Theodora Vetta Current Project Theodora Vetta Curriculum Vitae Current Project According to the rich literature of development agencies, a "vibrant civil society" appears to be a vital element towards the consolidation of liberal democracy in the post-socialist countries. This notion has already taken a normative and moral dimension and consequently a universal and uncontested character. What needs to be examined is how these discourses and policies, historically embodied in the western imaginary, are applied in socio-historical contexts of different trajectories and take on a life of their own. This project will focus on the NGO sector in Serbia. Considering the NGOs as a new social actor in the political and social reconfiguration of the country, I am mostly interested in their foundation as a development project in itself as well as in the social realities produced by their ability to work and mediate both on the transnational/national level and on the national/local one. Considering the first field, there are three major actors defining it with their concrete power relations over a state building project: the donor community, the State with its apparatuses and the NGO sector. Trying to trace their relational dynamics we have to examine to what extent the NGOs are donor driven; if and how they interpret, re-appropriate and reshape donors' directions to their own needs. Furthermore, it is important to shed light on how the NGOs are practically implicated in the state building program, having in mind contemporary ideological currents such as the so-called "New Public Management" and "Good Governance''. In both cases, what needs to be analyzed is how do NGOs, donors and the state interact in their everyday social experience over concrete projects, how are they implicated in the changing forms of power, through which procedures and techniques do they make themselves tangible.

Considering the power field created by NGO intervention on the nation/local level, there are two main questions that need to be examined: firstly, the formation of a new, local, highly educated elite of middle class origins possessing a considerable social and economic capital as well as their relations with the existing Serbian elite, both political and intellectual. Are the NGOs attempting to form a new class? The second question is related to the NGOs reception by the majority of the population as civil society representatives and solidarity associations. Trying to understand the origins of the general negative image the public opinion has of NGOs, we should draw attention to local social networks, to multiple ways of social organization and identity formation, focusing on local meanings and contestations, revealing continuities and discontinuities with the past that encompass everyday life.