Open Society Foundations Directors Describe Global Threats to Civil Society
The Human Rights Workshop on September 22 featured two directors of the Open Society Foundations (OSF). Founded by George Soros, OSF works to promote democratic governance, strengthen the rule of law, protect minorities, and uphold civil and political liberties around the world. At the Workshop, Johanna Chao Kreilick, OSF’s Director of Strategy, and Tatyana Margolin, OSF’s Regional Director for Eurasia, shared lessons that they have learned from promoting civil society around the world in increasingly hostile conditions.
Kreilick began the workshop by describing OSF’s tactics. “We’re a crazy family of interlocking entities that use a mix of tools — not just litigation but also advocacy, grant-making for organizations and individuals, cooperation with organizations around the world, public communications, convening lawyers and activists from different countries, and so on,” she explained.
To Kreilick, one thing that sets OSF apart from other organizations is its appetite for risk-taking when giving out grants. “We go where other philanthropies aren’t willing or able to go,” she said, “both because we’ve got eyes and ears on the ground, and because we have a risk tolerance around issues of power.” OSF gives away more than $1 billion in funding to human rights organizations and activists each year, but as Kreilick qualified, “In many closed societies, we’re finding that value we have isn’t monetized — it’s forms of operational support.”
OSF has recently had to alter and even scale back its work in some contexts, in response to direct threats to the organization and more widespread escalating risks for civil society. Data breaches in organizations and laws that restrict organizations’ funding sources and activities pose particular challenges. In Hungary, after Victor Orbán’s government passed the so-called “Stop Soros” laws constraining the activities of NGOs, OSF closed its office in Budapest. Kreilick suggested that this decision was taken to mitigate personal and security risks for OSF’s staff and partners. Margolin added, “The situation is devastating for our colleagues in Budapest,” but she also noted that the assault on OSF had at least pressured more European leaders to condemn Orbán. Moreover, Margolin stressed that closing the OSF Budapest office “doesn’t mean we’ve given up on Hungarian civil society.”
Margolin then turned to Russia — another country she oversees as the director of OSF’s Eurasia Program — where OSF began working during the Soviet era. Soros’s goal was that OSF could develop civil society in Russia by preventing brain-drain and encouraging locals to sustain Russian civil society groups, so that they would not need to depend on foreign funding.
However, as Margolin explained, OSF has had difficulty accomplishing this objective due to crackdowns on Russian civil society. The development of civil society in Russia has been impeded by laws targeting organizations that receive foreign funding, the Russian government’s granting funds to NGOs that pursue its agenda, and the closing of physical civil spaces such as centers for arts and debate OSF has spent many years developing. In addition, a law Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into effect in 2015 gives the government the power to prosecute foreign organizations it deems “undesirable” on national security grounds, which has already affected several of OSF’s grantees and partners.
This hostile environment puts OSF’s work in Russia “at a crossroads,” in Margolin’s words. Nevertheless, she affirmed OSF’s ongoing commitment to supporting civil society in Russia and expressed cautious optimism that there would soon be opportunities for openings in Russian society. But she clarified, “Keep in mind that that might look very different than what we’ve seen elsewhere — it might not be Putin stepping down.”
Kreilick admitted that such threats to civil society somewhat restrict OSF’s work. However, the organization has already adopted strategies to work around these risks. She listed a few, such as building partnerships with private sector actors to seek more diverse allies and strengthening the power of journalists in societies where the media is targeted. OSF is also developing “rapid response protocols” to “get money out the door faster to respond to major crises or attacks in Myanmar, Venezuela, and elsewhere,” in addition to OSF’s standard grant-making. Kreilick and Margolin characterized modern threats to civil society as daunting, but both clearly embraced the challenge of developing more creative ways of supporting civil society organizations and activists.
