DeMars follows the partners three steps beyond that circumscribed
notion of the conventional NGO network offered by pluralist scholars.
First, he shows how all color revolutions address and recruit security
actors in the police, military, and intelligence bureaucracies to abandon
the dictator and side with the revolution, either actively or passively.
This observation seriously undermines the flawed premise of pluralist
and globalist theory, as well as some definitions of global governance,
that network actors must believe and advocate common norms, and
maintain visible and mutual ties. Second, for the Serbian case, DeMars
shows that public advocacy by NGOs and diplomats from the United
States, Britain and other EU member states was acknowledged by all
observers as action within the network, but that parallel support
operations by military and intelligence actors from the same governments were ignored. Finally, DeMars follows the partners to delineate
comprehensive responses mounted by Russia, China, Iran and their
allies to neutralize future color revolutions, especially since 2005. These
authoritarian counter-networks are centrally and hierarchically organized, and so do not function as true decentralized networks. However,
they counter the color revolutions comprehensively across all modalities of the network, by mobilizing fake NGOs, anti-democratic
youth movements, UN Security Council vetoes, new regional IGOs,
election monitoring agencies, ideology, and websites.
DeMars argues that the most interesting politics usually happens
outside the normative harmony of the publicly visible network. He shows
that scholars who stop investigating the network when they run out
of homogeneous actors help to conceal the full politics of the
network.
In all these empirical cases, NGOs are revealed as partnering profligately with a heterogeneous array of societal and political partners.
These encounters are where the politics can be found. Some NGOs are
transformed by their encounter with a country or region, and transform it in return. Yet other NGO networks preside over stable situations, contrary to their transformative mandates. The actual effect of a
network is not predictable from the intentions articulated through the
network’s common norms. Instead, the consequences are negotiated and
renegotiated in contentious interactions among partners that often carry
various overt and latent agendas. The most interesting politics is often
revealed by probing both the political and societal partners of NGOs.