Marie Nathalie Leblanc and Louis Gosselin have put together an up-to-the-minute collection of work on religious humanitarianism which is a product of a particular moment in the early 21st century. As long-time scholars of West Africa, they began the work that led to this volume by noting changes in the religious landscape of Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire: the people and organisations who had been engaged in promoting faith-based views and interests in the sphere of capital-P politics were shifting their attention away from electoral contestations and partisan politics towards an alternate space of engagement, the world of NGOs and entrepreneurship.
This new arena of engagement, characterised by both the bureaucratic rationality of formal organisations and the organic flowering of spirituality, might be mistaken as just another manifestation of the NGO-isation of politics in Africa. However, Lebanc and Gosselin make the case that charitable work that is animated by faith is not reducible to generalisations about the spread of neoliberal rationality. Their chapters develop the notion that faith-based NGOs are a unique breed of social and humanitarian actor, however much they might superficially resemble their secular counterparts.
(The collection is also notable for what is not included, in this historical moment – although many chapters focus on Islam, none are about terrorism, extremism or the dangers of Islamic zealotry, which is a welcome change from much academic writing. This is a collection about religion beyond radicalism and proselytism, for which I am grateful).
The book has two parts. The first lays the scene by sketching out the broad contours of faith-based NGOs in Cote d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso. The second (and more interesting) section narrows the focus as chapters concentrate on specific organisations and individuals. Throughout the book, the protean nature of faith is evident, as both Islam and Christianity morph, hybridise and adapt to the political and economic conditions of the two countries, without ever being overdetermined by those conditions.
Although this book is part of an ethnographic series, most of the chapters do not read like ethnographies, in the sense of immersing the reader in the experiential world of these NGOs. For excellent exceptions, see the chapters by Marie Nathalie Leblanc and by Boris Koenig. Leblanc traces the historical evolution of women's associations in Cote d'Ivoire through her encounters with women representing different phases of generations of leadership, while Koenig's evocative chapter on ‘Christian citizenship’ in an Ivoirian ‘rehabilitation’ centre that seeks to ‘improve’ socially marginalised individuals is an example of how to do compassionate yet critical qualitative work.
At times, however, the chapters devolve into overly descriptive birds’-eye views of the social and political landscape, reading like situation reports rather than grappling with big questions. And because three authors – the two editors plus Boris Koenig – are responsible for seven of the 10 chapters, the writing style becomes a bit repetitious. The introduction notes that the book should be read as ‘a mix between an edited collection and a monograph’ and they might have done better to choose one format or the other. But in general, the editors succeed in using the West African context as a springboard for broader themes and questions in both religious studies and international politics.
Some of these questions are familiar, such as the tensions between global and local (or local and local) discourses that emerge as grassroots NGOs navigate relationships with their donor. The sometimes-uneasy relationship between Islamic NGOs in West Africa and funders in the worldwide ummah (especially Kuwait and Qatar) appears in several chapters, as NGO leaders must navigate between the secular and liberal orientations of their national governments and the more stringent expectations of donors, as well as leadership in their own religious communities (the population of Burkina Faso is just over half Muslim, while Cote d'Ivoire has a much smaller share, around a quarter Muslim population).
This collection is also strong on the emerging ethos of volunteerism – a phenomenon that is not confined to faith-based organisations as it can also be a practice of upward mobility among NGOs more generally, but which takes on new dimensions when it is understood and experienced not just as individual choices but as obligation and as religious identity work, brought out most strongly in Gosselin's chapter on evangelical Christian assistance to orphans in Burkina Faso.
The major contribution of this book lies in directing our attention to the nuancing and complexifying of neoliberalism. All the authors are clear that for an NGO to survive in the national and global competition for monetary and symbolic resources, neoliberal rationality is the only game around. However, describing a faith-based organisation or an individual with strong faith commitments as ‘neoliberal’ does not exhaust what can be said about them, and the authors are at their best when they explore how non-instrumental and reverent ways of being intersect with bureaucratic imperatives.
