Critical Sociology 1–16 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0896920516656762 crs.sagepub.com ‘What Will We Be without Them?’ Rural Intellectuals in the State and NGOs in Zimbabwe’s Crisis-Ridden Countryside David Moore University of Johannesburg, South Africa Zenzo Moyo University of Johannesburg, South Africa Abstract Research on NGOs in rural Zimbabwe suggests that ideas of automatic opposition between ‘civil society’ and/or non-governmental organizations and authoritarian states are too simple. Rather, relations between state and non-state organizations such as those referenced in this article, in the rural district of Mangwe about 200 kilometres south-west of Zimbabwe’s Bulawayo, are symbiotic. This contrasts with urban areas where political histories have led to more contested state-civil society relations in the last two decades, during which social movements with a degree of counter-hegemonic (or counter-regime) aspirations were allied with many NGOs and opposition political parties. Gramsci’s idea of ‘rural intellectuals’ could complement the widely used notion of ‘organic intellectuals’ to examine the members of the intelligentsia appearing to be at one with subordinate groups in the countryside and at odds with the state. Likewise state workers distant from the centre and close to their class peers in NGOs as well as their ‘subjects’ may operate with autonomy from their masters in ruling parties and states to assist, rather than repress, citizens and also to co-operate with NGO workers. This research indicates that discerning how hegemony works across whole state-society complexes is more complicated than usually perceived, given the many regional variations therein. Keywords Zimbabwe, civil society, hegemony, non-governmental organizations, rural intellectuals Corresponding author: David Moore, Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park 2006, South Africa. Email: dbmoore@uj.ac.za 656762CRS 0 0 10.1177/0896920516656762Critical SociologyMoore and Moyo research-article 2016 Article