ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the fourth act of this ethnography, the IDO actors revisit
the initial tools of this agency’s institutional ideology, and a new inter-
pretation of that ideology is born. This involves a sort of ‘filtering’ process,
in which the actors filter information about their partners and the sur-
rounding context into two basic colours which are heavily symbolic to them:
white and red. The dichotomymay be nuanced by each individual actor, but the
only real differences of opinion concern which of their local partners should
be categorized as white or red, rather than with the categories themselves. The local partners are classified as white if they are seen to be going in the
direction of the ‘flowering of civil society’ sought by the agency, and red if
they seem to be resisting this flowering as a result of their Soviet legacy.
