Surviving in adverse environments: A political sociology of non-governmental organisations in autocratic regimes using the example of Russia

2012年，俄罗斯议会颁布了所谓的《外国代理人法》。该法针对的是俄罗斯非政府组织，如果它们接受外国资金并从事政治活动，就必须向司法部登记为外国代理人。登记意味着增加对国家的问责和透明度的义务，以及加强政府控制。公共机构可以拒绝与相应的非政府组织合作，后者有义务在其所有公共行动中声明为外国代理人。外国代理人法可以被概念化为国家试图通过从根本上限制被纳入公民社会的机会来垄断政治交流，或者更准确地说，限制被纳入政治体系边缘的机会。在这里，国家对通信领域施加压力，迫使它们做出具有集体约束力的决定。在政治边缘，社会问题被明确表达，不同的解决方案被协商。非政府组织可能被定义为以应对和提出社会问题的解决方案以及在这方面改变社会结构为目的的组织，受到这项法律的严重打击。由于外国代理人法对任何倡导任何形式的社会变革和共同利益的非政府组织都带有普遍的不信任，它直接攻击了他们的自我形象和社会合法性的核心，并使他们的政治诉求面临风险，这是他们追求目标所不可避免的。然而，在这种情况下，俄罗斯非政府组织的韧性令人惊讶：他们中的大多数似乎成功地应对了政治限制；他们设法再生产和追求他们的目标，尽管政府强加的非法。因此，为了理解当前俄罗斯政治制度的动态和外国代理人法的影响，我们首先需要研究非政府组织如何在这些日益不利的条件下生存。这是该项目的出发点：采用组织社会学方法，使用遵循建构主义和系统理论的组织概念，该项目研究了俄罗斯非政府组织在外国代理人法之后的适应策略，调查了非政府组织与正式政治之间新兴的互动形式，并研究了对俄罗斯政治外围结构的影响。在经验方面，该项目是根据若干活动领域中选定的非政府组织的定性案例研究和其他定性数据。它重构了组织如何在其环境构建中引用法律，探索了这些构建的结构效应，并确定了对组织生存能力和确保其政治可寻址性至关重要的组织特征。

In 2012, the Russian parliament issued the so-called foreign agents law. The law is directed towards Russian non-governmental organisations and forces them to register as foreign agents with the Ministry of Justice if they receive foreign funding and conduct political activities. The registration implies increased obligations of accountability and transparency towards the state, as well as tightened governmental control. Public institutions may refuse to cooperate with the respective NGOs, and the latter are obliged to declare as a foreign agent in all their public actions. The foreign agents law may be conceptualised as the attempt of the state to monopolise political communication by radically restricting the chances of being included into civil society or, more precisely, into the periphery of the political system. Here, the state puts spheres of communication under pressure that are directed towards collectively binding decisions. It is in the political periphery where societal issues are articulated and different solutions are negotiated. NGOs, which may be conceptualised as organisations whose purpose is to cope with and propose solutions for societal problems and to transform societal structures in this respect, are severely hit by this law. Since the foreign agents law carries with it the generalized mistrust of the state towards any NGO advocating any form of societal change and the common good, it directly attacks the very core of their self-image and their societal legitimation and puts their political addressability at risk, which they inevitably need in order to pursue their goals. Given this situation, however, the resilience of Russian NGOs is surprising: Most of them seem to successfully cope with the political restrictions; they manage to reproduce and pursue their goals in spite of the government-imposed delegitimisation. Thus, in order to understand the current dynamics of the Russian political system and the impact of the foreign agents law, we first need to study how the NGOs manage to survive under these increasingly adverse conditions. This is the starting point of the project: Taking an organisational sociology approach and using a notion of organisations that follows constructivism and systems theory, the project studies the adaptation strategies of Russian NGOs in the wake of the foreign agents law, it investigates the emerging forms of interaction between NGOs and formal politics, and it examines the implications for the structures of the political periphery in Russia. Empirically, the project is based on qualitative case studies of selected NGOs in several fields of activity and additional qualitative data. It reconstructs how the organisations refer to the law in their constructions of the environment, it explores the structural effects of these constructions, and it identifies the organisational features that are pivotal for the organisations capacity to survive and to ensure their political addressability.