Unpacking the world cultural toolkit in socialist Venezuela: national sovereignty,human rights and anti-NGO legislation

This article examines how the Venezuelan government has discursively justified passing legislation that forbids NGOs that promote political rights from receiving foreign funding. Existing theories of globalisation theory fail to fully explain this phenomenon, including world polity/society and world-systems theories. Instead, I argue that although existing cultural scripts promote the spread of democracy and human rights through NGOs, the Venezuelan government has utilised a discourse of national sovereignty to justify its anti-NGO efforts. I argue that instead of one overarching set of cultural scripts, the world polity/society contains conflicting cultural scripts. In doing so, I develop the concept of the world cultural toolkit in order help us make sense of these contradictory cultural scripts concerning state policy.