” reunited six responses by different authors to the question to an old debate reignited
by a self-declared rant posted by Marshall Sahlins on the HAU Facebook page4. Subtitled
“Where have all the cultures gone?”, the rant lamented that contemporary anthropologists

4
The thread on the Hau Facebook page can be found at https://www.facebook.com/
haujournal/posts/1525246060874162. Accessed on May 13th, 2022.

5
may be turning their backs on “a century of the first hand ethnography of cultural diversity”,
consequently ditching their commitment as “custodians” of this knowledge on specific
cultural practices.
In her response, Yarimar Bonilla aptly points out that the classic anthropological project
of cataloguing cultural inventories “was the worldview of a time in which it was an open
question whether these different lifeways should continue to exist”, and that it has been
abandoned because “we know that these will persist within their communities, be it in practice
or in lore, even as we also know that they will not necessarily persist on their own terms” (Col
et al., 2017, p. 25).
However, Sahlins’ definition of anthropology as the “comparative study of the human
condition” strikes me as pertinent, echoing John Comaroff’s (2010) affirmation that the
critical estrangement of the lived world, which he identifies as one of the defining practices of
the discipline, can only be achieved through a comparative anthropology. Comaroff also
refers to anthropology as “the human science that dignifies difference” (2010, p. 525), a point
reinforced by Anastasia Piliavsky’s statement in that same HAU article that “the need for
anthropology’s openness to real moral and epistemological difference is as much intellectual
as it is ethical and political” (Col et al., 2017, p. 16).
Within that framework, I suggest that rather than cataloguing cultural inventories, one
way to describe the anthropological project could be expanding the repertoire of human ways
of being-and-becoming. The term being-and-becoming also comes from Comaroff, referring
to “the pathways by which lived worlds are pragmatically produced, socially construed, and
naturalized” (2010, p. 530). The word repertoire has a couple implications I find compelling.
As opposed to the stillness of inventory, it suggests action, such as a work of art that can be
performed or a tactic of collective action than can be put into practice (Tilly, 1983). In this
sense, it is more concrete and less essentialized, but also more conceptual: rather than an
immutable existence, it suggests a potentiality.
By illuminating the processes by which “verbs of doing become nouns of being”
(Comaroff, 2010, p. 530), anthropology produces a critical estrangement from familiar
discourses and practices and incorporates unfamiliar ways of being-and-becoming into our
repertoire, expanding the horizon of what is possible. For both of those reasons, I believe John
Bodley is correct in stating that anthropology “appears to be a discipline that can show us how
we got where we are and suggest how we might get out” (1985, as cited by González, 2004, p.
1).

6
 The present study does not get into “how we got here” (“here” being, in this case, the
prevalence of violent and oppressive responses to conflict, particularly in Mexico), but it is
centrally concerned with “how we might get out”. Or rather, it seeks to analyze one particular
way of being-and-becoming with regards to conflict: the one proposed and practiced by the
Public Collaboration Institute.

Research question and hypotheses

As will be discussed on the following sections, we will approach the organization
through the lens of anthropological NGO studies. Rather than “nongovernmental
organization”, the PCI describes itself as a “civil association”, which is the legal category
used in Mexico. However, as I will discuss in the methodological section, a challenge of this
study was that conflict transformation is a theoretical framework I share with the organization
I am describing and analyzing. For this reason, by virtue of being it is a concept and
theoretical framing that is not used by the PCI, the category of NGO was useful in helping me
establish some distance from the organization’s own perception of itself.
NGO anthropology first emerged as subfield of the anthropology of development. One
of the most important authors in this field is Olivier de Sardan, who observes
that “development operators postulate and search for common interests within populations,
and between the populations and themselves (since both their decision making and their
execution of decisions need consensus)” (2005, p. 209). He highlights this modus operandi as
one of the defining traits of a “logic of action”, in contrast to the “logic of knowledge”
employed by researchers, who instead place emphasis on differences and contradictions. In
this sense, while anthropology views conflict as a privileged focus of attention from a
heuristic point of view, organizations are characterized as conflict averse.
On the other hand, the Public Collaboration Institute’s knowledge management model
(which will be further discussed in the data description and analysis section) highlights
“positive conflict transformation” as the “thematic core” of the organization. The concept of
conflict transformation (CT) was coined by American sociologist, peacebuilding practitioner
and Mennonite missionary John Lederach, who proposed the following definition:
Conflict transformation is to envision and respond to the ebb and flow of social conflict as
life-giving opportunities for creating constructive change processes that reduce violence,
increase justice in direct interaction and social structures, and respond to real-life problems
in human relationships (Lederach, 2003, p. 13).

7
 Given the above, my central research question, then, is how can an NGO such as the
Public Collaboration Institute practice conflict transformation? To this, I propose two
provisional interpretations or hypotheses: 1) the framework adopted by previous studies to
characterize NGOs’ attitudes towards conflict is insufficient; or 2) there is a contradiction
between the conflict transformation theory and the NGO form. In either case, our current
understanding of such attitudes would be expanded, either by a necessary reformulation or by
a new comprehension of the mechanisms that produce and maintain them.
I also have three secondary questions, which can all be seen as unfolding from the main
question. They emerge from issues I will discuss in the theoretical section, at which point
their meaning will become clearer:
- How can the “sustainable transformation” proposed by conflict transformation, which is
based on long-term progression of conflict and building toward peace, be
operationalized through the project form?
- If mediation is a part of every NGO’s role, what changes when it is at the core of an
NGO’s officially declared role? Is this effect amplified or transformed?
- How can an NGO grounded in conflict transformation maintain a discourse of neutrality
when CT theory denounces this principle?

Another way to frame the aim of this dissertation could be the following: to establish a
conversation between peace and conflict studies (particularly conflict transformation theory),
NGO anthropology, and my ethnographic observations at a peacebuilding NGO. In the
following section I will undertake a brief review of the first two elements, while the latter will
be thoroughly discussed in the analysis section.

8
Literature review
Peace and conflict studies
I have chosen to use the umbrella term “peace and conflict studies” to refer to both
peace research and research on conflict resolution/transformation. In broad terms, each of
these can be tied to one of two major institutes founded early in the Cold War: respectively,
Johan Galtung’s Section for Conflict and Peace Research of the Norwegian Institute for
Social Research (later the Peace Research Institute Oslo, PRIO) and the University of
Michigan’s Center for Research on Conflict Resolution (Kehoe et al., 2012). Despite the
different points of origin, the two schools have always been in close conversation, and recent
studies tend to draw upon both.
It is relevant to point out, however, the contrast in terminology choice between the
Norwegian and American traditions. Kenneth Boulding, co-founder of the Center for
Research on Conflict Resolution, stated that “We deliberately avoided the use of the word
‘peace’ in the title [of the Center] because of the misunderstandings which might arise”
(Boulding 1978, p. 3, as cited by Kehoe et al., 2012, p. 195). As Gleditsch et. al. point out,
many academics of the time “were nervous that ‘peace’ had been given a bad name by Soviet-
sponsored ‘peace campaigns’ that promoted Eastern Bloc policies in sheep’s clothing”, and
even those sympathetic to the agenda of peace research “felt that ‘conflict’ was more
established as an academic term” (Gleditsch, Nordkvelle and Strand, 2014, p. 147).
The meaning of “conflict” established at the time is a far cry from the “life-giving
opportunity” approach seen in Lederach’s definition in the previous section. The core
concerns of early peace and conflict studies were the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear
Armageddon. Although the field then enlarged its focus from international war to a broader
perspective on armed conflict, there has always been more research on violence than on
peace. However, Wallensteen highlights “a second tradition of peace research that ‘draws
inspiration from hopes rather than traumas’ and identified this with positive peace in the
original sense of the term” (Gleditsch, Nordkvelle and Strand, 2014, pp. 148–149).
Positive peace is a concept coined by Galtung in the 60s, born out of a redefinition of
violence “beyond direct violence so as to include structural (indirect) and cultural
(legitimizing) violence” (Galtung, 1995). The author’s expanded peace concept, then,
characterizes it “as the positive presence of just relationships and just social systems [positive
peace] in addition to the negation of organized violence [negative peace]” (Klein, 2018, p.
65).

9
 Beyond the paradigmatic distinction between negative and positive peace, it appears
that Galtung is also responsible for the first usage of the expression “positive conflict
transformation”, which does not appear in Lederach’s own works but is ubiquitous in the
vocabulary of Mexican peacebuilding NGOs. In the same year that Lederach’s Preparing For
Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures was published, Galtung proposed a new and
more dynamic formulation for his peace definition: “Peace is what we have when creative
conflict transformation can take place nonviolently” (1995, p. 25). In this article, the author
contrasts a positive CT tasked with “coming out of that phase of the conflict with more
mature selves and more mature social formations around” with a negative CT which may
leave “enormous irreversibilities in homosphere, biosphere, lithosphère, hydrosphere,
atmosphere, cosmosphere, and damage to the soul” (Galtung, 1995, p. 33). The reason I am
highlighting this is that the shift in terminology from “conflict transformation” to “positive
conflict transformation” strikes me as an interesting expression of the dilemmas of the NGO
operationalization of the concept, which will be discussed in the data analysis section.
With regards to tracking the history of these ideas in the literature, on the other hand,
neither Galtung nor Lederach quote each other in the above-mentioned texts, having
seemingly reached the term “conflict transformation” independently from one another. While
Galtung simply states that “the conflict can be transformed (not resolved, conflicts are not
(re)solved)” (1995, p. 25), Lederach’s description in a later book of how and why he moved
from “resolution” to “transformation” is very interesting, especially from a Latin American
studies point of view. The author explains that he started using the term in response to
questions raised by Central American colleagues after he spent time in the region in the
1980s: “For them, resolution carried with it a danger of co-optation, an attempt to get rid of
conflict when people were raising important and legitimate issues (…). ‘Conflicts happen for
a reason,’ they would say. ‘Is this resolution idea just another way to cover up the changes
that are really needed?’” (Lederach, 2003, p. 8).
Beyond the role Central American scholars played in the definition of the concept of
conflict transformation, Latin America played a crucial role in shaping Lederach’s thoughts in
another major way: he cites the theory and methodology of popular education developed by
Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, as well as direct contact with experiences of
popular education in Latin America and Africa, as one of the three central influences on his
work. It is interesting, then, to see conflict transformation appear in Latin America as an idea
imported from the United States, often without reference to these roots, bringing to mind

10
Carneiro da Cunha’s (2009, p. 2) concept of ida y vuelta categories: ideas that come back
from abroad, transformed, to haunt their places of origin.
Besides popular education, another pillar of Lederach’s influences is ethnography and
its “respect for how people in a given setting understand themselves and events happening in
that setting [and] careful attention to everyday talk and taken-for-granted meaning in that
setting” (1995, p. 30). The author inaugurated what is known as the “local turn” in
peacebuilding (accompanied by an “ethnographic turn” in peace and conflict studies), which
proposes a grassroots and quotidian form of peacebuilding, as opposed to “liberal”
peacebuilding’s “traditional focus on international organizations, elite-level politics, and top-
down institutional solutions” (Millar, 2018, p. 13). Within the ethnographic turn (Mac Ginty
and Richmond, 2013, 2016), Millar (2018) then proposed an “ethnographic peace research”
(EPR) approach to provide a new empirical focus.
I will return to the local turn in the theoretical and conceptual section and to the relation
between anthropology and PCS in the conclusion, but first, it is necessary to go over the
history of a key concept in this debate: development5.

NGO anthropology
The idea of “development” as it will be discussed here is “associated with the
international projects of planned social change set in motion in the years surrounding World
War II” (Ferguson, 2010, p. 189). Olivier de Sardan defines it as
a sum of the social processes induced by voluntarist acts aimed at transforming a social
milieu, instigated by institutions or actors who do not belong to the milieu in question, but
who seek to mobilize the milieu, and who rely on the milieu in their attempt at grafting
resources and/or techniques and/or knowledge (2005, pp. 24–25).

Development, then, “is a moral mission, seeking to improve the quality of life for people in
other societies” (Sampson, 2017, p. 5), specifically “powerless peoples and subaltern groups”
(2017, p. 6) in “the poor countries of the ‘Third World’” (Ferguson, 2010, p. 189), today more
commonly referred to as the “developing world” or, from a more critical perspective, as the
“Global South” (Dados and Connell, 2012). In these countries, Olivier de Sardan states,
development is “omnipresent and inevitable” (2005, p. 2).
Ferguson (2010, p. 195) characterizes anthropology as “the field that fetishizes the
local, the autonomous, the traditional, locked in a strange dance with its own negation, its own

5
Not so coincidentally, the third pillar of Lederach’s (1995) influences happens to be appropriate
technology, a theory and practice developed within the field of international development.

11
evil twin that would destroy locality, autonomy, and tradition in the name of progress”:
development. This “strange dance” is a consequence of the fact that anthropology and
development are specialized, respectively, in the study and transformation of the same kind of
societies and settings, namely, small, rural, isolated, or marginal communities, especially
those that are poor and located in “developing countries” (Ferguson, 2010). Although
anthropologists have engaged in self-critique of the discipline’s founding idea of social
evolution since the late nineteenth century (Boas, 1896), and of its historical links with
colonialism and imperialism since the 70s (Asad, 1975; Hymes, 1974), the specialization
denounced by Ferguson produces an uncomfortable but persistent connection between
anthropology and development. This connection has often taken the concrete form of
engagements and entanglements between anthropologists and nongovernmental organizations.
NGOs suddenly rose to prominence within the international development industry in the
1980s, when a shift among agencies such as the World Bank toward promotion of more
flexible forms of “good governance”
helped to create a climate that began to favor NGOs as private market-based actors to which
service provision could be ‘contracted out’ within wider neoliberal restructuring
arrangements imposed on developing countries through conditional lending (Lewis and
Schuller, 2017, p. 635).

After the end of the Cold War, Eastern Europe and Latin America became the stage of
successful citizens challenges to formerly strong states (Fisher, 1997, p. 444), and the
rediscovery by thinkers of these regions of political ideas about “civil society” intertwined
“with the idea that NGOs could serve as catalysts for people-centered developmental change,
and as a result, official funding to NGOs skyrocketed during the 1990s” (Lewis and Schuller,
2017, p. 636).
The expression “NGO boom”, which has been consolidated in the literature to designate
this worldwide phenomenon6, was originally used to refer to Latin America, first by
Macdonald (1995) then popularized by Alvarez (1999). As Lewis (2019, p. 208) points out,
the groundwork for the growth of NGOs in the region was laid by liberation theology in the
1960s, and to some extent by the growth of popular Protestantism (Escobar, 1997), as well as
by Paulo Freire’s ideas about “education for critical consciousness” and participation
(Blackburn, 2000), and by peasant movements seeking improved rights to land and fighting
against authoritarianism (Bebbington and Thiele, 1993).

6
Alongside the closely related term “NGO-ization” (Lang, 1997). Interestingly, their first usages by Lang
and Alvarez both specifically discussed changes within feminist organizations.

12
 According to Schuller (2017, p. 24), soon after the boom “anthropologists took the lead
in posing critical questions”. The first generation of anthropological work on NGOs, which
viewed them as imperial projects of power, was inspired by the rise of a critical anthropology
of development that emerged with the works of Arturo Escobar and James Ferguson in the
1990s. Writing from a “postdevelopment perspective”, these authors drew on a Foucauldian
conception of power to analyze agency and structure and deconstruct the language of
development and its regimes of representation (Lewis, 2017, p. 29; Olivier de Sardan, 2005,
p. 5).
The 2000s, however, saw a “shift toward ethnographic treatment of development as a
category of practice” (Mosse, 2013, p. 228), which helped provide “a foundation for what can
be seen as a second generation of NGO work by anthropologists, in which earlier
polarizations between distanced critique and forms of anthropological engagement became
less pronounced” (Lewis, 2017, p. 30).
Though I personally subscribe to the radical criticism of the premises of development,
such as modernization and the appropriation of nature, and their legitimization as universal
truths (Escobar, 2005, as cited by Gudynas, 2001, p. 49), such a postdevelopment perspective
is incidental to the framework of this study and its arguments do not depend on it. Indeed, the
critical analysis of development discourse proposed by Escobar presupposes a level of
distance from the field that I, like second-generation NGO anthropologists, neither have nor
aspire to achieve. The option made by these researchers, which I align myself with, is instead
to embrace the challenging but epistemologically productive “messiness” of our
entanglements with the NGOs we study (Sampson, 2017), striving towards a “reflexive
critical engagement” (Lewis, 2017, p. 34). I will discuss the implications of this choice in the
methodological section.

13
Theoretical framework
Peacebuilding
In the review above of some of the previous literature in the fields of peace and conflict
studies and NGO anthropology, I have discussed two processes important to each of them:
respectively, the local turn in peacebuilding and the rise of NGOs within the international
development industry. In this subsection, I will explore the historical connections between
these processes, as well as the links between the two fields.
Although the term peacebuilding was first used by Galtung (1976), its use only became
widespread with the United Nations’ Agenda for Peace (Boutros-Ghali, 1992). With the end
of the bipolar order of the Cold War, the international community's focus shifted to the
increasing emergence of inner-state armed conflicts, from civil wars to secessions. Combining
these new demands with the end to the paralysis of the Security Council and the rise of an
activist secretary general in 1992, “the result was UN engagement on an unprecedented scale
in conflicts around the globe” (Bertram, 1995, p. 388). This engagement is characterized by a
focus on post conflict peacebuilding, casting the UN as an agent of democratic transition. As
stated by Waever (2004, p. 62), “[w]hen the task of the West changed from fighting a Cold
War to building a ‘new world order’, it suddenly remembered that it actually had a long-term
vision of peace as democracy (and/or liberalism)”. This peacebuilding framework, known in
peace and conflict studies as the “liberal peace” (Cavalcante, 2014), “has provided an
overarching rationale for international support to local actors by considering vibrant civil
society as an essential component of liberal democracies” (Paffenholz, 2014, p. 12)
Denskus and Kosmatopoulous (2015, pp. 1–2) point out that “in its global ambition,
peacebuilding has taken over developmentalism”, and that the two doctrines “came to inform
each other”, citing Boutros-Ghali (1993): “Without peace there can be no development and
there can be no democracy. Without development, the basis for democracy will be lacking
and societies will tend to fall into conflict”.
As Bertram (1995, p. 389) observes, “full-scale peace-building efforts are nothing short
of attempts at nation building; they seek to remake a state's political institutions, security
forces, and economic arrangements”. As such, it is in retrospect unsurprising that
peacebuilding, as an externally driven form of state building, quickly merged with the
international development industry, as Denskus (2007, p. 657) describes:
Ever more institutional arrangements and operational guidelines were adopted by
international aid organisations to operationalise 'peacebuilding'. An entire industry of

14
 'peacebuilding' consultants, experts, and practitioners sprang up to service these
arrangements.

The main form of organization of this industry is that of NGOs. In the early 1990s,
development agencies turned to NGOs as the new panacea to cure the ills of previous
interventionist, top-down development efforts (Fisher, 1997, pp. 442–443). Within
peacebuilding, this shift was impulsed, a few years later, by the widespread influence of
Lederach’s work. As highlighted by Paffenholz (2006, p. 13), interpretations of the
conceptual framework of conflict transformation “gave rise to and justification for the
mushrooming of international, national and local peace actors”.
Lederach (1997, as cited by Paffenholz, 2014, p. 15) “divides the conflict society into
three tracks of actors: (a) Track I – the top leadership; (b) Track II – the middle level
leadership; and (c) Track III – the grassroots”, arguing that Track II, in which he places most
NGOs, “holds the ‘greatest potential for establishing an infrastructure that can sustain the
peacebuilding process over the long term’” by acting as a link between top leadership and
grassroots activity.
Although the author himself replaced this middle-out approach with web-approach in
later works (Lederach, 2005, as cited by Paffenholz, 2014, p. 16), it was granted by
practitioner organizations the “status of an unquestioned mantra in civil society
peacebuilding”, and thus “outside support continues to be largely directed to moderate, like-
minded, urban, non-membership, elite-based peacebuilding NGOs at the expense of other
civil society actors” (Paffenholz, 2014, p. 25).
This is connected to Fetherston’s (2000, p. 207) criticism of “the lack of an analysis of
power in Lederach's framework”, which echoes Fisher’s observation that “NGOs cannot be
understood as a forum in which real people are social and political actors without attention to
the micropolitics of these groups” (1997, p. 456). Citing Chambers (1995), Fisher also notes
that the embracing by the development establishment of objectives of participation and
empowerment (which, as I have noted above, were like Lederach strongly influenced by
Freire’s work), and
the use of national and international intermediary NGOs to facilitate, fund, promote, and
provide planning and organization assistance to so-called grass-roots organizations have
resulted in the paradoxical attempt to generate participation through a top-down process of
planning and organization (Fisher, 1997, pp. 454–455).

15
On “NGO-ing”, temporality, and the mediating role
“Paradoxical”, indeed, is an apt descriptor of the NGO scene, which Bernal describes as
a “landscape of contradictions”:
NGOs are at once nongovernmental and governmental, deeply local and inherently foreign,
an expression of the global South and an instrument of the global North, grassroots and
elitist, expanding possibilities for women’s activism and yet also limiting those possibilities
(Bernal, 2017, p. 39).

The “unstable” (Lewis and Schuller, 2017) category of NGO contributes to mask and to
stabilize these contradictions, uniting under its broad umbrella a diverse and heterogeneous
range of projects, politics, and organizational structures. Sampson, however, highlights two
important features shared by NGOs: they are groups of people with a moral intervention
project, which are organized as juridical persons. The two are intimately linked, “since
juridical status allows NGOs to procure and use funds or mobilize political allies”. “NGO-
ing”, then, understood as a set of practices rather than as a fixed form, “is the practice of
balancing the moral and the professional in a way that convinces others” (Sampson, 2017, pp.
11–12).
This entails the adoption of a “state-like and state-linked, yet nonstate” (Bernal and
Grewal, 2014, p. 9) bureaucratic structure and of a project and market logic, both of which
enable NGOs to make contracts with donors or with the state. The process of NGO-ization,
then, results in the production and conversion of what is outside the state “into a legible form
within a governmentality that parallels official state power” (Bernal and Grewal, 2014, p. 8)
and in the commodification of activism, with depoliticizing effects.
Projectization, in particular, is relevant to the question of the relationship between
NGO-ing and conflict transformation. To illustrate his considerations on the time dimension
of peacebuilding, Lederach (1997) makes use of Maire Dugan's concept of a nested paradigm,
in which the lower levels are nested (visually encircled) into the higher levels. From the first
circle of crisis intervention (immediate action, 2-6 months), he moves to preparation and
training (short-range planning, 1-2 years), then design of social change (decade thinking, 5-10
years), and finally desired future (generational vision, 20+ years), as seen in figure 1 below:

16
 Figure 1. Lederach’s nested paradigm of the time dimension in peacebuilding.

Derived from Lederach, 1997, p. 77.

As Fetherston (2000, p. 205) highlights, “the nested paradigm approach is significant

because it points out the importance of long-term thinking, planning and envisioning”.
Lederach’s central argument is that peace is possible and depends on the process of building
an infrastructure “made up of a web of people, their relationships and activities, and the social
mechanisms necessary to sustain the change sought” (1997, p. 84). Supporting, implementing,
and sustaining this “process-structure”, which takes place at all levels of the society, requires
adequate resources, explicit preparation, and commitment over time.
As discussed in the previous section, peacebuilding is materially operationalized by the
structures of development aid, being funded and implemented by generally the same actors:
international agencies, private donors and foreign government agencies (funders); national
and local government agencies, NGOs both national and international, and in some cases
other “middle rage” actors such as faith-based organizations and university programs
(implementers).
This goes even deeper in Latin America and the Caribbean, which tends to be the
recipient of development or humanitarian aid but ignored by funds specifically destined for
peacebuilding. The European Union’s Instrument contributing to Stability and Peace (IcSP),
for example, dedicated only 7% of its budget to the region in the 2012-2017 period, most of it
to Colombia (Bergmann, 2018, p. 14), and this contribution fell to zero in the following
period after the Peace Agreement was signed in the country (IcSP, 2021). This follows
Lederach’s observation that “funds are much harder to secure when they are intended to
finance preventive action taken before the emergence of the crisis or to support the

17
implementation of an agreement once it has been signed” (1997, p. 92). This is problematic,
he argues, as conflict prevention and sustaining reconciliation are the most strategic and even
the most “cost-effective” actions with regards to mitigating the consequences of destructive,
protracted conflict.
Applying Lederach’s model of peacebuilding through the framework and tools of
international development aid is a challenge. As the author himself points out, it is difficult to
fund the creation of an infrastructure “from which it is possible to respond creatively to
evolving situations” and to measure a dynamic “process of understanding and learning”. What
donors fund and evaluate, and expect NGOs to propose and report on, are projects: “discrete,
concrete, and measurable units of activity bounded by parameters such as time and
completion of tasks” that lead to proposed results (Lederach, 1997, pp. 130–132). This raises
a question that can be seen as an unfolding of this study’s research question: how can the
sustainable transformation proposed by Lederach, which is based on long-term progression of
conflict and building toward peace, be operationalized through the project form?
Another unfolding question is related to the issue of mediation. Lewis and Schuller
2017, p. 638) note that common to all threads of anthropological work on NGO-related issues
is an intermediate position; understanding NGOs’ mediating roles provided an impetus for
theoretical crystallization, a common theoretical platform for further theory building, and a
clear innovation and mandate within “NGO studies,” as distinct from the other related fields
(e.g., development studies and the newer humanitarian studies).

This raises the following question: If mediation is a part of every NGO’s role, what changes
when it is at the core of an organization’s officially declared role? Does this “meta-mediation”
have the effect of a magnifying glass or of a distorting one with regards to previous studies’
findings about NGOs? In the next subsection, I get into a little more detail about such
discoveries.

NGO entanglements and issues

In the introduction to Cultures of Doing Good: Anthropologists and NGOs (Lashaw,

Vannier and Sampson, 2017), Sampson (2017) highlights, building on the collected
contributions to the book, four kinds of relationships NGOs find themselves entangled with:
the state, the donors, other social activist movements NGOs find themselves in competition
with, and finally, their ostensible “target group”, the people they are supposed to help. As
mentioned above, the idea of mediation is a key to understand these entanglements, as
organizations at the international or national levels tend to adopt an intermediary role between

18
the state or donors and local NGOs, grassroots social movements or individual members of
the target groups.
Foucauldian-inspired works suggest that NGO studies should highlight NGOs’ role as
group makers, that is, their “discursive power to make certain populations visible” (Bornstein,
2017, p. 189). One example of this is Lemons’ analysis of an NGO which oversees women’s
arbitration centers for domestic conflict cases in Delhi: “in diagnosing needs and
implementing responses, Action India has produced collectivities that have become legible
through these needs” (2017, p. 206).
Sampson also outlines seven important issues that anthropologists have discovered
about the NGO world, of which I will highlight a few as they will help analyze PCI and more
generally the particularities of conflict transformation NGOs. One central point is that of
affect and emotions: “The urge to do good and the practice of doing good are tied to an
affective dimension, a regime of affect” (Sampson, 2017, p. 16). Lashaw et. al. highlight that
the engagement that characterizes NGOs is not simply at the organizational level, but that this
is intertwined with the personal biographies and emotional implications of individual NGO
activists.
Another issue is that of representation. According to Sampson (2017, pp. 16-17),
“NGOs are shown to be in a constant struggle to demonstrate that they speak for some group
or constituency other than themselves” and “the NGO form is contingent on its ability to
perform representation” . This authenticity requirement is therefore framed as essential to
their legitimacy and as the frequent target when it is questioned by other actors.
Finally, political neutrality plays an important role in NGOs’ discourses of self-
description and justification. As Fassin (2011, p. 49, mentioned in Synková, 2017, p. 79)
points out, the “neutrality principle” is “the cornerstone of humanitarian intervention and the
very condition for ensuring that such intervention remains legitimate”. However, the
upholding of this principle is often observed to be quite inconsistent. Reyfield (2011, p. 68,
mentioned in Kornfeld, 2017, p. 179) argues that neutrality is a strategically employed fiction.
Sampson (2017, p. 16) concludes that “just as anthropologists have begun to take up
‘secularism’ along with religion, we need to examine ‘neutrality’ alongside ‘politics’ [and]
view the performance of ‘neutrality’ as a practice embedded in the world of NGOs”.
We can contrast these discourses of neutrality with the following quote from Lederach
(1995, p. 26):
Education is never neutral. It always involves a project ultimately aimed either at keeping
things as they are or changing them. Popular education promotes change both in social and

19
 educational systems. It is centered on the concept of conscientization, the process of
building awareness of self-in-context that produces individual growth and social change.

The context for this quote is the passage, noted in the literature review, where the author
emphasizes the influence of Paulo Freire and the popular education movement in the conflict
transformation framework: this is the first point of Lederach chooses to highlight. Here is a
recognition of the impossibility of complete neutrality, as any form of social intervention such
as education – or facilitation – will necessarily have an effect in social contexts, even if that
effect is to preserve them as they are.
Conflict transformation, like popular education, aspires to transform social relationships
at both personal and systemic levels. The structural dimension of CT refers to analysis of the
social conditions of conflict – which “may encompass issues such as basic human needs,
access to resources, and institutional patterns of decision making” – and deliberate
intervention to change them (Lederach, 1997, p. 83). Taking Barnett and Snyder’s (2008, p.
143) definition of “‘apolitical’ as those actions that are not intended to alter the governance
arrangements that are hypothesized to be the cause of suffering, and political those actions
that are intended to do so”, peacebuilding frameworks that involve changes to such issues are
inescapably political.
So how does the PCI reconcile the contradiction between the NGO-ing framework,
which emphasizes neutrality as the condition for legitimacy, and the CT framework, which
rejects it? I will discuss this in the analysis and conclusions.

20
Methodology
Following ethnographic research methodology as described by Olivier de Sardan
(1995), I have combined three of the four major forms of data production that occur within the
framework of fieldwork: participant observation, intensive microsurvey procedures, and the
collection of written sources. I will briefly discuss each of them below, and then address the
methodological implications of larger epistemological and ethical questions related to
ethnographic research, particularly those concerning reflexivity, strong implication in the
field, “NGO-graphies” and the use of digital tools.

Participant observation
In the three months I spent at the organization, I accumulated over 60 hours7 of
observation, that is, time during which I was in direct contact with my coworkers and
specifically paying attention in order to take notes, of which I filled 80 pages of my A5-sized
field notebook, and which constitute the bulk of the data on which my analysis is based. Not
counted here are all of the hours during which I was simply working, on my own or
consulting my coworkers over WhatsApp or email, or the in-person get-togethers I had with a
couple of people I got closer with, as these observations and interactions did not contribute to
the systematic production of data. They did, however, contribute to the research through
“impregnation”, being essential to the familiarization with the field.

Written sources
As Olivier de Sardan points out, some written sources “are an inextricable part of the
field inquiry into which they are integrated” (2015, p. 40). This is the case of the documents I
have analyzed in this research. The PCI, as it is characteristic of NGOs, produces a wealth of
written documents, and I even collaborated on some myself. Besides all the documents I read
without the intention of analyzing, of which we could also say have an “impregnating” impact
on this research, I specifically sought out to read those that form the center of Public
Collaboration Institute’s “knowledge management” model (KMM), as these choices indicate
what the organization considers important, providing an emic perspective on its core values
and ideas.

7
Arriving at this estimation was made much simpler by the fact that the organization keeps a shared
Google Calendar in which each staff member is expected to track where they will be spending their time.
Though throughness in this use varies from person to person, the meetings at least are all accounted
for, making it easy for me to identify how much time I spent in them.

21
 I have encountered three kinds of documents: one public (publications) and two for
internal use: deliverables to the donors and “meta” documents aimed at knowledge
preservation and transmission within the organization. Although the last two are private, they
are not secret, and I received explicit permission from the organization from the start to
include them in this study.
These meta documents are not produced by members of the PCI staff themselves, as
they are written by third-party individuals or organizations which facilitated internal processes
of self-evaluation, self-knowledge production, and planning. Such documents, therefore, are
the reports on these processes, based on notes taken during the facilitated meetings and in
some cases the previous realization of a “collaborative diagnosis”, using research methods
such as personal interviews with prominent leaders, electronic surveys, archive research and
focus groups.
Notably, these are much the same processes as the Public Collaboration Institute itself
often facilitates, and the techniques it utilizes, forming a recursive network of intervention.
Even more remarkable, these research methods are also some of the ones used by social
scientists, the implications of which I will discuss below.
The external production of these documents confers them an ambiguous status between
primary source and gray literature. They are produced by people external to the specific group
that is the object of this study, but are undeniably internal to the field of inquiry, as the PCI
requested and accepted such reports and makes active use of them. Furthermore, the
individuals that produced them are a part of the same social world that is of interest here.
I make use of such documents as an important primary source of this study, conscious
of the validity risk posed by the inevitable presence of subjective interpretations from these
external actors. However, this risk is equally present in the case of internal informants, and
the precautions taken to mitigate them are the same, that is, the use of standard fieldwork
policies (Olivier de Sardan, 2015).
Due to time limitations, I focused particularly on the KMM framework document and
the Executive Overview of PCI’s Strategic Planning for the 2017-2021 period (meta
documents), for the reasons stated above, and on the documents relevant to the projects I was
working on, as I had enough context on them to be able to analyze relevant elements I found
in them with more depth. These encompass the two other categories: a publication aimed at
divulging the experiences of local NGOs in shaping public policy at that level and providing
organizations with a toolkit to do the same, and all of the reference documents for the project

22
in Sonora, intended for use by the team assigned to it (Eugenia, Shiadany and me) and to be
shared with the donors.
Olivier de Sardan (2015, p. 40) also highlights that “the fact that the greater part of
written data involves preexistent documentary sources does not mean that we ought to
abandon the option of getting local actors to write about matters related to the inquiry”. In the
case of this study, though I did not conduct formal interviews, a valuable source of data
production was asking questions through email conversations, complementing the answers I
had gotten and taken note of during meetings.

Intensive microsurvey procedures

One very particular type of written source was very useful to me: the organization’s
LinkedIn and particularly their website, which contains a wealth of information on its
purposes, projects, donors, structure, staff etc. I have compiled and presented this data (mostly
in the first subsection of the analysis), through what Olivier de Sardan (2015) calls “intensive
microsurvey procedures”: an organizational chart, a comparison of the number of women to
men on the team, a list of types of donors from which the PCI receives funds etc.

Organization and presentation of the data

The analysis is structured into four subsections. These are recurring topics that emerged
from the exercise of reviewing the data I had produced in light of my research question and
theoretical framework.
In every instance where the analysis includes quotes from the ethnographic material, be
it from my observation field notes (which I took in Spanish) or from written sources, they are
English translations I have made from the original Spanish.

Reflexivities: opportunities and risks

As Olivier de Sardan (2015, p. 112) points out, anthropological studies must account for
the effect of the researcher’s subjectivity in three levels: that of all scientific activities, that
which characterizes the social sciences, and that which is specific to field research in the
social sciences. For this reason, the need for reflexivity is undeniable. However, anthropology
is far from having a monopoly on this issue, as reflexivity is an element of the shared
epistemological bases of the social sciences (Olivier de Sardan, 1995; 2015).
This is complicated here, though, by Lemons’ observation that this epistemological
framework is in many ways shared by NGOs. It is certainly shared by those grounded in

23
conflict transformation theory, which beyond drawing direct inspiration from ethnography, as
we have seen, explicitly calls for reflexivity in more recent works such as that of Angela
Lederach (2016). Furthermore, NGO employees frequently have academic backgrounds in
social sciences, as is the case of all of the Public Collaboration Institute team’s officers and
directors. One of the program directors even studied specifically in Sweden, having
participated in an International Training on Dialogue and Mediation offered by the
Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University.
Though “reflexivity” is an uncountable noun, I am pluralizing it here to stress the point
that NGOs such as the PCI also practice a form of reflexivity, being described by Lemons as
“self-critical sites of knowledge production and intervention” (2017, p. 203). This was a
serendipitous source of data for this study, as I had the opportunity to observe meetings and
focus groups and access reports that constituted and resulted from the organization’s internal
processes of self-evaluation and self-knowledge production.
On the other hand, the overlap of anthropologists and NGOs holds risks for both, as the
impossibility to differentiate between perspectives can render anthropological contributions
pointless, and “ethnographic participation in the social fields of NGOs, as well as the
ethnographic works produced by the anthropologist, often hold direct and immediate
consequences for our interlocutors” (Lashaw and Vannier, 2017, p. 235). Both of these have
been important preoccupations for me on the course of this study.
As Lashaw and Vannier (2017, p. 236) point out, however, it is precisely these
challenges, and the answers offered to them, that constitute an important part of the
contribution of NGO anthropology to the field at large, as it “forces anthropologists to build
the terms of their engagement into their research design through a reflexivity that must be
constantly and consistently reassessed”. This is what I will dedicate the next two sub-sections
to.

Conditions of the study: in-betweenness and strong implication

The way I approached my research can be described as an experiment in exploring
possible collaborations between differing and at times contradictory interests. I consciously
assumed a place “in-between”, or as Atlani-Duault and Vidal (2009, p. 278) have put it,
“between two”. These “two” assume many forms, which involve intrapersonal, interpersonal
and systemic levels (Barter, 2018), and are interrelated but do not automatically correspond to
one another. An inexhaustive list includes: knowledge and action (Olivier de Sardan, 1995),

24
academic and non-academic work, critical detachment and engagement (Atlani-Duault and
Vidal, 2009), collective transformation and personal trajectory.
I do not see these binaries as dichotomies, but neither do I take the overcoming of these
distinctions for granted. The relationship between them is tense and uneasy, and though I
view that tension as heuristically productive and worth engaging with, the possibility of
reconciliation between these contradictory interests was not a premise but rather a hypothesis
of this experiment.
The ethnography I conducted can hardly be described as engagement with “radical
alterity” (Graeber, 2015): although I had never been to Mexico before, Mexico City shares
many similarities with my hometown São Paulo, and I chose the internship precisely because
the organization’s work aligned with my interests and aspirations. When it comes to “making
the familiar strange, and the strange familiar” (Myers, 2011), my efforts are doubtlessly closer
to the first part of the equation, even if many things about my field were new to me.
I had initially considered doing an ethnography with an indigenous community in
Chiapas, as I was interested in Mayan traditional justice systems, but the rules of my Masters’
scholarship limited permanence in Latin America to a maximum of three months, and
specialist scholars I spoke to considered it too short a period to properly situate myself in such
an unfamiliar field. In an attempt to avoid the risk of superficiality – very serious for a
discipline which strives to incorporate an emic perspective into its descriptions of social
groups (Olivier de Sardan, 1995, p. 6)–, I decided instead to merge my thesis’ fieldwork with
an internship at an NGO specialized in facilitation, a project I had previously envisioned as
complementary but not directly connected to the research.
This conjunction of academic and professional interests has the noteworthy effect that
my foray into a professional “reconversion” towards the field of facilitation implied in a type
of relative endo-ethnography akin to “conversion” to a studied religion: a maximization of
participation which doesn’t come from “a deliberate methodological option, but rather […] a
personal life choice” (Olivier de Sardan, 2015, p. 117). Yet in Olivier de Sardan’s typology of
“strong implications” in the field, my situation presents perhaps even more similarities with
what he calls “split status”, in which the researcher simultaneously occupies one of the
available professional roles in his field. Ultimately, I am somewhere in between both cases, as
my entrances in the field as someone conducting a study and as an aspiring “local” are
simultaneous, neither – or perhaps both – being instrumentalized by the other.
As with every form of “strong implication”, this “offers advantages and disadvantages
and combines new resources with additional constraints” (Olivier de Sardan, 2015, p. 119).

25
My particular case has the significant advantage of making it much easier to integrate my split
status as the negotiations of my presence in the field and my position in the organization are
coordinated and openly discussed. On the other hand, the disadvantage is that the risks of
insufficient immersion and of getting caught up “in cliques and factions” (Olivier de Sardan,
2015, p. 118) or in “the kind of schizophrenia in which the same person is simultaneously the
researcher and the researcher’s informant” (Olivier de Sardan, 2015, p. 119) were all
concurrently very present.

What I chose to leave out, and why

The scope of my research can be precisely described as an “NGO-graphy” (Sampson
and Hemment, 2001). While for a long time it was more likely that anthropologists would
engage with grassroots perspectives on the presence and effects of NGOs than with the
organizations themselves (Lewis and Schuller, 2017, p. 637), such perspectives are entirely
absent here. That I had very little access to the perspectives of the organization’s beneficiaries
was, to some extent, imposed by the conditions of my internship: its limited time and the
types of tasks the organization needed my help with at that moment. But the choice to have
my fieldwork coincide so closely with my internship was not merely due to time constraints,
it was also a methodological one, born out of the intention to focus my attentions on the NGO
itself as a way of “studying up” (Nader, 1969, as cited by Lewis and Schuller, 2017), or at
least “studying sideways” (Ortner, 2017). Although “NGO-graphies” certainly come with
their own ethical challenges, the power dynamics I positioned myself in entering the field as
an intern are probably less uneven than the ones I might have encountered in an attempt to
establish direct contact with, for example, the collectives of families of missing people that
are at the center of one of the projects I worked on. Although the organization’s executive
director, María Fernanda, generously offered to facilitate such a contact, I would have
inevitably run into the challenges of “NGO-dependent anthropology” (Lemons, 2017),
rendered particularly problematic in a study which aims to understand the NGO itself.
A contact the organization did not offer to facilitate was with the other end of the
“chain” it brokers: the donors. This omission might be revealing of a (not unjustified)
perception that anthropologists are more often interested in grassroots communities than in
aid agencies, and/or of a perception that the organization’s relations with the donors are more
delicate than those with the beneficiaries, and therefore handled with more caution. I cannot
affirm either way because I did not ask for such a contact either. Although accessing donors’
perspectives could have enriched my ethnography with insights into “the structures and

26
processes of the neoliberal architecture of the aid system” (Lewis, 2017, p. 30), characteristic
of “aidnographies”, I would be wary of including any details on this for fear of negative
repercussions for my interlocutors. Having myself previously been in the position of
managing projects funded by international cooperation, I have first-hand experience with the
volatility of such relationships.
As Bornstein (2017, p. 185) points out, “most anthropologists would agree that
exposing internal politics is not worth the risk of getting an organization defunded […]. Here
we see how responsibilities to a chain of loyalties can affect ethnographers of NGOs”. The
author points out that, as in “all politically charged ethnographic contexts”, the consequence is
often self-censorship. In my case, in anticipation of these ethical challenges and consideration
of the limited time I had to conduct my research, I chose, from the moment of “data
collection”, to speak only to the NGO workers, and to leave out questions related to internal
politics.

Digital ethnography
With the exception of a three-day in-person meeting I facilitated along with María
Fernanda and Eugenia, a program officer, my internship was entirely remote. This is due to
the fact that the organization suspended all of its presential activities at the beginning of the
covid-19 pandemic in 2020, adapting them to an online setting, and ended up letting go of the
lease for its office. My internship ended right before the first time that the full staff would
meet in person in two years, for a week-long planning session for the 2022-2027 period. At
the time, other in-person activities were just getting back in full swing, a change about which
the staff expressed relief and joy. But it was also one that required energy-demanding
adjustments after working from home for a long time, especially with regards to the impacts
of transportation on the schedules of those who live on the outskirts or even outside of the
city. The organization had also just found a new space to reopen the office, the plan being to
pivot to a hybrid system to maintain the accommodating advantages of remote work while
also reestablishing a contact the loss of which was often decried.
The NGO I worked with had a lot of meetings: a coworker who joined the same week I
left remarked that he had never had that many in a first day at a new job. This is likely a
reason for which the switch to online was felt so negatively by the staff, but at the same time,
it helped minimize the isolation effects. Though I did not have access to everyday moments of
socialization and interaction (the importance of which the organization understood as clearly
as any ethnographer does), and my contact was mostly limited to just the few people I directly

27
worked on projects with, the frequent short meetings8 to “touch base” (toque de base) with
them and the weekly meetings with the full staff were fundamental in the process of getting
familiar with the NGO’s processes and people, both as an intern and as a researcher. For this
latter purpose, particularly interesting were the four meetings dedicated to the 2022
operational planning, which were facilitated by an external organization, and the focus group
with the consultant who later facilitated the 2022-2027 strategic planning.
Sampson (2017, p. 5) observes that “since an NGO is an organization and workplace,
with a family life outside the organization, the NGO may not be amenable to the kind of
intense participant observation for which anthropologists are trained”. However, precisely
because of these conditions, the adaptations necessary for digital NGO ethnographies are
easier than for digital ethnographies of lived worlds in which more intense participant
observation would normally be possible. My degree of immersion in the organization was
certainly different than it would have been if the offices were open, but that is also true for all
of my interlocutors, especially those who also joined after the beginning of the pandemic: in
this, my experiences matched theirs.
Following Pink et. al.’s idea that “digital media and technologies are part of the
everyday and more spectacular worlds that people inhabit” (2016, p. 25), this is one example
of research that uses digital techniques and tools to investigate “everyday life activities or
localities that are not usually contexts or sites of digital media immersion” (Pink et al., 2016,
pp. 28–29), thus making a small contribution to our understanding of “the digital” as part of
something wider without situating it at the center of my work.
One interesting aspect of NGO ethnography the digitality of my research helped shine a
light on was the relevance of the wider geographical context. While on the surface I could
very well have conducted most of my fieldwork from anywhere in the world, I found myself
called to reflect on the central questions of my research by everyday conversations and events
during my time in the field that were unrelated to my internship. Stories of express
kidnappings, deathly soccer brawls, and casually stated fears for the disappearance of younger
family members, though outside the scope of my research, contributed to inform my
anthropological imagination of the particular configurations of violence and conflict in
Mexico City.

8
All of the organizations’ virtual meetings were held through a Zoom link set up by the administrative
assistant, Rosario.

28
Analysis
General organizational overview: structures, team profile and
funding
In hierarchical terms, the Public Collaboration Institute is divided into the governing
board9 with a president, a treasurer and an advisor, and the team, which includes the executive
director, under which are program directors and an administrative coordinator, under which,
respectively, are program officials and administrative workers, which include an accountant
and an administrative assistant and, finally, operative support. I have illustrated this structure
in figure 2:

Figure 2. PCI organizational chart.

Own work.

While both the board president and treasurer are men, the team is overwhelmingly
female, with a rate of only one (though another joined after I left) male staff member to
eleven women, which is remarkable even in a highly feminized environment such as the NGO
scene (Bernal and Grewal, 2014).
The six program officers are divided into the PCI’s two program areas: Sustainable
Development (SD) and Citizen Security and Human Rights (CSHR, sometimes referred to as

9
I have never met or interacted with the board in any capacity.

29
Human Rights and Peace instead10). A third area listed on the website, Capacity Building,
doesn’t have its own program with designated staff. What not having a program means in
practice is that while the PCI occasionally offers capacity building services to organizations
who hire them directly, such as the meeting the feminist coalition asked the Institute to
facilitate, usually this work is done within the projects of the other areas. As a program officer
explained to me when I expressed confusion about this, the programs share methodologies
and can sometimes ask for or offer support to people from other areas, including
administrative and operative departments.
One explanation for this might be that since donors tend to have earmarked budgets to
fund Sustainable Development or Citizen Security and Human Rights projects, but capacity
building is considered as a part of those, this reflects on the Institute’s structure, as stably
funded projects mean the possibility of hiring people for that area. Relatedly, the difference
between SD and CSHR, which had only two program officers when I joined the PCI (another
was hired while I was there) and no program director, answering directly to the human
director, versus three officers and one director (at some previous point, it actually had two) in
the SD program, might be indicative that “sustainable development” is currently trendier
amongst donors than “human rights” and both “security” and “peace” (and the mentioned
changes could signal a shift in this current).
The list of donors on the Public Collaboration Institute’s website includes five
international aid agencies (four of them American, both public and private, and a German
private one); four international corporations (two based in Mexico and two in the US, the
latter through private foundations); two European Embassies; the European Union; one Latin
American regional NGO; and two American NGOs, both funded primarily by organizations
which also directly fund the PCI. The biggest projects that were running during my time at the
PCI were funded by international aid agencies.
Finally, it should be noted that one area is missing from figure 2: the Institutional
Strengthening Coordination, which for reasons unknown to the team the governing board
decided to leave vacant since the person leading it left the organization seven years ago. By
the time my internship was ending, though, María Fernanda had already secured the board’s
approval to fill it again and had initiated the hiring process.

10
This vocabulary slippage provides interesting elements to be thought of at the light of Waever’s (2004)
discussion on the history of the usage of the terms ”security” and ”peace”, pointing perhaps to a re-
politicization of the latter in recent years or a contextual difference between Europe and Latin America.

30
 What set apart “coordinations” from other areas is that they are internal to the
organization. In that sense, Capacity Building and Institutional Strengthening11 refer to the
same methodology, applied respectively to other organizations and to the PCI itself.

The Public Collaborative Institute’s theoretical and conceptual

framework
When it was my time to organize a weekly meeting, – besides expanding a bit more on
the objectives and methods of this study so that the full team could have more clarity to
consent and potentially raise concerns about it – I asked them to comment on the process of
elaboration of the Knowledge Management Model, in order to understand how they as
individuals relate to the theories and methodologies that make up the “conceptual
infrastructure of the PCI”, as described by the framework document. In response, Eugenia
observed that being an expert organization implies in “innovation and knowledge
transmission”.
To those ends, the KMM framework document includes a diagram of the organization’s
“conceptual infrastructure”, which I have translated and adapted into figure 3 below:

Figure 3. The PCI’s ”substantive themes”.

Adapted from the PCI Knowledge Management Model (personal communication, 2021).

11
In the original Spanish, the names of these areas are closer, with the word ”strengthening” used for
both. I chose to use the term ”capacity building” because that’s how the organization itself translated it
on the English version of their website, which reinforces my interpretation (discussed in the next
subsection) that this area’s activities refer to what Lederach calls capacity building.

31
 This diagram is accompanied in the document by the following explanation (emphasis
in the original):
The thematic center of the PCI is based on the conviction that conflicts can be positively
transformed, in that sense, violence is rejected in any of its forms and manifestations to
resolve a difference or dispute between the parties.

This transformation runs on two parallel tracks, dialogue and participation. Dialogue in a
double aspect of approach and space or, as Lederach (2007) states, as focus and locus.
Approach is the methodological lens through which conflict transformation is fostered, and
space is the concrete place through which participants meet.

Participation, for its part, is also a methodological approach and, at the same time, the
recognition of the human right to take part in decisions affecting stakeholders. These two
paths lead to the generation, accompaniment and strengthening of networks, alliances and
coalitions that aim at the creation of collaborative advocacy processes generating
substantive proposals in two fields defined in the PCI's mission: sustainable development
and citizen security.

The human rights approach, the conflict-sensitive approach and the multi-sectoral and
inclusive approach are considered in a cross-cutting manner. All of them as an
infrastructure that sustains and gives a sense of inclusion and respect for diversity, while at
the same time keeping the institution alert about its mode of intervention in the processes it
manages (personal communication, 2021).

In spite of this statement that conflict transformation constitutes the “thematic center” of
this conceptual framework, the concept was not mentioned in the meeting, and in fact seldom
appeared in my observations. This might be tied to Goetschel’s observation that conflict
transformation is both “a rather complex and a rather technical term”, limiting its usage
(2009, p. 96).
Rather than a constantly reiterated guiding line for the PCI, CT seems to be one point in
a complex web of theories and methodologies, which includes approaches that apart from
distinct, can be subtly contradictory, as in the case of peacebuilding and the “Do No Harm”
(DNH) or “Conflict-Sensitive” Approach (CSA), which I will discuss below.
However, some key aspects of Lederach’s framework are indeed very present amongst
the issues the Public Collaboration Institute concerns itself with. As the KMM highlights,
besides being methodological approaches, dialogue and participation are also important in
that fostering spaces of dialogue and the right to participation is how PCI staff conceptualizes
both the organization’s mission on a macro level (the PCI’s theory of change12) and their

12
The theory of change approach, which emerged in the United States in the 1990s with the field of policy
analysis, ”is commonly understood as an articulation of how and why a given intervention will lead to
specific change” (Stein and Valters, 2012, pp. 2–3).

32
responsibilities as third-party facilitators of particular processes of conflict transformation.
Lastly, the idea of process – which, as we saw in the theoretical section, is very important for
Lederach – is also prominent in the PCI’s terminology, as will be discussed in the next
subsections of the analysis.
Besides these “substantive themes”, the document mentions that the PCI holds a “wide
offering of methodologies that it will also be necessary [for its staff] to know and put into
practice”. This offering is advertised in a portfolio found on the organization’s website under
the Capacity Building header, and includes
I) capacitation workshops focused on equipping participants with specific
methodological skills, such as effective communication and negotiation,
collaborative advocacy, facilitation of effective meetings, and tools for analysis of
and intervention in conflicts,
II) processes of organizational and institutional strengthening: strategic planning,
institutional conflict transformation, and systematization of experiences; and
III) specialization courses, which are offered in partnership with universities.

While Sustainable Development and CSHR are the fields the PCI focuses its activities
on, Capacity Building is the general descriptor of such activities. In Lederach’s framework,
capacity building is a part of the transformative training that aims at “preparing for peace”.
While conflict resolution traditionally tends to focus on training as the transfer of content to
people as individuals, Lederach points out that “institutional capacity building is what makes
the difference over time” (1997, p. 133). This stance is mirrored by the PCI’s note in the
portfolio that
[w]hile the design of the workshops takes individual skills into account, the PCI's
commitment is to impact the organizational, structural and cultural transformation of society
by strengthening people and institutions in their leadership and their participation in matters
of public interest.

Of the three types of activities offered by the Public Collaboration Institute, the
specialization courses are the most individualized, as the workshops tend to be offered to
organizations or institutions rather than to groups of isolated persons, and the services listed in
II are processes that by definition can only happen at the organizational level. Those are the
ones I had the most direct contact with while at the PCI, actively participating in process of
strategic planning, institutional conflict transformation, and systematization of experiences. I
will detail from observations from them in the following subsections.

33
 I have previously pointed out the recursive and self-reflective nature of these services:
the PCI’s own strategic planning and systematization of experiences and internal knowledge
is facilitated by external consultants. In the case of specialization courses (and some
capacitation workshops that are open to individual inscription rather than offered to
organizations, such as a training on peace circles methodology happening this year), this goes
one step further. While the courses and workshops are led both by external experts and staff
members of the PCI with expertise on the given subjects, other staff members are given the
opportunity to take part in them as trainees, as a way to strengthen the organization’s internal
capacities.
One of the capacities developed in workshops is worth expanding on a little more here,
as it is of particular importance both to the general mission of the PCI (as seen in figure 3
above and the quote that follows it) and to two of the projects I collaborated on: collaborative
advocacy. The portfolio describes it thus:
Citizen participation in decision-making on matters of public interest is a right recognized
by international instruments as well as a civic responsibility to improve the governance of
societies and countries. Carrying out a process of collaborative advocacy requires social
subjects who are qualified for such a task. This course offers the tools for the
implementation of a citizen advocacy process from a non-adversarial perspective.

It then lists the following skills strengthened by the workshop:

• Identification of the topic and/or issue of public interest on which participants intend
to advocate.
• Carrying out a planning process for the advocacy process.
• Identification of the possible members of a coalition that will strengthen the
advocacy action.
• Identification of the resources, time, and actors to be influenced.
• Recognition of best practices carried out by other civil society organizations that
have carried out similar processes.

The projects
As mentioned in the introduction, during the course of my internship I worked with the
Public Collaboration Institute on three different projects, each from a different area. As the
goals of the projects are similar in that they all involve some form of capacity building, I have
identified them by their respective target groups. After describing each project, I close this
subsection with a comparison between the projects, focusing on the relationship between such
groups and the PCI.

34
 1. Collectives of disappeared persons' family members
The first was in the area of Citizen Security and Human Rights, alongside the program
officers Eugenia and Shiadany. This project is a part of a larger program in Mexico that is
funded by an international aid agency and implemented by an international development
consulting firm. In 2020, the program opened a general call for projects to impulse the
implementation of legislation with regards to torture and forced disappearances in specific
Mexican states.
As in one of these states there were no NGOs previously working on this issue – and
particularly no local organizations, a factor that was highlighted to me as important to justify
the external intervention –, the program approached the Public Collaboration Institute
(through recommendation of another organization the PCI frequently shares projects with)
and proposed that they start a process there. Eugenia and Shiadany observed that the
professional relationship with the program implementors was very flexible and unusually
close, as they participated in all of the project’s meetings.
The northern state in which this project is conducted has one of worst realities of forced
disappearances in the country, and the scarcity of NGOs in the region is due precisely to
dynamics of political violence and unsafety. The target group of the project are collectives of
family members of disappeared persons, who organize search parties looking for any trace of
them – either dead, through field and forensic searches, or alive.
The objective of the project is to strengthen the collectives’ capacities “to contribute to
the effective exercise of their rights and the correct implementation of the state’s General Law
on Disappearance” (LGD for its Spanish initials). The approval and implementation of such
laws at the national and state levels – creating Search Commissions and Citizen Councils for
the country and each state, as well as a National Search System – was and remains a main
goal of missing persons’ family organizations since years before national movements became
successful in the campaign for the creation of the LGD, which was instated in 2017.
Besides the project I collaborated on, the PCI has also been accompanying one of these
large national movements since its creation in 2015, but rather than being able to count with
one continually funded project, they have relied on short-term sources of funds, such as a
grant from a private foundation to research and publish a document systematizing the
advocacy process that led to the approval of the national LDG. The contrast between the four
months of that project and the thirteen years that separate us today from when groups of
missing person’s families started to form around Mexico (according to the above-mentioned
document) is telling. There is a mismatch between the time frames of projects and the

35
temporalities of the social movements they are supposed to support. I will come back to this
point in the next section.
As for the project at the state level, though it was started recently, it is envisioned and
designed as something closer to a long-term process, as it is expected to be extended or
renewed for at least several years, generating gradual build-up of knowledge and capacities.
However, bureaucratically it still has the structure of discrete projects, as every year comes
with its own planning and reporting duties.
The first iteration of the project went from April 2021 to January 2022. It included four
phases: the elaboration of a participative diagnosis (based on a mapping of the key actors and
in-depth interviews, mostly with members of the collectives), the design and invitations to
collectives for the capacity building process, the semi presential implementation of said
process with a focus on collaborative advocacy, and dialogue spaces. The actual process and
dialogues took place between August and January. The period when I was in the organization
coincided with the diagnostic phase of the 2022 iteration of the project.

2. Civil society organizations and networks

The second project I collaborated on was in the Sustainable Development area. For a
few different reasons, my overall vision on this area is more fragmented. As I mentioned in
the previous section, this area has more staff than CSHR, and as it used to have two program
directors, it is currently in a process of adaptation. Finally, when I joined this project, it was
on a tighter schedule that the project with the search collectives, so instead of a meeting with
the whole area to introduce me to their work lines, the meetings were shorter and centered on
the tasks.
The project was also funded by an international aid agency, but implemented in
partnership with Mexican governmental agencies. Its objective is to strengthen the capacities
for collaborative advocacy of civil society organizations13 and networks. The project has had
several iterations since 2019, the one I collaborated with being the third. In this case as well,
though they have a continuity, each of the three versions is concretely a new project which
must justify its request for funds and, later, their implementation. Every proposal and report
must reiterate the objectives and background of the project, cyclically advancing on a linear
narrative of progress.

13
As I explicitated in the introduction, I have chosen ”NGO” as the analytical category that is used
throughout this study. All instances of ”civil society organization” refer to its usage as a native category,
particularly to identify this specific project.

36
 The third edition of the project had three components. In the first one, the PCI managed
the implementation of “seed contributions”, small funds given by the donor to a few short-
term projects presented by organizations who had participated in the first and the second
editions of the larger project. The idea was that in these previous editions, the organizations
had strengthened their skills for collaborative advocacy, developing plans for advocacy
actions, the early stages of which were then implemented with the aid of these funds. One of
the projects was implemented by a network of three people from different organizations, who
had met in one of these past editions and decided to jointly elaborate a project for the seed
contribution.
The PCI’s role was to manage the call for and selection of these small projects, as well
as to follow up on their implementation and reporting. In this structure, the PCI adopted the
role, often present in the literature, of a national NGO which acts as a mediator between
initiatives at the local level and international organizations.
The second component was a “learning community”, that is, a
shared space for reflection and collective learning among civil society organizations and
networks that allows for their strengthening and articulation for the implementation of
effective advocacy processes for good governance in public policies at the local level.

It consisted of four online meetings, the first three of which started with presentations from
experts on topics such as public policy evaluation, followed by exchanges of knowledge and
know-how between civil society organizations, which the Public Collaboration Institute
facilitated. The last meeting was focused on collaborative evaluation of the process.
The third component was the systematization of the organizations’ experiences. In a
previous edition of the project, the PCI had published a guide for carrying out advocacy
processes. In this one, a new guide was produced with a focus on the local level, including a
chapter dedicated to describing concrete experiences. Six organizations, networks or
coalitions that had participated in the project were chosen for in-depth interviews narrating the
antecedents, design, implementation and results of their advocacy processes, aiming to
identify good practices, learn from mistakes and share these lessons with people interested in
starting their own local initiatives.

3. A feminist pro-abortion coalition

Lastly, I was part of the strengthening process of three feminist pro-abortion
organizations, which included facilitating the strategic planning and institutional conflict
transformation of the coalition. Unlike the other two projects, in this one the PCI was hired

37
directly by the coalition. The three organizations are actors much like the Public
Collaboration Institute: professionally staffed national NGOs based in Mexico City, who –
both individually and as a coalition – receive funds from international donors and form
partnerships with large national companies.
The PCI’s role in this case, then, was not that of a mediator between donors and target
group, but of a service provider hired by another NGO on a short-term contract. Despite this
difference, the process had the same project-structure as the other two I described: proposal-
implementation-report.
In this case, it started with interviews with current and past leaders of the coalition about
its history, mission and problems to be addressed in the process. The methodology and
findings of the interviews were then systematized in a document delivered to the coalition,
along with a proposed agenda for a three-day meeting of all members of the three
organizations, facilitated by María Fernanda, Eugenia, and me.
It started with reviewing and collectively approving the proposed agenda and objectives
of the meeting: to establish a strategic yearly plan and governance agreements for the
coalition (which would later be systematized by the PCI in a document which constituted the
final deliverable of the process). We then asked the participants to share conviviality
agreements and personal statements of commitments for the duration of the meeting, such as
the policy on mask wearing and engagements to active listening, nonviolent communication,
respecting contradicting opinions, limiting the use of cellphones except in cases of emergency
etc. Then each participant wrote down key moments they had lived in the coalition’s on sticky
notes and pasted it to a timeline we had drawn on kraft paper and taped to the wall,
collaboratively building a history of the coalition. The aim was to establish a common
understanding of the reasons that had brought the participants together and the issues causing
conflict between them, in order to agree on whether to move forward together, and why,
before opening a discussion on how.
The rest of the meeting alternated between moments where the PCI presented the
findings from the interviews and moments where the participants were divided in subgroups
(in which all the organizations and roles in the coalition were represented) to formulate
proposals that were then presented to and discussed by the full group until a consensus was
reached.

38
Social movements, NGOs and “target groups”

The projects described above give us some interesting elements to reflect on NGOs,
social movements, and the relationships between them. The example of the organizations that
make up the pro-abortion coalition contradicts the idea of a distinctive opposition between
NGOs and socials movements. These organizations are clearly both an important part of the
Mexican feminist movement and structured in a way that corresponds to the “hegemonic
cookbook definition of NGOs” (Sampson, 2017, p. 11): juridically corporate, professional,
expert organizations.
Although the coalition initially formed with the three purposes of strengthening the
capacities of local feminist collectives and advocating for both legal and social recognition of
the right to abortion, in the meeting it was decided that they would leave external capacity
building and legal advocacy as objectives to be pursued by each organization independently,
and focus only on social advocacy as the center of the coalition’s “theory of change”. In doing
so, it (re)produced an interesting division of labor between “the movement-activist and
technical-professional faces of NGOs”, in which the coalition focuses on the “feminist project
of cultural-political transformation” while the individual NGOs advocate for its translation
into “concrete gender policy proposals” (Alvarez, 1999, p. 181).
With varying degrees of “NGO-ization”, the presence of these two faces is also true of
the collectives of missing persons’ relatives and the “civil society organizations” that
participate in the second project I described. That project itself could be said to contribute to
or at least incentivize the process of institutionalization, as it translates into eligibility and tax
exemptions for the seed funds. In the case of the seed project that was proposed by a newly
formed network, the partnership was built by combining one organization’s fiscal ability to
receive the funds and the other members’ expertise on the topic of the advocacy initiative.
We can see how the focus on institutional capacity building I have previously discussed
impacts the choice of “target groups” of the three projects described above: all of them are
pre-existing organizations. The PCI’s interlocutors are not individuals, but collectives. This
somewhat undermines the argument that NGOs always “produce” the groups they work with,
or at least that that production necessarily negates their agency to some extent, as the main
“speech acts” (Austin, 1975) that bring these groups into existence are their own.
Quite apart from Foucauldian discourse analysis applied to NGO anthropology, there is
another framing in which we can more meaningfully affirm that the PCI has a group-making
role, which is that of conflict transformation theory. Lederach’s approach to transformative

39
training includes not only capacity building, but also relationship building, which “responds
to the longer-term and coordination requirements needed to sustain peacebuilding in a given
setting” (1997, p. 109).
Unlike capacity building, there is no reference to relationship building in the PCI’s
structure or mission statement. However, it is implicitly present in the “generation,
accompaniment and strengthening of networks, alliances and coalitions” proposed in the
KMM and visible in the three projects I have described.

Moving towards timeframes of social change: a question of

“educating the donors”?
The Public Collaboration Institute’s first strategic objective for 2021 was to “design,
implement and follow up on coherent and coordinated processes”. The same document
remarks that a change that occurred in the first ten years or so of the organization’s history is
a move from attending to demands that were urgent, but not necessarily coherent amongst
themselves, to the PCI generating “a demand for its services in the areas where it wants to be.
There has been observed an evolution from thematic dispersion towards strategic
intervention”.
While the 2021 objectives were being reviewed in the course of a 2022 planning
session, María Fernanda highlighted the need for “institutional clarity on the role we want to
have in particular processes”, announcing a will to “stop working on projects and start
working on processes of social change”. She even mentions an attempt to “educate the
donors” in this sense.
The concept of educating the donors is interesting in that it subverts the North-to-South
idea of knowledge transmission. At the same time, it indicates a hope for more horizontal
relationships with donors, and an awareness of the importance of not letting themselves be
dictated by the donor’s agenda. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. As Sampson
points out, "donor aid can shift what NGOs do in addition to how they document it and the
language they speak" (2017, p. 23),
When asked whether she thought the PCI had managed to change its practices in this
sense, María Fernanda answered that “Yes and no. We have advanced in the consolidation of
processes of change, for example in Sonora: it’s not a tiny project of a few months and that’s
it. But we often find ourselves attending to immediate demands, and that has to do with
funding”. Penélope, the sustainable development program director, agreed: “We have put

40
effort into it, even with regards to funding, as we have been migrating to bi o tri-annual
projects, but the pandemic has complicated that”.
With ten-year retrospectives, five-year objectives and plans to overcome the limits
imposed by the project-form, the PCI is taking steps in the direction of moving from short-
range planning to thinking in terms of decades. In this sense, it is operating on the level that
Lederach’s framework of the time dimension of peacebuilding calls the “design of social
change”.
However, as discussed in the theoretical section, the idea of neutrality plays an
important role in the self-definitions of NGOs, but is eschewed by Lederach (1997), who
opposes it to that of social change. This leaves us with the question of whether the PCI
acknowledges this contradiction within its frameworks, and how it manifests in the
organization’s theories and practices.

Three meanings of “neutrality”

Analyzing the category of neutrality in the PCI’s discourse, I have identified three
meanings for it, which largely overlap but have different associations that I find analytically
useful to separate here.
The first dimension is that of neutrality as independence and impartiality. In the
“About us” section of the PCI’s website, the organization’s mission statement closes with the
affirmation that “the PCI as a facilitator of dialogue processes maintains its role as an
impartial third party”. This position is further detailed on the Executive Overview of the PCI’s
Strategic Planning for the 2017-2021 period:
In order to generate trustful spaces for the exchange of ideas and the construction of
agreements, as well as capacity building, the PCI must guarantee that the ideas of the
various stakeholders are always respected on an equal footing, regardless of the interests or
agenda of the body or organization financing the processes. The PCI team will assume a role
of impartiality, which means that it will not take sides with any of the perspectives on the
table and will maintain independence from the interests of each stakeholder in defining and
conducting the processes it facilitates. In this context, the PCI is an organization
independent of any creed, party or political ideology.

Two processes closely related to conflict transformation conducted by the PCI helped
me have a more concrete idea of how these principles are applied in practice. They are tied to
two of the projects I have previously described: the one with the feminist coalition the one
with the search collectives of missing persons’ family members at the level of a northern
state. In both cases, the parties in conflict were the different organizations and individuals
which were present in the dialogue spaces.

41
 The two provided me with different types of information on the Public Collaboration
Institute’s ways of being and becoming with regards to conflict, related to the different
positions from which I was able to observe them. There is also a difference between the
nature of the processes.
In the first case, I had direct interaction with the parties in conflict, conducting a
participant observation of a dialogue process as a member of the facilitating team. Although
the coalition’s continued existence was an open topic of the process – as tensions were high
due to interpersonal conflict and lack of clarity on the coalition’s purpose and internal
governance agreements, such as who must be consulted before a communication can be
published on behalf of the coalition –, it was formed independently from the PCI and they
were the ones who called for the dialogue space.
In the second case, the space was called for by the PCI. I had no interaction with the
parties in conflict, and instead analyzed the documents generated in the phases before
(sociopolitical diagnostic and design of the process) and after (reporting) the facilitated
dialogues occurred. From this external viewpoint of the process, I asked Eugenia some
questions over email, to which she responded in detail:
In the process of diagnosis, mapping of actors and interviews, we found a strong tension
between two search collectives: they did not participate in common places, if one of them
was present in one space, then not in another, if one of the other collectives was close to
one, then it was automatically contrary to the other. They had that kind of dynamic. What
the PCI thought was the best option was, first of all, to listen to the needs and concerns of
the collectives, provide the same information in the same way and by the same means to all
the collectives, invite all the collectives equally to participate in the program, and to be
honest: tell them which collectives would be present, tell them explicitly that the invitation
was for all, and establish coexistence agreements within the framework of respect. We tried
to be impartial and generate as little damage as possible in the process. The truth is that it
went very well, in retrospect the process allowed that, for the most part, the collectives
opened up to the possibility of working together, although the tension between these two
collectives persists, it has changed in some aspects the dynamics of collectives in [the state].
With regards to this the PCI applies a methodology called “do no harm”, maybe you could
check it out (personal communication, March 17th 2022).

Following Eugenia’s advice, I researched the methodology, discovering that authors

such as Barnett and Snyder characterize it as somewhat contradictory with comprehensive
peacebuilding, since – as I discussed in the theoretical section – the ambition to transform
social relationships at the systemic level is decidedly political, while Do No Harm (DNH) is
apolitical, trying to “maintain the principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence to
the fullest extent possible” (Barnett and Snyder, 2008, p. 149).

42
 The DNH approach originated in the field of international development, emerging from
the acknowledgment that aid given in contexts of conflict can reinforce, exacerbate, and
prolong the conflict (Anderson, 1999). DNH proposes anticipating and trying to prevent the
unintended consequences of aid in order to “provide relief while minimizing the negative side
effects” (Barnett and Snyder, 2008, p. 146). Despite potential incompatibilities between them,
Lederach’s CT framework and DNH have both been embraced by the mainstream of
development programs, often through the label of “peace and conflict sensitive development”
an approach that proposes that “development interventions try to avoid inadvertently
escalating the conflict situation and ideally also contribute to peacebuilding” (Paffenholz,
2006, p. 12).
The PCI’s own framework includes the concept of a conflict-sensitive approach (CSA).
From my observations, what this translates to in practical terms is the idea that the
organization has a responsibility to avoid tensions, as is made clear in the following quotes,
respectively from the Executive Overview of PCI’s Strategic Planning for the 2017-2021
period and the participative diagnosis document for the first state-level project with
collectives of missing persons’ relatives:
In all its processes, the PCI will implement the principles of Do No Harm, which imply
attention to the impact of the organization's actions in the local contexts where it intervenes.
To this end, all members of the team will ensure, from the planning, implementation and
evaluation of the projects, that all elements of the projects promote social cohesion and
prevent the generation or fostering of tensions.

To avoid tensions between collectives when participating in workshops on internal

organization, it is proposed to emphasize common objectives rather than differences.

Intervening in a context of conflict as an external actor imposes a certain type of

neutrality-producing procedures to avoid polarization. However, fully mitigating the risks of
generating or exacerbating tensions is contradictory with the CT framework, which is one of
conflict embracement, an process of dialogue of unknown destination.
The second is neutrality as methodological expertise. The concept of expertise is of
course important for the legitimation and success of any professional organization or
individual.
the organization’s LinkedIn page advertises the following “specialties”: collaborative
negotiation, facilitation of dialogue processes, consensus building, effective communication,
multi-actor dialogue and actor mapping.
In some contexts, “methodology” can have a larger meaning. When replying to some of
my questions by email, Eugenia noted that the Public Collaboration Institute is an

43
organization with expertise in several theories and methodologies, “especially peacebuilding
and positive conflict transformation”. However, these larger frameworks are not mentioned on
the organization’s LinkedIn, and the specialties listed above are methodologies in the
narrower sense of a technical know-how.
The connection of this issue with that of neutrality became visible to me in a focus
group run by the person who facilitated the 2022-2027 planning. She raised the question of
whether the PCI’s staff members are thematical or methodological experts and, relatedly,
whether it is possible for them to facilitate processes related to any theme. Shiadany replied
by reiterating and deepening the question: “Are we experts on communication and facilitation
or are we [thematical] experts? PCI presents itself as a neutral organization, but we did
become experts on some issues. In which processes are we still a neutral actor?”
She then tied this open question, to which she did not suggest an answer, to the previous
discussion that appeared in the focus group about the PCI’s “mission” or “vision”. Another
program officer, Citlalli, pointed out the fragmented way in which the organization is
perceived by external actors: “so-and-so is a facilitator” or “they give workshops” (for another
example of the PCI staff’s annoyance at this, see figure 4 in the next subsection). The focus
group’s facilitator raised the question whether this indicates an identity crisis or a failure in
the communication of this identity.
Shiadany then highlighted that the context in which the NGO was founded in 2005 was
one in which a window for citizen participation was opened, and that the Public Collaboration
Institute was created to prepare people to make the most of that window. However, that such
spaces were now closing up, she argued, and questioned whether the organization’s mission
should change accordingly.
To evaluate if Shiadany’s assessments of the openness to participation in Mexico
seventeen years ago and today are accurate would be far beyond the scope of this study. What
is notable about these questions, however, is the underlying connection between neutrality
and a favorable political climate. The implication is that neutrality, though a valued principle
of the organization, might not be unconditional, and can potentially be rendered obsolete or
politically unaffordable in a scenario where the conditions for dialogue are absent.
The other connection visible here is between neutrality and methodological expertise.
Despite the place that both methodology and thematic issues hold in the PCI’s framework,
appearing in written sources to connect harmoniously, the questionings that emerged in a
moment of organizational self-evaluation and reflection show a dissonance. While expertise

44
in communication and facilitation is constructed as neutral, becoming experts in specific
themes is framed in opposition to this principle.
The reason for this is not obvious, as most NGOs present themselves as both neutral and
experts in the specific “themes”, such as gender. However, the phrase “in which processes are
we still a neutral actor?” provides a key: because program areas are thematic, the seemingly
abstract idea of thematic expertise can be understood as a signifier for the PCI’s ongoing
projects with specific social groups. This brings us to the third dimension of neutrality:
distancing.
“Facilitation demands a form of distancing”, Shiadany told me on our first meeting
when she and Eugenia gave me an overview of the two current projects in the Citizen Security
and Human Rights program, which are both focused on the issue of forced disappearance.
One of them is a national movement led by the families of disappeared people, which the PCI
has been accompanying for seven years. They explained that the invitation to join the
initiative came from another NGO that plays the role of internal management and organizing.
The PCI, on the other hand, “was invited in its capacity as an organization that is more
external to the problem, that can therefore maintain a broader view of it”.
As such, the Public Collaboration Institute’s legitimacy is not based on performing the
identity of “authentic participants in social movements seeking justice” (Sampson, 2017, p.
4), unlike NGOs that build their expertise on the proximity to people they seek to represent.
On the contrary, the organization employs careful procedures to steer clear of representation.
Shiadany highlighted that in order to avoid taking over “the voice of the families”, unlike
other actors the PCI will sometimes intentionally refrain from speaking at or even attending
events that are public or with the government.
The Public Collaboration Institute is able to afford eschewing the claims and practices
of representation as a mechanism of legitimization because a characteristic that makes it
unique in the literature I have reviewed. Instead of directly engaging in advocacy in the name
of a social group, the PCI offers workshops to other organizations to build their capacities for
“collaborative advocacy”. This type of intervention is defined in the 2017-2021 strategic
planning as the “design and strengthening of networks’ and civil society coalitions’ advocacy
processes”.
At the same time as the organization mediates these political processes, its own political
engagement is mediated by them. Shielded by methodological expertise, the PCI appears as a
neutral third-party engaged in a field of political actors. Rather than enacting social change,

45
the PCI’s mission mentions enabling processes of change. This allows the organization to
maintain neutrality and professionalism, which contributes to their credibility.
The distancing required for the effectiveness of this framing, however, is challenged by
engagement and affective implications, both necessary and inevitable in NGO work. Though
the PCI as an organization does not advocate for specific social policies, centering its
discourse and practices on the dialogue form rather than on any political content, it is made up
of activist individuals. What sustains the neutrality of the Public Collaboration Institute, then,
is that it is doubly mediated: first by the other organizations engaged in advocacy, then by the
engagement of the PCI staff with these very concrete and political goals. Nonetheless, these
lines can blur quickly, such as when individual participation in political marches organized by
the groups the PCI facilitates for are shared and celebrated in team meetings.
In the same meeting discussed above, Shiadany acknowledged that, with time, the
families create a relationship where they have a lot of trust in the PCI, and that creating ties
and feeling implicated are things she cannot avoid either. The engagement of individual NGO
works is not only organizational and political but also intensely personal and emotional. As I
will argue in the next subsection, this affective dimension also plays an important role in the
facilitation process.

An unexpected discovery: the importance of humor and

festiveness
Every Wednesday morning, all of PCI’s employees gather for a half-hour Zoom
meeting, each time planned by a different person in rotating alphabetical order. The first time
I was present, it was Rosario’s turn, but she was unable to attend the meeting and had
forgotten to ask someone else to run it. In a light-hearted tone, María Fernanda jokingly
scolded her in absentia, then went on with the meeting asking everyone to introduce
themselves to me, and vice-versa. I briefly described the study I was planning to conduct and
when an awkward (at least for me) silence formed after I asked if anyone had any doubts or
concerns, the director broke the ice by asking me what types of tacos I had tasted so far. It
occurred to me then that María Fernanda’s use of humor is both a spontaneous personality
trait and a strategically chosen tactic to spotlight and/or alleviate tensions. Later instances of
such a use, in the context of a tense meeting I was co-facilitating with her, reinforced that
interpretation.
Furthermore, the presence of the comical and playful is also part of the organization’s
general culture. Of the twelve people who currently work at the Public Collaboration Institute,

46
most of whom joined in the past five years, Rosita (as she usually called) is the only one who
has been there since it was founded in 2005, and the dynamic she chose for the team meeting
was to present the history of the organization through a slideshow of images from those
seventeen years. More precisely, the unofficial history, as far from staged pictures of the full
team or even photos taken during work activities, the selected images centered on the office
parties held across the years.
They included invitations (one featured a montage of PCI’s staff as carol singers and, in
colorful letters, the words “Big Toast and & Christmassy karaoke. Sing and dance in PCI
style!”); pictures from said parties ranging from fancy to dancy (punctuated in the meeting by
comments such as “that day we went preppy”, “no, I think that one was in another year”, “we
did a bunch of parties” and “I think that’s me in the picture, I’m twerking at you guys”); and a
selection of memes made for the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the organization, such as
the figures 4 and 5 below:

Figure 4. Meme made by the PCI staff.

Made in 2015, included with the organization’s permission.

47
 Figure 5. Meme made by the PCI staff.
Made in 2015, included with the organization’s permission.

Figure 4’s text translates to “After so much effort and so much disinterested, loyal,
heroic, strategic and restless work… / We complete ten years as ‘mediators’!”. Figure 5’s text
translates to “They were telling me that with dialogue we weren’t going to accomplish
anything and that we would better dedicate ourselves to something else / I told him that this
was not just any dialogue but a process”. Both of the memes jokingly refer to
misunderstandings and oversimplifications, by people from outside the organization, of what
the Public Collaboration Institute’s work consists of. Another of the images shared by Rosita
was a photo of a wall in which an angel had been hand-drawn next to the words “St. PCI,
defender of difficult and desperate causes”.
It took me several more weeks’ worth of Wednesday meetings to understand that their
dedication to a fun activity was not an exception, but rather, that their actual purpose lies in
teambuilding through connection and communication. The meetings usually starts with a
check-in moment, in which each staff member briefly talks about how they are at the moment,
with a greater degree of honesty and detail than I would have expected: sleepy, excited, sick

48
from a stomach flu, anxious, overworked, joyful, worried about some personal situation etc.
Sometimes, this is done through some fun dynamic, such as “what animal do you feel like and
why?” Then, the main activity might be a presentation to share some new methodology that
was learned in a workshop a staff member participated in, or it might simply be a game.
Finally, some quick announcements are shared.
The same sense of playfulness was also present at the feminist meeting we facilitated, in
the use of activities that involved art and crafts (complete with glitter and stickers) and of
icebreakers I was familiar with from my personal history of participating in youth summer
camps oriented towards peace education (which suggests the possibility of some shared
cultural practices between different peacebuilding spaces, either through inter or intra-
generation transmissions), but certainly not from other work environments in the non-profit
sector.
These elements might be connected to gender issues, as all the participants and
facilitators on the meeting were women. They might also (giving some weight to my first
hypothesis that CT-oriented organizations have particular characteristics that distinguish them
from other NGOs) be connected to conflict transformation practices, as authors such as Sclavi
(2008) highlight the relevance of humor for conflict transformation purposes, which I also
observed myself as mentioned above, both to address specific conflicts and to prevent them,
through communication and connection.
At any rate, they seem to challenge what could be called “the two sides of the NGO
coin” described by Sampson (2017), escaping what might be expected of both the self-
seriousness of people who think of themselves as engaged in a moral mission, and the
professional solemnity of a bureaucratic structure. This is most notable in the memes and the
angel drawing, which show a sense of pride in the self-sacrifice involved their mission, at the
same time as this is undercut by an ironic self-depreciative sort of humor.
While the affective dimension of NGO work pointed out by Lashaw et al.’s (2017) and
more recent works inspired by theirs (eg. Mogstad, 2022) is no doubt present in these
observations, the subject of humor and playfulness is not addressed in these authors’ texts,
except in an excerpt in which a program director opposes what they derisively call play[ing]
practical jokes and do[ing] activism” in regards to negotiations with local authorities (Černý,
2013, p. 20, as quoted by Synková, 2017, p. 85). Exploring the place of the “unprofessional” –
but not specifically activist – dimension of play in the affective sociality of NGOs can be an
interesting point of entry to reflect on the effects of the pandemic on this sociality. PCI’s staff
specifically remarked they missed being present together for the opportunities for shared

49
festivities, such as planned parties, but also impromptu celebrations of work-related victories
and achievements: “Heck yeah! This came through, let’s go out and have a mezcal14”.

14
Popular Mexican agave-based hard liquor.

50
Final discussion
Limitations and future research possibilities
This study sought to integrate theories and concepts from two different disciplinary
fields – peace and conflict studies and NGO anthropology – into a coherent framework from
which to approach empirical data. This required accounting for each field’s validity demands,
which include complex issues of criticality, normativity, methodology, ethicality and
reflexivity. The attempt to face this challenge, which is one that I consider to be important to
Latin American studies as an interdisciplinary field, provided the opportunity for pertinent
theoretical considerations, but took up some of the time and energy that would be necessary
for more extensive data production and analysis. As a result, the empirically grounded results
are limited and more exploratory than conclusive, and some of the findings presented here are
of a more theoretical nature.
With regards to the methodology, this study heavily relied on participant observation
and some written sources vis-à-vis other fieldwork sources of data such as intensive
microsurvey procedures and especially interviews. Within the given time constrains – made
all the more serious as anthropological studies require “time, a lot of time, an enormous
amount of time” (Olivier de Sardan, 1995, p. 3) – this was, I believe, the choice that best
contributed to my aim of understanding one particular way of being-and-becoming with
regards to conflict.
The deep implication in the field allowed me to leverage anthropology’s potential to
bring up unexpected connections and framings. One example is the issue of playfulness,
which was far from my original concerns and could only be discovered through ethnographic
methods. For this reason, I found them useful to estrange and demystify the “received
orthodoxies” (Comaroff, 2010, p. 234) of which this subject matter is riddled with. However,
much of the richness and rigor of data combination was lost, and some interpretations are
suggested as possibilities in the analysis but are not a part of the conclusions as I didn’t have
enough data to confirm them.
Some of this is also due to the fact that while I had the opportunity to be present for the
online meetings in preparation for the 2022-2027 strategic planning, the actual planning
session unfortunately occurred in-person after I had left Mexico and officially concluded my
internship and with it, the data-gathering period of this study. For this reason, I had access to
interesting questions raised be the organizations’ staff about the PCI’s mission and future, but
not to the answers they arrived at.

51
 One of the framings I had proposed for the intents of this dissertation was to establish a
conversation between peace and conflict studies, NGO anthropology, and my ethnographic
observations at the Public Collaboration Institute. Though there is something ambitious about
such a project, “establishing conversations” is a rather limited goal, as social science studies
are rightfully expected to provide meaningful and empirically grounded conclusions. The
exploratory nature of an initial conversation such as this one implies opening many threads
and closing few of them, but I did reach some conclusions, which are presented in the next
subsections.
Two dimensions I would have liked to have included but decided not to, as they would
have pulled my analysis in completely new directions, are those of race and disability.
Though feminist perspectives have always been at the vanguard of critical NGO studies, as I
have briefly alluded to in several points and tried to incorporate at least in the margins of my
analysis (and which is already much more present in organization’s own internal discussions),
I didn’t dispose of enough analytical tools to suggest what the PCI might look like through the
lenses of whiteness, race, and disability and neurodiversity studies.
I was also held back by uncertainties about how to approach these topics in ways that
wouldn’t put my interlocutors in difficult positions, and whether the attempt was worth the
risks. Though I ultimately decided it wasn’t, I consider these issues as essential to understand
more deeply the sociabilities of professional worlds and would be particularly interested in
NGO studies from these perspectives, incorporating reflections on the contradictions of the
intersection between activism and work.
Lastly, it should be highlighted that while I have sought to highlight the connections
between this study and relevant issues in Latin American theories and histories, Mexican
Studies were entirely left out from my literature research, as the field is rather distanced from
my specific areas of both expertise and interest. However, I have no doubt that a
contextualization of my observations within social research on Mexico would have brought to
light entirely new frameworks from which to understand them – and conversely, that studies
such as this one might have something interesting to contribute to ongoing national
conversations on issues such as participation, conflict and peacebuilding.

Conclusions
With these caveats in mind, let us go back to the research question: How can an NGO
such as the Public Collaboration Institute practice conflict transformation? I had proposed two

52
hypotheses to this question: 1) the framework adopted by previous studies to characterize
NGOs’ attitudes towards conflict is insufficient; or 2) there is a contradiction between the
conflict transformation theory and the NGO form. As I discuss below, both hypotheses are
confirmed to some extent and disproven to another.
There are also some secondary questions I have stated in the theoretical framework
section, which emerged from reviewing the previous literature in light of my research
question: First, how can the “sustainable transformation” proposed by conflict transformation,
which is based on long-term progression of conflict and building toward peace, be
operationalized through the project form? Second, if mediation is a part of every NGO’s role,
is this effect amplified or transformed when it is at the core of an organization’s officially
declared role? And finally, how can an NGO grounded in conflict transformation maintain a
discourse of neutrality when CT theory denounces this principle?
The first finding of this study is bibliographic. As demonstrated in the theoretical
section, NGOs rose to prominence within the international development industry due to much
the same political and cultural climate that fostered their expansion within peacebuilding: the
end of the Cold War and a shift towards so-called local, bottom-up or community approaches,
strongly influenced by Freirean ideals of participation and optimistic views of civil society’s
role in democratization, especially in Latin America and Eastern European contexts. As
mediators between the global aid industry and local actors, NGOs hold a privileged place in
this framework.
When I originally formulated the research question, it was with the premise that
development and peacebuilding were two distinct and apparently contradictory types of social
intervention. However, the literature search showed that in order to understand peacebuilding
it is necessary to consider the ways in which, since the first mainstream usages of the term,
development has been a fundamental part of both its definition and its operationalization.
Consequently, we can conclude that hypothesis 2 is proven correct in that it identified a
contradiction, but inaccurate in placing it between NGOs, on the one hand, and CT-oriented
peacebuilding, on the other. A better formulation might be that there is a contradiction – or at
least a tension – between some elements of transformative peacebuilding theories, such as the
nested timeframes paradigm, and peacebuilding practices, and that this is tied to the
connection between peacebuilding and the NGO scene, which is itself a “landscape of
contradictions”.
As to hypothesis 1, the mediating role present in literature on NGOs can indeed be
considered as insufficient, as there are more dimensions in play. By positioning itself as a

53
facilitator of advocacy and enabler of processes of change, the organization not only acts as a
mediator between the existing order and social movements, but its own participation as a
political actor is mediated in turn by a focus on methodologies rather than concrete agendas
for social policy. This positioning, coupled with the individual engagements of its staff,
allows the organization to keep a discourse of neutrality at the same time as it maintains a
horizon of social change. The professional credibility guaranteed by such operations, in turn,
confers enough leverage to the organization to envision relationships with donors that subvert
the North-South knowledge transmission model, suggesting the possibility of “educating the
donors” in order to move from short-term projects to the decade-thinking planning of social
change.

Closing remarks
Ortner’s (2006, p. 66) definition of the anthropology of resistance includes both “the
critical study of the existing order” and “studies that emphasize thinking about alternative
political and economic futures (both “rethinking capitalism” and social movements)”,
emphasizing the importance of keeping them in active interaction. NGO studies have much to
contribute to this, as the mediating role NGOs play between the existing order and social
movements is crucial to understanding either, and can be a key for “rethinking capitalism”.
Although peace and development were key concepts for this study, neither was part of
my initial research interests. Rather, the necessity to engage with them inevitably arose from
my desires to study conflicts and their transformation and to work with/in NGOs. Both
concepts have strong moral and normative connotations, which make them at once difficult
and important to examine, seductive and dangerous, especially when the use of police, army,
or security forces is so often carried out in their name.
Denskus remarks that just as “aidnography” studies “the realities of aid projects to
uncover relationships, negotiation processes, and the 'being' of development projects”,
ethnographic research is needed for peacebuilding organizations and projects as well (2007, p.
661). This line of inquiry, which is preceded by Ghosh’s (1994) proposal of “an ethnography
of international peacekeeping”, is surprisingly absent from the research agenda of
anthropological NGO studies15, and neither does it engage with insights.

15
The topic of peace and peacebuilding was not discussed in any of the sixteen contributors to the
collection Cultures of Doing Good: Anthropologists and NGOs (Lashaw, Vannier and Sampson, 2017),
nor in the three other books in the NGOgraphies: Ethnographic Reflections on NGOs series.

54
 By incorporating reflections on the particularities of the NGO project-form and NGO-
ing practices into peacebuilding anthropology, I hope to have contributed to the opening of a
conversation between these closely related yet strangely insular subfields. Development
projects have incorporated “peace and conflict sensitive” approaches since the end of the
1990s (Paffenholz, 2006). I have attempted to do the same, and it is my wish that other NGO
ethnographers will as well, and that in doing so, we can expand our collective repertoire of
ways of being-and-becoming at peace.
Conflict transformation is a powerful framework for this endeavor, one well worth
engaging with in both its descriptive and prescriptive levels. Both Lederach and Butler
emphasize the importance of normative aspirations, of generating “within the conflicted
settings the space to envision a commonly shared future” (Lederach, 2005, p. 77), as such an
imaginary “would help us find our way toward an ethical and political life in which
aggression and sorrow do not immediately convert into violence, in which we might be able
to endure the difficulty and the hostility of the social bonds we never chose” (Butler, 2020, p.
51).
The context of production of this study is one of binding loyalties: first, one forged
since before this project was ever envisioned, to this imagined future and to the people I build
it with. And another, forged from the moment I decided to participate in a social world that
was (at least until then) not my own and to entangle myself with the Public Collaboration
Institute, to my interlocutors. They welcomed me with open arms, explicitly considering me
as part of the team for the duration of my internship, and I did the same, fully “putting on the
organization’s shirt”, as we say in Brazil. The formal closure of that work relationship doesn’t
negate the continuity of an affective bond.
And yet, as Bornstein reminds us (2017, p. 184), “loyalty is not defined by the absence
of critique”. Indeed, this is what makes self-critique possible. Ortner highlights that the
“violence of power and inequality is not simply physical force and/or deprivation, but always
at the same time the ways in which it limits and deforms projects of what Veena Das has
called ‘the everyday,’ projects of care and love, happiness and the good life” (2006, p. 65).
For this reason, while it is indispensable to undertake such life-affirming projects and to
denounce the cynicism of criticism for criticism’s sake as rooted in a hopelessness that is both
a product and a condition of neoliberalism, critiques and self-critiques that refuse to start from
normative assumptions are essential to the work of envisioning and building possible, better
futures.

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International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1(2), pp. 181–209. Available at:
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Anderson, M.B. (1999) Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace--or War. Lynne Rienner
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