Civil society in Pakistan: an exclusive discourse of projectization

This article analyzes the discourse of civil society in its actual manifestation at the societal level. In the West, civil society developed with the rise of capitalism. In a non-Western setting such as Pakistan, characterized as semi-feudal, semi-industrial, and with non-capitalist social relations still prevalent in rural and tribal areas, civil society has gained currency through the discourse of foreign-funded "NGO projectization." Through an ethnographic account of community mobilization by seven national-level NGOs, it is demonstrated that imported concepts introduced by the development industry through projects have, at times, turned civil society into an exclusive discourse of "projectization" that does not go beyond, donors, practitioners, and consultants within transnational spaces.