- Sustainable development is about processes of popular enrichment, empowerment and participation that our technocratic, project-oriented view has simply failed to accommodate. Unfortunately, difficult problems have the power of leading us to focus on their more manageable components thus totally avoiding the more complex basic, structural questions. This is known as ‘the exclusion fallacy’ in which ‘what-we-choose-not-to-discuss is assumed to have no bearing on the issue’.
- An uncritical, repetitive reliance on the same old, shallow interpretation of unresolved issues –i.e., not considering all the human rights (HR) violations we witness as outcomes of complex social and political processes– has equally foreseeable conservative consequences. Outlooks stemming from such a vantage point particularly suffer from an inexcusable narrow understanding of the nature of control processes in society (both in the North and in the South).
- Somehow, debates about past historical rights and wrongs are not guiding us to come up with more cohesive propositions for tomorrow. If there is no cohesion in our vision, as campaigners we will weary and the campaign will perish; we thus need to reshape our vision firmly embedding it in a more realistic practice. To walk away from making our debates ultimately relevant to those we purport to serve is a luxury we cannot afford. A vision is not much good if it simply stays in the air as something devoutly to be desired; a vision of that sort is a mirage: it recedes as you approach it. To be of use, the vision has to suggest a route, and this requires that it takes into account many unpleasant realities.
- A vision is of no use unless it serves as a guide for effective action. These actions will, once and for all, have to be biased towards the oppressed, because it is their rights that are being trampled-upon day-in-day-out. We can no longer abandon the have-nots to the dollar-dispensing Northern bilateral or multilateral agencies. The moment cries for us to press for more. Windows of opportunity have a way of slamming shut.
- I am aware it is still very difficult for some of us to maintain our political agility in a hostile environment. But the role of an avant-garde is to cause fermentation. We cannot fall in the trap of believing someone else is going to take care of these things for us; we have to get active. A strategic overhaul of our actions requires nothing less than a crisis in our thinking and if by now there is no such a crisis in the horizon, we have to perhaps create one.
- The future of our work cannot be a simple extension of the past. If we try to pursue a path of business-as-usual we will find some altogether unusual consequences. As said, however much we may engage in fine-tuning the engine, this will not suffice unless we redesign certain sizable parts of the motor itself.
- A new politically conscious professionalism will emerge only if we are explorers and ask, again and again, who will benefit and who will lose from choices made and actions undertaken in our work. New professionals ‘who put the last first’ already exist; we still are a minority though. The hard question is how we can multiply and, most importantly, how we can interact, coalesce and organize dynamic networks among ourselves and between us and grassroots organizations.
- Making prescriptive recommendations on what each of us needs to do to contribute our individual grain of salt to making pro-HR interventions more effective and sustainable would be presumptuous. The materials in this Reader are just a wake-up-call for some and an always-timely-reminder for others. It is about being more critical about what we do and see. This, as a basis for each of us to develop our own (new) vision for the future: a vision that fits our own specific situation, one that we commit ourselves to share, and one that we are willing to implement working with others.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org