In Strategic Foreign Assistance: Civil Society in International Security (Hoover Institution Press, 2006) Hoover fellow A. Lawrence Chickering and his coauthors examine the roles local civil society organizations (CSOs) could play in promoting change in countries that resist advice from other states and from international organizations.
Since 9/11, Chickering says, policymakers have come to feel a greatly increased sense of urgency about promoting democracy, development, and social justice in states that shelter terrorists. In the initiative to promote democracy, serious problems have arisen in a number of countries—most obviously Iraq. Many of these problems are a consequence of the limited options available to traditional, formal statecraft. Local CSOs need to play a much larger role in promoting changes that cannot be imposed from outside but must come from within.
Chickering and his coauthors, Isobel Coleman, senior fellow, U.S. foreign policy and director of the Women and U.S. Foreign Policy Program of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR); P. Edward Haley, Wm. M. Keck Professor of International Strategic Studies at Claremont-McKenna College; and Emily Vargas-Baron, director of the Institute for Reconstruction and International Security through Education, draw on their experiences to discuss particular issues and reform models in this approach.
Chickering is a Hoover research fellow and founder and president of Educate Girls Globally, a CSO that promotes girls' education in developing countries. He cofounded the International Center for Economic Growth and served as its executive director until 1998, and he has worked in Pakistan, India, and Egypt. Chickering edited (with Mohammed Salahdine) a book on the informal sector in development, The Silent Revolution (1991); and he is the author of a book on American politics, Beyond Left and Right: Breaking the Political Stalemate (1993).
Strategic Foreign Assistance: Civil Society in International Security
by A. Lawrence Chickering, Isobel Coleman, P. Edward Haley, and Emily Vargas-Baron
ISBN: 0817947124 $15.00
132 pages July 2006
