Issa G. Shivji

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“We activists are not in the business of brokering power where expediency and compromise rule. Our business is to resist and expose the ugly face of power. We are guided and our work is informed by deeply held human values and causes. It seems to me that consistency of principles and commitment to humanity should inform all our work, thought, activism and advocacy.”

“‘A better world is possible’ according to the NGO slogan. But to build a better world we must understand the world better.”

“Needless to say, policy-making is a terrain of intense conflicts of interest, and has nothing neutral about it. The question is, as always, which interest is being served by a particular policy. A question about which there can be neither neutrality nor non-partisanship.”

“Policy-making, an attribute of sovereignty for which the government of the day is supposedly accountable to its people.”

“The international and national orders within which we are functioning are unequal and there are conflicting interests. To pretend that society is a harmonious whole of stakeholders is to be complicit in perpetuating the status quo in the interest of the dominant classes and powers. In the struggle between national liberation and imperialist domination, and between social emancipation and capitalist slavery, NGOs have to choose sides. In this there are no in-betweens.”

“While some NGOs may be quite involved with and appreciated by the people whom they purport to serve, ultimately NGOs, by their very nature, derive not only their sustenance but also their legitimacy from the donor-community. In the current international conjuncture, even political elites located in the state or political parties seek legitimacy from so-called ‘development-partners’, rather than from their own people. Not surprisingly, there is a fair amount of circulation of the elite between government and non-governmental sectors.”

“The colonial state was an implant, an alien apparatus imposed on the colonised society. It was an excrescence of the metropolitan state without the latter’s liberal institutions or politics. It was a despotic state.”

“The underlying economic logic of the colonial economy was the exploitation of natural and human resources. Colonies became sites for generating surplus while the {{w|metropoles}} were sites of accumulation. The result was the development of the centres and the underdevelopment of the peripheries. Production processes relied heavily on coercion rather than on contractual consensus for reproduction: forced labour, forced peasant production, enforced cash-crop sales, restrictions on organisation and association and the criminalisation of ‘civil relations’.”

“We do not judge the outcome of a process by the intentions of its authors. We aim to analyse the objective effects of actions, regardless of their intentions.”