Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS

It is very motivating to see vulnerable people becoming strong advocates for their own rights and persuading their government to act; or to see passionate young economists influencing the state and effecting positive change for tens of thousands of poor households. It is impressive to see dedicated work by a national NGO to build successful community health-care programmes that influence the health services of a whole country.

The reliance of development NGOs on donor funding exposes them to the danger of formulating programmes geared to meeting the needs of the donors, rather than those of local beneficiaries. In the worst-case scenario, NGOs may exacerbate existing problems through interventions that reinforce their own dominance and undermine local empowerment. This article examines some of the practices of one international NGO which worked in the field of higher education in three former Soviet countries.

The effects of counter-terrorism legislation on civil society organisations (CSOs) based in the South have received little attention in the wider literature. This article reports on the findings of a series of international workshops to examine the effects of such legislation held in Lebanon, the Kyrgyz Republic, India, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA. The evidence presented at these workshops suggests that counter-terror legislation is undermining the work of civil society in complex and interrelated ways.

This article describes the legal frameworks governing trade unions and NGOs in Ukraine, with the latter defined very much as organisations working for the benefit of their members and other citizens sharing the same interests rather than as philanthropic organisations whose mission is to assist others.

The growth in the number of 'small wars' has led to a proliferation of post-conflict reconstruction efforts. The experience in the Balkans with post-war reconstruction can provide a significant contribution to further learning, as much learning still needs to be done from the messy, poorly conceived, and chaotic manner in which the outside world stepped in and tried to help in the 1990s. Among the most important lessons that transpired is the need to include women fully in peace building.

The Gender Audit (GA) and associated reports and reviews drawn upon in this article enable an evaluation of how far the intervention processes at work in Kosova since 1999 have been inclusive of gender analysis and supportive of women's and girls' needs and interests. This assessment considers the strengths and drawbacks of various attempts to use and implement gender-sensitive projects. The GA was designed to support the emerging feminist reconstructive politics in Kosova.

This article focuses on the personal, social, and psychological hazards that children and the elderly face in Russian state-run institutions. The paper challenges two assumptions: that Russia's problems are purely economic, and that the state is solely responsible for the solutions. We argue that Russia's problems are basically social, and that the community can take the lead in solving them. We introduce low-cost, practical, humane, and community-driven initiatives as an alternative to rigid institutionalisation.