Globalisation and alternatives: an interdisciplinary reading into the discourse of NGOs

Non-Government-Organisations (NGOs) have been in the forefront of the struggle against the alleged negative impact of globalisation on developing countries and disenfranchised communities around the world. But despite the fact that NGOs and other grassroot movements are becoming increasingly strident, the discourse of this sector of civil society has not been subjected to any substantial and concerted academic study, particularly in the field of international communication. -- The present study aims at partially filling this gap by 1) reviewing the current general state of NGOs, 2) surveying the latest debates relative to the outreach of globalisation and 3) examining the alternatives being proposed. While drawing mainly on a select sample of NGOs and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) press communiques, the core focus of this study is to deconstruct the NGOs' discourse with a view to gauging its linguistic and hermeneutical underpinnings and situating its relevance within the ongoing debate on globalisation and alternatives. -- This study also aims to examine the discourse of NGOs in the context of a multidiscourse environment relative to the present state of global community development in general and civil society and disenfranchised communities in developing countries in particular as part of the praxis of mainstreaming alternative views and discourses. -- For this, an interdisciplinary methodology of text analysis, juxtaposition and interpretation, based largely on the matrix outlined in Wodak's (Matouschek, Wodak & Januschek, 1996, p. 60), Historical Discourse Method (HDM), Van Dijk's (1998) Media Discourse Approach and Fairclough's (1995, 2001) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used throughout this study. -- And in order to gauge the impact of NGOs' discourse on global civil society, sample articles are examined to decode the perspectives of pro-globalisation media vis-a-vis NGOs' discourse within the parameters of TNCs/Civil Society/NGOs relationships, international political economy and NGOs' taxonomy within International Regimes.