The Offensive Against Global Civil Society Diffusion of NGO Restrictions

Recent decades have witnessed a global cascade of restrictive and repressive measures against formally organized civil society organizations. This chapter sheds light on what explains the rapid diffusion of legislative restrictions against nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). As we will show, it is witnessed in so-called hybrid regimes or defective democracies as much as in fully authoritarian regimes and to a lesser extent also in full democracies. The rise in NGO restrictions is not just a belated response to NGO growth since the 1990s; it is associated with a broader trend of worldwide deterioration in the quality of democracy. Contrary to debates in international relations focusing on the influence of authoritarian “rising powers,” we present descriptive data and qualitative evidence suggesting that we need to look beyond the actions and intentions of China or Russia to understand the illiberal transformation that is underway. Instead, the diffusion of NGO restrictions is due to a more immanent and horizontal process we call “learning from examples.” Through close textual comparisons, we provide “smoking gun” evidence of learning from examples, tracing the intraregional migration of specific legal formulations from one state’s law to another.