About the Author

Michel Feher, a Belgian philosopher, is the author of Powerless by Design: The Age of the International Community and the editor of Nongovernmental Politics and Europe at a Crossroads, among other titles. Founder of Cette France-là, a monitoring group on French immigration policy, Feher is also a founding editor of Zone Books. Yates McKee is an art critic based in New York City Gaëlle Krikorian is a doctoral student at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and a member of the consultative board AC27 at the national research agency on HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis (ANRS).

Reviews

It is a tribute to Nongovernmental Politics that, while keeping their focus on the urgency of action, its contributors…insist over and over on how claims to disinterestedness are shot through with interests and inextricably political. The point is both to enrich and to displace what we understand by neutrality.—Radical Philosophy

Nongovernmental Politics…is a huge and intellectually sprawling volume, physically large enough to serve as a doorstop or even to be used in self-defense against pointed weapons…The authors of the forty-seven contributions here are diverse—a few are university scholars, a good many are activists, some are staff to NGOs and international agencies, several are graduate students. They are predominantly European, with a strong French inflection (doubtless due to Feher's influence). They reflect as well as anything I have read the range of ambitions and anxieties in the growing NGO movement, although of course they are all committed to some version of the notion that we must find new modes of responding to the inadequacies of formal politics through other means. The term “nongovernmental politics” sounds like an oxymoron, but this interesting volume shows why it is not.—Common Knowledge

Morality can't tell political actors what to do. Only politics can do that. The difficulty this poses for anyone who wishes that politics might be done differently, and better, is a theme that unites many of the contributors to Non-Governmental Politics. In his excellent introduction, Michel Feher spells out some of the tensions inherent in the idea that politics is failing many of the world's neediest inhabitants, and yet it is only politics that can rescue them.—London Review of Books