[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about a new look at attitudes and actions we need to embrace for more effective HR work. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–To understand the terrain in which our struggle unfolds is the first act of resistance. (escr-net)
Without imagination, activists can only sell routine (Albino Gomez)
–Without taking risks, activists cannot even dream of achieving justice and fairness. Audacity is the door to history.
–Only the armed prophets succeed. (Macchiavelli)
–To be truly radical, activists must make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
–To be is to do. Or more facetiously: “Enough of realities, we want promises”. (graffiti)
1. As human rights activists, there are many attitudes and actions we need to embrace; among them:
- Because single issue campaigns rarely can be brought into rainbow coalitions, activists are to stitch together the many now-siloed, single-issue, locus-specific patches of activism into a single quilt. (Greg Smith, Nicholas Freudenberg)
- Denounce inequities and injustice, but you also must announce a new order.
- Avoid going in circles of diminishing radiuses since we then miss the target; we need a spiral approach to hit the target.
- Do not downplay the power of individual action since natural leaders in the community* can and do act as enablers and catalysts of alliances and teamwork that create the conditions for human rights (HR) changes and thus spur actions that have maximum impact. (G. Nisbett et al.)
*: These leaders have trusting followers whom they do not lead ‘on behalf of’, but lead with them and thus increase their power because of them. They inspire and motivate and unleash the potential of colleagues and claim holders around them. Ergo, working with local development sector groups, activists are to transform project staff into system architects and local development organizations into movements for justice and HR. (United Edge)
What human rights activism is all about is moving potential claim holders from pain to indignation
2. But it is even more: it is to move them into a creative anger of historic proportions with a perspective that leaves fatalism behind forever. (Leonardo Padura, Personas Decentes)
3. For change to occur, a critical mass has, therefore, to be achieved in one scoop as a result of a process of ‘social and political accumulation’. The question is: What is the social maturation time of an idea? For Jan Oberg, a HR activist, a good idea takes 30-50 years to catch on. Wow! (I have been at it for 20 years, …and? Is he right?)
4. But it is not only the time factor: We have to be careful not to be playing in the wrong chessboard or to show up for the race and not winning it. (Warren Berggren) Does this mean we have to go beyond classical (soft) ‘advocacy’ work?
Does ‘advocacy’ bring about significant human rights changes?
–We have been along this path long enough…
5. Advocacy is said to be about convincing with (com)passion, about empowering and energizing, about acting with courage and seeking consensus. [But is it succeeding at that? Consensus between whom?] Advocacy is mainly speaking, pleading and/or writing in support of a cause. An advocate is to be one who is called to speak in favor of others. Advocacy is said to be the underpinning of any planning process.** [But do we have a lot to show-for on this?] Its practitioners claim it transforms charity-oriented-approaches-to-providing-services into national obligations to give meaning to HR. [But does it really bring about such obligations in the HR sense?]
**: Stating the obvious does not usually help solving the problem as much as ideas alone will not magically convince duty bearers especially when bureaucracies respond to the demands of Capital, not to the needs of people.
6. So, is advocacy really about empowering individuals to formulate and ask their own questions? Advocacy is used to persuade, influence and convince. [Maybe in counted specific cases…] We are told activism using advocacy is a long-distance race, not for the short winded. [Exactly meaning what?] (Bernard van Leer Foundation)
7. Ill-conceived activism, we are further told, would be: a) posturing about peripheral matters, b) using excuses not to focus on the big picture or, c) unwillingly allow the differences between two sides to seem slight. Also, d) engaging in mock debates and letting the ‘narcissism of small differences’ exaggerate what are not really small differences or, e) even giving little disputes the appearance of moral gravity. [Not bad, but this Reader has forever been painting activism as much more than advocacy, i.e., claim holders actively demanding their rights].***
***: See HRRs 85, 232, 304, 440, 470 and 573 at www.claudioschuftan.com
Bottom Line
–Moving in the right direction will always be first asking where do we want to go and defining our goal.
8. Progressive movements have emerged, but many have also disappeared. The only really big movements that have survived over the centuries are trade unions. They are the only that can still make their voice heard to change global policy (hint, hint for HR activists). Yet there also is enormous potential in movements of the youth and of women; much depends on the class position young people take. (Francine Mestrum)
9. And finally, I am not saying everyone has to be a front-line activist. But times are hard, time is running short, things are getting badly out of control and academic discussions are not taking us places; it is a luxury we cannot afford. We are faced, not with new arguments, but with new approaches to argumentation!
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
schuftan@gmail.com
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
Violence is not an exception activists face since it is the logic of Capitalism made visible
–As HR activists, we are witnessing something akin to a Political Economy of Violence (PEV), i.e., a global regime in which violence is deployed by both state and non-state actors to maintain an economic system of profit and control. Today, neoliberalism has intensified this violence, blurring the lines between corporations, organized crime, and state institutions. PEV manifests through militarized dispossession, protest criminalization and environmental destruction exposing the deep connections between states, corporate power, and organized violence. Violence also functions as a tool for corporate-led dispossession and territorial reconfiguration.
Some ways how HR activists can resist the Political Economy of Violence are as follows:
- Center your actions on defenders and communities under threat.
- Name the violence: build shared analyses that dismantles narratives of justification and denial.
- Denounce and amplify: raise the visibility of cases and demand accountability from state and corporate actors.
- Foster international solidarity: unify actions across regions, confront the interconnected violence we face, and strengthen long-term support through relationships of trust forged in collective struggle.
- Protect territories and the lives that sustain them: strengthen collective protection, care, and community-based strategies to advance alternatives to military violence.
- Transform structures: advance alternatives to the dominant economic model, grounded in self-determination, environmental justice, and people’s sovereignty.
Capitalism has always depended on extreme force –historically extracting wealth through dispossession, slavery, and exploitation. Today, neoliberalism has intensified this violence, blurring the lines between corporations, organized crime, and state institutions. The result is a world where those defending lands, waters, and sacred territories are increasingly under attack, while impunity reigns. From red-tagging and forced disappearances to a militarized development and land dispossession, repression has become the cost of resistance. (Geneva Graduate Institute) Food for thought if you are (or plan to become) a HR activist.