Civic Activism as a Novel Component of Armenian Civil Society

mentioning a few key points here to underscore the difference between these two types of civil
society actors.
Unlike NGOs, civic activist groups maintain minimal levels of formal organisation. They
do not opt for becoming legal entities through state registration procedures. Membership,
leadership and decision-making rules are simple and based on unwritten, informal conventions,
acceptance and mutual understanding. In this respect, civic initiatives are more akin to social
movements than to associations.
Another major difference between NGOs and civic initiatives is the focus of their main
activities. While NGOs have mission statements and areas of expertise, these are usually fairly
broad. Armenian NGOs often engage in a number of varied projects that loosely connect to their
mission; drifting focus areas (often in response to chance changes in donor preferences) is not
uncommon. Civic initiatives, by contrast, are mostly very narrowly targeted at one specific issue.
They have a clearly defined goal (to preserve one particular park, for example). Once the issue is
resolved, the civic initiative in question ceases to exist. Of course, the individual network does
not disappear overnight. The same people are likely to take up another campaign in a similar (or
a different) field. One often sees the same people as core activists in various campaigns (Bagiyan
2015; Kankanyan 2015).
The third and perhaps most defining difference between NGOs and civic initiatives is that
grants are the lifeblood and the modus operandi of NGOs. Most of them do not even consider the
possibility of becoming self-sustainable and moving away from grant-earning and implementing
cycles. Grants from international development organisations are actively sought and considered
prestigious. Civic initiatives, by contrast, explicitly reject foreign funding. They aim at being
self-sustaining at any given point in time, undertaking only those activities that they can
implement through volunteer commitment and minimal fundraising among members.
Thus, contemporary Armenian civil society is richer than it was ten years ago. Civic
initiatives have entered the civil society arena and brought distinct ways of organising and
operating. Our research project examines the interplay between the ‘old’ NGO sector and the
‘new’ civic activism, using a range of methods, which are discussed in the next chapter.
III. Methodology
The goal of the research project, described in this manuscript, is to study the interplay between
NGOs, as the older elements of Armenian civil society, and civic initiatives led by activists, as
the new actors in the civil society arena. The aim of the project is to answer the following
research questions:
RQ.1: How do NGOs and activists perceive one another?
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