Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2006. / Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 334 p. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis examines how non-governmental organisations (NGOs) claim legitimacy in the UK national context with the aim of increasing the understanding of how NGOs’ access to power is justified. The thesis argues that the limits of current theories on NGOs and legitimacy do not enable proper scrutiny of the organisational complexities involved and proposes that Beetham’s approach to legitimacy is more fruitful. A Beethamite analysis is based on scrutinising NGOs’ legitimacy-in-context. This involves examining NGOs’ normative structures and internal organisation of power in order to explain and assess their legitimacy claims. It explores the legitimacy claims of three UK NGOs by applying a Beethamite analysis to interrogate their legitimacy claims. The NGOs that are my unit of analysis are enmeshed in complex organisational hierarchies that extend beyond the UK territory. Understanding the internal organisation of power in these hierarchies is important for identifying legitimacy sources that underpin NGOs’ legitimacy claims. The three NGOs are Amnesty International UK, Greenpeace UK and Cafod. The case study of Amnesty International UK shows how the legitimation of power is justified internally where the members of the UK section legitimise the representational powers of the International Secretariat. This is contrasted with the normative sources of legitimacy that are more commonly used to justify Amnesty International UK's legitimacy claims and which ignore members as an important source of authority. The analysis in the case study of Greenpeace UK demonstrates how it is a representative unit of Greenpeace International. It also highlights how scientific knowledge has become a legitimacy source that justifies Greenpeace UK's legitimacy claims with implications for how to assess their legitimacy claims. The case study of Cafod analyses how Cafod claims legitimacy as a Catholic agency and how it is institutionally embedded in the Holy See. Cafod is primarily a social agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. The case study demonstrates how Cafod's sources of legitimacy are primarily Catholic and that this causes legitimacy problems when Cafod uses secular rather than theological sources of legitimacy to justify its policies. One of the main conclusions of the thesis is that a differentiated approach is needed for analysing NGOs’ legitimacy claims, one that takes into consideration the context of NGOs’ legitimacy claims, their internal process of legitimation and their sources of legitimacy, when assessing their access to power. The lack of an appropriate regulatory framework, and in particular the systematic exclusion of politically oriented NGOs by UK regulators, hinders the advancement of proper assessment and understanding of NGOs’ role in society.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have grown significantly over the years and are today considered to be one of the most influential and powerful actors in the world when it comes to defending democracy and upholding various rights. When it comes to human rights, Amnesty International is one of the largest and most respected NGO in the world. Amnesty International works for a world where all the human rights should be respected and can be enjoyed by all the people of the world. Despite the important work of Amnesty International, knowledge of Amnesty International and other NGOs are very limited. The knowledge that exists is considered to be very simplistic, since NGOs are much more complex than one actually thinks. This study is therefore an effort to increase the knowledge and understanding of Amnesty International and NGOs. Using the “Stakeholder theory”, Amnesty International will be analyzed to examine how powerful and effective it is. Various stakeholders in the form of governments in countries and the media will be used to analyze their relationship with Amnesty International in terms of being able to influence. The findings has shown that because Amnesty International lives on donations, they depend on having a high membership base and reputation. Amnesty International prioritizes therefore topics based on how much the interest there are from the public opinion and in the media. This, instead of Amnesty International focusing and working in the countries where the most serious human rights violations occur and take place. Therefore, Amnesty International as a NGO will be weakened in its effort to be effective in changing and influencing the human rights in the world.

1 Abstract Since the 1990s, two parallel international phenomena have occurred: the growth of digital communications and the growth of the non-profit sector. The latter growth has taken place globally, but is acutely visible in the Czech Republic. In the Czech Republic, the 1990s posed an interesting challenge for the growth of non-profit organisations after the fall of Communism. One communications practice which has been utilised in business, journalism and the media is transmedia storytelling, though its application has been lacking in the non- profit sector. Through the utilisation of SWOT analysis methodology, this master's thesis will see this practice extrapolated to the non-profit sector in an exploratory case study of Amnesty International groups at various levels in both the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom. From this, the work hopes to achieve a better understanding of how transmedia storytelling practices could aid an international non-profit organisation, such as Amnesty International, in the effectivity of its agenda setting and resource mobilisation - thus eliminating discrepancies between regions in campaigning and fundraising. Keywords: Agenda Setting, Amnesty International, Non-Profit Organisation, Resource Mobilisation, Transmedia Storytelling

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed July 9, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 248-272).

This doctoral research project conducts a political sociology of knowledge of non-governmental actors engaged in advocating and reporting on issues relating to conflict and human rights. It engages the following research question: what are the limits of knowledge produced by non-governmental advocates? This question is applied to empirical case studies looking at, firstly, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group, and secondly, a network of global activists working on post-war Sri Lanka (2010-2014). Applying a Bourdieusian sociological framework, the thesis argues that professional advocates' epistemic practices are shaped by an array of socio-political dependencies. Contrasting with past applications of Bourdieu to International Relations, this thesis reveals contextually-specific dependencies through multiple levels and scales of analysis. At the organisational level, these dependencies manifest through advocacy NGOs' market-like relations with their targeted consumers, as well as their relations with rival knowledge producers. At the level of the human practitioner, it is shown how leading advocacy NGOs are reliant upon a relatively narrow labour market, consisting of practitioners who share a strong dispositional affinity with their consumers. Studying a smaller group of global advocates working on post-war Sri Lanka, the thesis also demonstrates how symbiotic relations between NGO practitioners and leading policy stakeholders had a structuring effect on advocates' network relations, as well as stimulating a deference to a dominant policy discourse of 'liberal peace'. Shifting the attention to advocates' extraction of knowledge from its proximal contexts, this thesis also examines the influence of advocates' localised dependencies. In the case of post-war Sri Lanka, it is shown how foreign advocates' knowledge is informed by a limited set of domestic actors, primarily encompassing the country's liberal elites. Overall, these dependencies are argued to place significant constraints on knowledge generated in advocacy contexts - limits that differ to other modes of knowledge production.

This work focuses on the comparison of the managerial systems of Ukrainian and Czech branches of international human rights organization Amnesty International. In theoretical part it describes types of government of nonprofit organizations, principles of their management, introduces analytic-normative model of the management of organization and external factors that can influence organization. Practical part if focused on the analysis of Amnesty International as a whole, its respective branches, application of the analytic-normative model for those branches, analysis of similarities and differences and identification of the causes of those differences. Results show the influence of organization's external environment on its management.

After decades of repression and segregation South Africa managed to break free from the Apartheid era. The year was 1994 when democracy started to prevail in South Africa. That year a truth commission was created in the country to deal with the human rights violations of apartheid. This thesis will analyze the truth commission’s management through three perspectives. These perspectives are the Truth Commission’s, a report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and lastly a theory by Samuel Huntington. The analysis is designed as a case study of the truth commission’s work. This thesis describes the commissions work and the challenges that followed. The purpose of the thesis is to describe and analyze some of the different approaches on South Africa’s process of reconciliation. This has been done to see if there is parallels or possible contradictions between the perspectives and to highlight challenges. The result shows that the perspectives do have split opinions about the commissions work. The Truth Commission aims to bring the country forward in a fast pace, while Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch stands more critical on how the commission chooses to go about. Clear parallels are also shown between Huntingtons theory and the reality of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Syftet med uppsatsen var att undersöka vilka retoriska strategier som används i texter publicerade på djurrättsorganisationen Djurens Rätts respektive människorättsorganisationen Amnestys webbsida, och vilka likheter och skillnader det finns organisationernas argumentation emellan. Vidare bestod metoden av en deskriptiv argumentationsanalys med utgångspunkt i fem olika argumentationstyper. Resultatet påvisade likheter vad gäller förekomsten av orsaks-och konsekvensargument, exempelargument och analogiargument medan märkbara skillnader fanns i anknytning till auktoritetsargument och regelargument. Skillnaderna skulle till viss del kunna förklaras i relation till Djurens Rätts och Amnestys olika arbetsområden samt de kontraster som finns vad gäller social och juridisk status mellan djurs respektive människors rättigheter. Slutligen är det möjligt att likheterna i organisationernas reotrik beror på likartade arbetssätt och syften.

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