Between Resistance and Complicity: Women’s tactical agency within NGOization in Palestine

This article explores the situated, subjective experiences of women engaged in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Palestine, through the prism of decolonial feminism and the theorization of oppressing-resisting proposed by Maria Lugones. Since 1993, the Palestinian women’s movement has transformed from grassroots activism into a bureaucratized, professionalized movement through ‘NGOization’. Within a context of settler-colonialism, we examine how this affects Palestinian women’s ability to organize and to resist. Drawing on interviews with Palestinian women, we interrogate how agency/institutions are implicated in NGOization, uncovering how dependency and complicity are institutionalized and agency reshaped and constrained. We identify how women become implicated in practices of oppression and fragmentation that reduce possibilities for collective resistance, in which role modularity, the compartmentalization of thought and action into differentiated roles, is at play. Through a framework of oppressing-resisting, the prospect of tactical agency nevertheless remains, creating possibilities for resistance within the constraints of NGO roles. Our main contribution is to illuminate the latent power of minimal agency, revealing the tacit ways in which active subjectivity enables women to practise resistance from within the settler-colonial context itself.