Anthropological research on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) considers their proliferation since the late twentieth century and their frequent performance of statelike roles. This scholarship speaks directly to how anthropology understands political action and the production of states and subjects. Themes of this work are rooted in the discipline's history of development research and are also shaped by critical social theory, political–economic changes, and the structural position of anthropology as a profession. Anthropology makes distinctive contributions to the study of NGOs, in the form of contextualized, ethnographic studies of social actors and processes, and engages with pressing matters of public interest, such as inequality and climate change.