PARTICIPANTS

PAUL J. NELSON
University of Pittsburgh

Paul Nelson is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, where he directs the International Development program. He teaches and conducts research on NGOs, human rights, development policy, religion, and international organizations. He worked for 13 years for several US-based development NGOs, primarily as a policy analyst and public advocate. He is the author, with Ellen Dorsey, of The New Rights Advocacy: Changing Strategies of Human Rights and Development NGOs (Georgetown University Press, 2008).

Religious bodies – worshipping communities, religiously-motivated agencies and organizations, and the local, national and international governance bodies that oversee or unite faith communities – these actors are among the most widespread mass membership organizations that can make a claim to participate in transnational civil society.  Religious bodies would seem to have all the ingredients to form very strong international communities and identities: they have mass memberships, longstanding social teachings, powerful shared identities, formal and informal links among local and national bodies.  But in general the claims that people of faith, especially in poor countries, are able to make on their coreligionists in the wealthy countries do not seem to motivate concerted or sustained mass responses.  I am interested in how these relationships between coreligionists and their institutions are defined in different faiths; how they are expressed institutionally; under what circumstances they have succeeded in motivating significant acts of solidarity; and what explains the relative lack of mass political or other action.  Having worked for some years for humanitarian and development organizations with strong religious ties, I have a strong suspicion that the ability of “faith-based NGOs” to define North-South relationships as acts of charity has significantly defined these relationships.

back to listing