-It is unlikely that the naysayers and nitpickers will be able to overrule committed human rights activists.
-It is difficult to be an actor, but easy to be a spectator.
1. Human rights activists’ claims are often (reluctantly) tolerated by regimes long trained in the art of uttering a two-faced-human-rights-speech and who see themselves threatened by the strategies of genuine participation being proposed by progressive development workers. (CETIM)
2. At the grassroots, though, individuals-seeking-to-protect-the-rights-of-poor-people are undeniably making great and often successful efforts to act on people’s justified claims. But, collectively, we have not managed to coordinate and agree on a joint political strategy; our dispersed efforts are thus greatly hampered by the powerful and continuous impoverishing impact of ongoing unjust institutional arrangements. This begs the question: Is this the best we can do? And the answer is: NO. As someone in PHM India said: …for we are condemned to act collectively…
3. The bottom line is: As human rights activists, we need to neutralize some of this headwind coming from these unfair institutional rules. We cannot continue to speak with a myriad of voices putting forward a heap of half-baked reform ideas, many of which are politically unrealistic –even if we managed to organize behind them. (Thomas Pogge)
4. Poor people are affected by events of which they have never heard of….but WE have –and that, morally, calls for our activism! Or, as CETIM says: …we need to mobilize politically at all times and in all fronts.
5. [“…We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break apart our ethical backbone; to dampen and undo what is arguably our civilization’s greatest achievement: the growth of our inborn moral sensitivity.” (Zizek)]
6. But the moral call to action is underpinned by yet another key question: If on the ethical issues we can agree, can we also get one step closer ideologically and thus politically?
7. Agreeing on the latter is needed, because changes will only occur if each of us promotes or participates in steps leading to an active engagement and mobilization of claim-holder constituencies, as well as of duty-bearer.
8. Many solutions are being proposed by different proponents; some of them are good and are politically realistic. But how are we going to blow life into them? What are we to do concretely?
9. Because of this dilemma, we need to re-discuss our collective role as human rights advocates and as change agents. All of us, worldwide, need to get ‘one step closer politically’. In a political world, we, most probably, need to go from accommodation to confrontation.
A kind word to our colleagues, the scholars, activists-to-be
10. Have you ever asked yourself why it is that when scholarship and activism compete for our time, it is activism that tends to be pushed aside? Everybody seems to have her/his pet excuse for this.
11. But technical and scientific erudition will have only limited influence if it is restricted to classrooms and professional journals…or to Readers like this one… Being a good scholar is not sufficient. Our colleagues cannot stop at science. It is simply not enough to make the world we live-in a better place. Just talking about ending poverty or HR violations makes our scholarly-inclined peers feel good, even if nothing good comes out of it.
12. As I see it, the problem is that too many among us keep dreaming they can reverse the malady of their respective societies…’if only they do their technical work better and more efficiently’. But, who are they really fooling?
13. Technical and scientific cures for human rights violations may hold moral virtue for doing the right thing but, politically, it simply is applying cures with-minimal-inconvenience-to-the-haves-of-the-world.
14. With scientific cures alone one does not solve the problems of people whose rights are being violated. Doing so rather makes one accomplice in a process of ‘modernization of poverty’ in which a number of new (and numbing) variables have been introduced that mostly confound the problem.
15. Therefore, activist-scientists need to critically analyze the measures being applied in development work that actually perpetuate the problem(s) and, at the same time, contribute to demobilize the poor through the use of a combination of technical interventions, populist rhetoric and programs that leave the exploitative and HR-violating structures intact.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org