Stigmatization by an Authoritarian Government: Russian NGOs Under the 2012 Foreign Agents Law

Most organizational stigma research focuses on preexisting stigma, leaving largely unexplored the question of how the stigmatization process unfolds. The few studies on the stigmatization of organizations have not explored the dynamics between the stigmatizer and the stigmatized or the role of the government. I address these voids by explicating the process of top-down stigmatization of Russian NGOs after the passage of the 2012 foreign agents law. Through an inductive approach relying on archival data, online sources, and interviews, I uncover an authoritarian government’s deliberate stigmatization of select NGOs by assigning to them the resurrected historical label of “foreign agent.” I present a three-phase process model of stigmatization: stigmatizing label emergence, stigma enforcement and contestation, and stigma propagation. I also detail the iterative manner through which the government used burdening, isolating, and intimidating enforcement tactics and how the stigmatized organizations devised coping strategies: persist, adjust, dispute, and evade. The outcomes of the process were the broadening of the scope of targets and criteria for stigmatization and the NGOs’ destabilized existence. I highlight the critical roles of power imbalance, limited action by international authorities, and lagged media attention. I conclude by discussing how these findings may generalize beyond authoritarian regimes.