The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Power at the Open Society Foundation

Program officers, strategy leads, and senior executives at the Open Society Foundations do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking languages of Open Society Values, Rights and Dignity, Democratic Practice, Equity in Governance, and Building Vibrant Inclusive Democracies. They claim responsibility for sustaining the world’s largest private funder of human rights, justice, and anti-authoritarian efforts inside a competitive, post-2024-election environment defined by rising illiberalism. This is the core insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Institutional vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define legitimacy, and justify control over multi-billion-dollar endowments, global and regional programs, network offices, and the invisible machinery of grant pipelines, dashboards, and portfolio reviews. But at OSF, that language does more than recruit allies. It sorts status internally. It functions as a passport inside a transnational professional class that spans foundations, NGOs, policy shops, and elite legal culture. The ability to speak of rights, dignity, and democratic practice fluently is not just moral positioning. It is a credential. It marks who can be trusted to allocate capital, who belongs in strategy rooms, and who will not embarrass the institution in front of peer foundations, journalists, or regulators. The language is both external coalition technology and internal rank-ordering device. These phrases do not merely describe practice. They define jurisdiction. They determine who gets to say what kind of institution the sector can sustain, how ruthless that democracy-defending culture should remain under institutional pressure, and which forms of adaptation still count as faithful to what the Open Society Foundations are.
Before the analysis proceeds, the framework needs a limit acknowledged, and at OSF this limit is more visceral than anywhere else in this series. Alliance Theory, applied without restraint, becomes a closed system. When every position gets decoded as a power move, the analysis loses precision. The program officer who stays until midnight refining a civic-engagement cohort’s coalition map is not primarily executing a coalition maneuver. She is trying to ensure the grantee hits the ground running when the next authoritarian crackdown or electoral shock arrives. The president who structures her week around strategy sessions years after promotion because she knows it protects frontline movements inhabits a world whose demands are real, not merely performed. The Open Society Values framework, Democratic Practice Excellence, and the accumulated tactical culture of a network that has been the world’s first philanthropic response to closed societies for nearly five decades are not just rhetorical structures and coalition technologies. They are an ethical and operational system with its own internal logic and genuine authority over the people who accept them. Alliance Theory names something real about how institutional authority functions inside the Open Society Foundations. It is not the whole picture, and here the remainder is measured in something more immediate than anywhere else in this series. Once the grant is awarded and the check clears, there is no reinterpretation. Only outcome.
Ernest Becker argues in The Denial of Death that human beings are unique among animals in their awareness of their own mortality, and that most of human culture, religion, and social life organizes itself to manage the terror that awareness produces. We construct hero systems, cultural frameworks that promise symbolic immortality, that tell us our lives participate in something larger and more permanent than our individual bodies. To be a faithful member of a hero system is to transcend death symbolically. To lose one’s hero system is to be thrown back against the terror it was built to contain.
The Open Society Foundations are a hero system organized around a specific and unusual fear. The deepest terror the institution manages is not death in the biological sense. It is Missing the Defense of the Open Society on Our Watch. It is systemic irrelevance: a rights-and-justice mission that fails because the network was not ready, a portfolio that lands too late or too conventionally, a grantmaking culture that turns OSF into just another endowment manager while authoritarianism, nationalism, and inequality dominate the contested civic space. Democratic Practice is not merely a strategic posture or a managerial aspiration. It is a defense against philanthropic defeat, the collective refusal to allow the institution to calcify into the kind of foundation that mistakes process for outcome, political pressure for prudence, and diversity metrics for structural transformation. Every portfolio review, every impact dashboard brief, every Open Society ritual is the hero system doing its maintenance work: interrupting the drift toward bureaucratic complacency that the institution’s own scale and endowment environment continuously produce. The Beckerian bargain OSF offers its staff and grantees is this: your individual career, lived seriously within this framework of justice and power-building, participates in something permanent. You are not just disbursing grants. You are the tip of the spear that keeps democratic possibility alive by being ready to fund anywhere the need arises.
But OSF is not a closed system. It is an organism embedded in a hostile and competitive environment, and the internal language only holds so long as external actors allow it to.
OSF operates under constant latent threat from its arbitration layer. Governments can investigate. Tax authorities across multiple jurisdictions can redefine the boundaries of permissible political activity. Hostile legislatures in Hungary, India, Israel, and the United States have treated OSF grants as evidence of foreign interference. A single grant framed as partisan infrastructure triggers scrutiny that no internal dashboard can absorb. This layer does not care about impact reports or equity metrics. It cares about the boundaries of permissible political activity under charitable law, and catastrophic failure at that threshold is not recoverable through institutional vocabulary. Beyond state actors, elite media sit just above that layer. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal do not control OSF, but they classify it. Neutral philanthropic actor or political combatant. That classification determines how much operating room the network has, and losing it tightens the constraint layer instantly.
Inside the institution, the core tension is time. OSF operates under a structural mismatch that no amount of internal urgency can close. Authoritarian actors can move over a weekend. A large foundation, even an unusually aggressive one, still moves through committee structures, legal review, risk screens, and internal narrative calibration. That creates a chronic temptation to confuse speed relative to peer foundations with speed relative to the political environment. The environment does not grade on a philanthropic curve. A grant that arrives six weeks too late can still be celebrated internally as responsive. On the ground it is simply late. What feels fast internally may still be slow relative to the forces that matter. This is not a moral failing. It is a structural condition, and the institution that does not name it tends to mistake the performance of urgency for urgency itself.
Robert Trivers argued that natural selection favors not merely reciprocity but the ability to track and interpret social information about cooperation and betrayal better than others. Morality, in this frame, is not primarily a ledger of debts. It is a forensic system. At OSF, metrics are not merely management tools. They are epistemology. The system has progressively shifted from using grant data to discipline movement behavior toward using grant data to define movement reality. What can be measured by dollars disbursed, grantee diversity counts, coalition mapping scores, or equity hiring goals becomes real in the system’s operative sense. What cannot be measured, the tacit judgment that tells an experienced program officer which movements will hold under backlash, the long-horizon investment in infrastructure whose value will not appear in any annual report, becomes progressively invisible.
This creates the shift from Open Society Grantmaking to proxy obsession. Leaders stop managing structural transformation and start managing the variance in dashboards that represent transformation at several removes from a frontline organizer fighting in contested civic space. The proxy becomes the reality. The metric becomes the movement. And when that happens, optimizing the metric is no longer the same as building power that can execute against entrenched authoritarianism, though the institutional vocabulary continues to describe both activities with identical language.
Trivers’ deeper claim is that organisms deceive themselves to better deceive others. The OSF professionals who invoke Rights and Dignity as their primary criterion are not primarily performing. They believe it. That self-deception is load-bearing: an institution whose members have genuinely internalized the conviction that every decision serves justice can sustain the metric regime with moral energy rather than mere compliance. But the self-deception also creates the specific failure mode that proxy epistemology produces. Once you have convinced yourself that a demographic representation goal accurately represents improved movement cohesion and tactical performance, optimizing that goal feels like serving justice even when the two have diverged. The gap between the map and the territory becomes invisible precisely because the map has been invested with the moral weight that belongs to the territory.
The deepest failure mode at OSF is not bad intent. It is the substitution of manageable proxies for unmanageable reality. Real power-building is erratic, politically risky, and difficult to measure. Substitute activities are easier. Convenings can be counted. Leadership cohorts can be showcased. Toolkits can be distributed. Capacity-building can be described in language that satisfies boards and peer institutions. Some of this work matters. But it also offers something institutions find hard to resist: the sensation of strategic seriousness without full exposure to political risk. The metric becomes the movement. The disbursement becomes the outcome. The dashboard becomes the map of reality.
What foundations call judgment is often accumulated taste pretending to be neutral evaluation. At OSF, this means the decisive filter is not only whether a proposal advances rights or democratic practice. It is whether the people carrying that proposal feel legible to the institution. Seriousness has a tone. It has a memo style. It has a way of speaking about power that sounds professional rather than raw. It has a social texture that fits boardrooms in New York, London, and Brussels. The result is predictable. Foundations drift toward grantees who can narrate conflict in the institution’s preferred dialect, even when the actors most capable of carrying political weight in contested civic space are less polished, more local, more nationalist in register, or simply harder to domesticate. Geography intensifies this asymmetry. OSF’s mission is global, but its prestige signals remain anchored in elite Western professional culture. A movement actor in Eastern Europe, Latin America, or sub-Saharan Africa might be effective in contested civic space while failing the aesthetic tests of donor culture. A fluent NGO intermediary might pass every internal filter while carrying less real political weight. The selection system rewards legibility over capacity. The problem is proxy temperament. The grantee who sounds like the foundation might not be the grantee who can hold ground.
Inside the institution, these forces produce tensions between factions with different definitions of success. Program staff see themselves as carrying the moral mission. Finance and legal staff see themselves as protecting the institution from collapse or scandal. External affairs manages narrative exposure and reputational risk. Each group experiences the others as distortions. Program staff see constraint as timidity. Constraint staff see programs as undisciplined and insulated from consequences. Communications sees both as naive about how the institution is perceived. These are not side conflicts. They are the daily operating reality of the organization.
Succession sharpens the stakes. The transition from George Soros to Alex Soros is not just a leadership change. It is a test of whether urgency can be inherited. The founder’s biography was part of the operating structure of the institution. He forged it in direct confrontation with closed societies. His risk appetite, his anti-totalitarian memory, and his willingness to absorb political exposure were not decorative. They were the institution’s operating system. The next generation inherits the structure but not the original conditions. Inherited urgency faces the classic problem of all second-generation regimes. Urgency becomes management. Antagonism becomes strategy language. The hero system becomes something to maintain rather than something that arises from lived conflict. Becker is most useful precisely here. The hero system becomes hardest to sustain when it passes to people who did not build it in direct confrontation with the original enemy.
OSF also competes with other major funders, NGOs, and advocacy networks for the right to define what serious democratic defense looks like. That means internal arguments are partly arguments about field position. Is OSF the risk-taking insurgent funder, the standards-setting flagship, the emergency backstop, or the prestige center that blesses strategies others then copy? These are different institutional identities. They imply different grants, different staff tolerances, and different thresholds for embarrassment. Internal battles are often battles over which ecological niche the institution should occupy inside the wider human-rights industry.
Stephen Turner’s critique of essentialism applies to every coalition competing for jurisdictional control at OSF. Each claims to know what the Open Society Foundations really are. A rights institution. A power-building network. A democratic infrastructure fund. A responsible steward of permanent capital. These are not discoveries. They are reconstructions built from selective readings of the same founding materials, the support for dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, the role in post-apartheid South Africa, the post-2024 democratic-defense pivot. Each coalition selects the episodes that support its current position and presents that selection as recovery of authentic purpose. The rights-and-dignity coalition defends an essence selected from OSF’s history that serves its interest in institutional centrality while minimizing the evidence that the network has also functioned as a legitimating structure for elite professional networks whose commitment to power redistribution has been, at best, partial. The movement-building coalition invokes a revolutionary essence that draws on real episodes of consequential grantmaking while serving interpretive flexibility interests that the institutional record, honestly read, does not straightforwardly support across every decade. The endowment-stewardship coalition asserts a permanence essence that reflects genuine fiduciary obligations while serving the interests of those whose incentives run toward institutional preservation rather than political risk.
The Open Society Foundations are not one institution. They are four overlapping systems negotiating with each other under the immediate pressure of active grantmaking in a polarized democracy and global authoritarian surge. The doctrine layer, anchored by Chair Alex Soros and President Binaifer Nowrojee, defines what the network claims to be. A rights institution committed to democracy and human dignity. Soros is the fast-life-history insurgent in the most literal sense in this series: a more explicitly political philanthropist who leads the network into the operational environment rather than managing from legacy playbook. His public statements on power and inequality are the clearest possible signal that he understands what OSF is for. Nowrojee, the first woman and first person from the global south to lead the institution, brings lived experience from East Africa and the Asia-Pacific that prevents the doctrine from becoming purely Western abstraction. They cannot rewrite the signal to match the cue once the grant lands. They can only build the portfolio that is ready when it does. The constraint layer, anchored by Interim COO Maija Arbolino, transitioning to Leela Ramdhani, and the finance and legal leadership including the Soros Economic Development Fund arm, determines what is financially and operationally possible. They control the resource flows that determine whether justice is genuine or documented. A justice mission that cannot sustain itself past the initial grant is not a mission. It is a vanguard that waits for rescue. The expansion layer, led by Vice President for Programs Pedro Abramovay and Vice President Leonard Benardo and the global network of regional offices and grantees, converts doctrine into deployed capital. These are the units that take the doctrine layer’s claims about Democratic Practice and convert them into the occupation of contested civic ground. The vice presidents are where the Trivers analysis becomes most concrete. They manage the interface between the metric system that reports their impact to the board and the tactical reality their grantees describe to them in honest assessments. When those two accounts diverge, whether they surface it or absorb it into an impact report determines whether the network’s justice capacity is visible to the people planning around it. The reproduction layer, anchored by VP for External Affairs Laura Silber and General Counsel Debbie Fine, determines who gets hired, promoted, and trusted. This layer carries the tacit knowledge transmission system that makes the network’s justice-seeking culture durable across leadership changes and grant cycles. They know which portfolios are ready and which are producing impact reports. They know which officers have the tactical judgment to reorganize a movement ecosystem under fire and which have learned to optimize for the metrics that produce promotion.
Power at OSF does not flow from formal authority. It flows from the ability to stop something from happening. The investment officer who refuses to certify a mission investment as impact-ready exercises a veto that no chair can override without accepting accountability for what happens if the capital fails. The program VP who tells the board that a portfolio is not ready for crisis deployment exercises a veto through institutional credibility that the metric system cannot easily override if she is honest and sustained. Soros himself exercises the most consequential veto in the philanthropic system: his willingness to refuse grants, strategies, or impact assumptions that his operational judgment tells him will fail when the next political shock arrives.
Three failure thresholds structure the system. Metric failure is constant and mostly invisible. Adjust the dashboard. Refine the language. Operational failure is harder to ignore. The gap between what the metrics reported and what the movements produced becomes undeniable. Internal correction begins. Catastrophic failure triggers the arbitration layer. Governments, tax authorities, hostile legislators, elite media, and donor revolts intervene. At that point the institution no longer controls the narrative. Most elite institutions do not fear being wrong. They fear being caught being wrong by actors they do not control. The management of exposure is a core logic, and it expands quietly until it becomes indistinguishable from self-protection.
The signal layer and the cue layer at OSF operate according to the governing logic this series has traced across every institution. Signals maintain legitimacy while cues determine survival. Open Society Values, Justice-Centered Grantmaking, and Democratic Resilience Excellence are the signal layer. Grant disbursement totals, resilience scores, mission investment returns, and promotion outcomes are the cues. At OSF, the divergence between signals and cues carries a specific and important character. Unlike most institutions in this series, OSF operates under time compression that most bureaucratic systems never experience. Boeing drifts for years. Government agencies plan over months. OSF lives in grant cycles and crisis windows. Once the political shock arrives, the network has weeks to reallocate, convene, and deploy capital. Once the grant lands in contested territory, there is no metric system available to reinterpret what is happening. That temporal compression is OSF’s most important structural feature. It strips away the institution’s ability to rewrite signals to match cues at the moment of maximum consequence. The impact is either real or the grant reveals that it was not.
The jurisdictional contest at OSF will be decided by what the next grant cycles and political shocks reveal. Watch the impact reports: if they surface tactical failures with enough specificity to force strategy and investment changes, the feedback loop functions. Watch the promotion outcomes: if officers whose portfolios underperformed are separated while officers whose movements adapted under fire advance, the selection environment has changed. Watch the equity dashboards that follow leadership transitions: if the network’s justice metrics improve while the tacit knowledge base of program staff erodes, the simulation layer has reasserted.
OSF’s jurisdictional war is not a disagreement about values. It is a conflict over which coalitions, strategies, and selection environments best satisfy the network’s survival requirements under conditions of regulatory threat, field competition, elite media scrutiny, and democratic crisis. The signal layer provides the legitimacy framework through which these strategies compete, but survival is determined by the alignment of capital discipline, movement fitness, and environmental pressure. The hero system sustains commitment by giving meaning to participation in this structure, while the selection environment determines which version of that structure persists.
Shock produces clarity. Clarity produces standards. Standards produce drift. Drift produces simulation. Simulation awaits the next shock. At the Open Society Foundations, the shock is currently underway. The grants, movements, and capital deployed in 2026 are the most honest impact assessment the network has conducted in years. They are not checking a box. They are answering the question that every institution in this series has been structured to avoid asking too directly: does the capability the metrics describe exist when the environment stops allowing the metrics to define reality?
OSF’s leading coalitions are not governed by a single trusted program class but by competing groups of considerable institutional reach and genuine normative commitment, each using a different language of justice to justify authority over the grants, portfolios, dashboards, hiring decisions, and mission investments through which philanthropic power is defined and the civic space is shaped. The equilibrium this produces feels like confusion because the questions at its center, what counts as justice and who deserves deference for naming it, have never been settled and cannot be settled by any coalition’s institutional victory alone. That unsettledness is not a failure of American philanthropy. It is its most honest expression.