Farmer’s food for thought
[I have the satisfaction to report that the new book by Paul Farmer (PATHOLOGIES OF POWER: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, with a foreword by Amartya Sen, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2003) sees human rights along the same lines this Reader has been doing for almost two years. Dr Farmer’s human rights "iron laws" can be paraphrased as follows (parentheses added):]
Rats and roaches live by competition1. Utopian ideals are the bedrock of human rights. Human rights are the birthright of everyone: no one has the right to deny them, and everyone has the right to fight for her or his own rights.
under the law of supply and demand;
it is the privilege of human beings
to live under the laws of justice and (rights).
Wendell Berry.
2. Human rights are respected when everyone has food, shelter, education and health care ( - and the poor effectively claim these rights).
3. Most victims of ‘structural violence’ do have rights...on paper. (Voting in elections is a very weak and almost symbolic act of people exercising their rights as claim holders). The right to vote has not protected the poor from dying (preventable) premature deaths.
4. The right to survive is being trampled-on in an age of great affluence. Human rights violations are not accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect; they are symptoms of deeper ‘pathologies of power’ and are linked to social conditions that determine who will suffer abuse and who will be spared.
5. In each local context, it is thus the social forces at work that structure the risk of most forms of human rights violations.
6. Far too many human rights violations are committed in the name of protecting and promoting some variant of the free market ideology. Because of that, the weekly harvest of human rights violations undermines the best of optimisms.
7. It is astonishing how ideology is used to conceal or even justify assaults on human dignity...and such assaults are not haphazard.
8. Human rights violations somehow fail to draw on our deeper understanding of the social (economic and political) determinants of the wide variety of ills (and abuses) we see - this lending them a random appearance when, in fact, they are a highly predictable set of outcomes.
9. So far, human rights scholarship has largely been more the province of lawyers and judicial experts than of academics; (mostly) legal documents and legal scholarship have dominated the human rights literature. But it is difficult to find a (positive) correlation (between the) steep rise in the publication of human rights documents and a statistically significant drop in the number of human rights abuses.
10. It is the present social and economic structures that foist injustice and exploit people; so the question is: since laws designed to protect human rights are not neutral at all, what additional measures have to be taken?
11. The struggle to impose a human rights (development) paradigm is one measure; searching for the mechanisms and conditions that generate human rights violations is another. (But these are not the only ones).
12. The task at hand is to identify the forces (and individuals responsible for each major) human rights violation ( - and these are weighed differently in each local setting). In this context, analysis means bringing out the truth, no matter how embarrassing. Merely telling the truth often calls for extensive research. Telling who did what to whom and where and when indeed becomes a complicated affair.
13. In the past, the human rights community has defined its mission narrowly; some issues are (selectively) ignored; the gaze, for example, is too often diverted from structural violence; (outside observers) look away from its (root causes and) effects, avoiding to look at power issues to understand human rights abuses.
14. (But the plain truth is that) no honest assessment of the current state of human rights can omit an analysis of (the root causes of) structural violence.
15. Human rights abuses are best understood from the point of view of the poor. It is mostly them who are the victims and they have too little voice, let alone rights.
16. The poor are not only more likely to suffer; they are also less likely to have their suffering noticed. The more there are suffering human beings, the more neutral their suffering appears. A wall between the rich and the poor avoids the poor ‘annoying’ the rich; they die in the silence of history. (Pablo Richard)
17. Only through a careful analysis of the growing international inequalities will we understand the processes that structure social and economic rights locally. Human rights are, (first and) fundamentally, transnational in nature.
18. To explain human rights, one has to embed them in the larger context of culture, history and the prevailing political economy. We must not fail to study human rights abuses; but we cannot study them out of context. We thus have to move beyond good (proximal or outcome) analysis.
19. We (simply) cannot avoid (participatorily) examining the political economy of the human rights violations we investigate. (This is easier said than done, because) the institutions we work-in put sharp limits on (any type of) activism.
20. Invoking ‘cultural differences’ is one of several ways to explain away assaults on dignity and on human rights. As may be expedient, oppressive practices are said to be part of ‘the local culture’. These are analytic vices we have to combat. Culture only has a very limited role in explaining the distribution of human rights violations. Culture per-se does not explain human rights violations - it may, at worst, furnish an alibi.
21. So, we need to ground our understanding of human rights violations in the broader analyses of power and social inequality. Human rights violations are, as said, the result of pathologies of power.
22. Injustice (in the world) goes too deep to be responsive to palliatives. Hence we speak of liberation, not of development, not of modernization. In that sense, many quests for rights by the poor have been quests for power sharing, for social-justice-for-all.
23. The human rights arguments are most powerful if we really believe that all human beings are equally valuable. Once we believe this, we are less likely to accept second-rate interventions. (But we all know that) social inequalities have always been used to deny some people a ‘fully human’ status.
24. In health, we cannot simply worry about poor or lack of access to health care; we have to link that to social and economic rights in general. This, because, as health workers, our work takes place at an intersection of medicine, social theory, philosophy and political analysis. For too long, health has been only peripherally involved in work in human rights.
25. Medicine and public health benefit from an extraordinary universally accepted ‘symbolic capital’ that is, so far, sadly underutilized in human rights work (and is largely untapped). (In a way, this is paradoxical since) health offers a critical dimension to the human rights perspective; (the hurdle to be overcome is, therefore, an ideological one).
26. The concept of human rights may at times (seem to) be used as an all-purpose tonic ( - it just isn’t). Originally, it was developed to protect the vulnerable, those most likely to have their rights violated, i.e., the poor and otherwise disempowered.
27. (So, to pretend that the vulnerable are being protected,) human rights has become mainstreamed into the foreign policy rhetoric of most Western liberal states. But human rights is not just an additional item in the priority policies of states.
28. Just passing more human rights legislation is not a sufficient response either, because those in charge already disregard many of the existing, but non-binding instruments. Laws alone - without enforcement mechanisms (triggered and controlled by the people) - are not up to the task of relieving the immense suffering already at hand.
29. States honor human rights laws largely in the breach - sometimes intentionally and sometimes through sheer impotence. The chief irony of human rights work - i.e., that states will not or cannot obey the treaties they sign (of free will) - can either lead to despair or to cynicism. (Ultimately), laws are normative ideology and are thus tightly tied to the prevailing power relations. Under neoliberalism, policies erode the right to freedom from want. The other irony of human rights laws, therefore, is that they consists largely of appeals to the perpetrators...
30. (Under such circumstances, states (are not) able to help their citizens attain (internationally recognized) social and economic rights - even though they do often retain their ability to violate human rights.
(A couple notes of caution):
31. In human rights work, moral relativism is not acceptable.
(There are no half-rights).
The diffusion of the human rights culture can thus be
perceived as a form of moral progress. (Michel Ignatieff)
32. We too can be implicated-in and benefit from the increasingly global structure that is actually violating human rights. (If we stay in our ivory towers), human rights can reduce us to seminar-room warriors. At worst, we risk standing revealed as hypocrites. (Why?) Because, in human rights work, research and critical assessment are insufficient. No more adequate is denunciation. Knowing carries obligations.
33. To confront ongoing abuses is to be faced with a moral dilemma: do one’s actions help the sufferers or do they not?
34. So, to speak of inalienable rights and to wait decades to see them vindicated is NOT what it is about.
(A couple notes on action):
35. (De-facto) engagement to relieve human rights violations IS relevant even if not in possession of a tried and true remedy.
36. To work on behalf of the victims of human rights violations invariably means becoming deeply involved in pressing for social and economic rights. This, since the absence of social and economic power empties political rights of their substance.
37. The fact that we have failed to enforce human rights does not imply that the next step is to lower our sight; rather, the next step is to try a new approach.
38.(Our intellectual recognition of all the above) is only a necessary first step towards pragmatic solidarity, that is, towards taking a stand by the side of those who suffer most from an increasingly harsh and unfair new world order. (But is this enough?) (Perhaps) the world’s best hope is to elicit the (proactive solidarity) of the oppressed for their (fellow) oppressed. (Bertolt Brecht)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
1. We know that the human rights-based approach pushes organizations to focus more on law making, influencing policy, and bringing about empowering participation. In other words, only by contributing to social, economic and legal transformations will we guarantee the sustained protection and fulfillment of human rights.
2. We also know that the position of claim holders and duty bearers is not a fixed attachment to a person, but rather a perspective on the role people assume in a legally defined relationship. Ergo, the human rights-based approach demands the capacity and capacity gaps of both claim holders and duty bearers be identified, analyzed and acted upon in an effort to bring about needed changes.
3. We further know that a State’s increased awareness of the importance of human rights ought to push it in the direction of creating an ad-hoc legal framework for human rights to be upheld. But we have also been made aware that laws and rights are not synonymous. (!) The existence of (new) laws inspired in human rights do not necessarily mean that the legal position of claim holders - as subjects of rights - has improved.
4. On the other hand, we probably are less aware that the struggle for rights can be used as an important political tool to make the State guarantee full support and protection of the social and economic rights of its citizens; this, at a time when the supportive role of the State itself in the economic and social life of its citizens is declining, when subsidies are being cut and more responsibilities are being passed-on to the private sector.
5. If we take Children’s Rights as an example, we will see that we also do not know that this idea is still new to many governments and societies. States think the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) have to simply be added to existing national policies and laws rather than calling for a whole new way of designing and drafting legislation and policy for children. What still prevails is the traditional view of the child as an object of support and protection by the State rather than as a subject of rights. Hence, the laws that define the role of the State vis-a-vis the child mainly see the State as a service provider charged with fulfilling the needs of children and as an institution to protect children from harm by guaranteeing their security and punishing the perpetrators of any harm inflicted against them.
6. It is the idea of the child as a ‘rights holder’ that is not well developed. Children are mainly seen in function of adults and of society, and not as persons entitled to, as a group, express their views and aspirations on issues related to them.
7. Another less known fact is that individuals’ rights are generally not very important in East Asia, where I live. The notion of rights as inalienable entitlements of individuals towards the State does neither exist in legal practice nor in cultural practices here. What matters here is the fulfillment of social duties by the citizens who, in exchange, expect a good economic performance by the State. The State has absolute primacy over individual rights and is seen as the expression of the common interests of its citizens. This primacy carries conditions though: it correlates the State with duties to provide good standards of living. It is due to the fulfillment of this social and economic duty that the State can request the support (and submission) of citizens. Therefore, the interests of the collective - as expressed by the State - ultimately prevail over individual rights. In last instance, individual civil rights are not to infringe upon the State’s and the public interest.
8. Such a view of the relationship between citizens and State is deeply rooted in Confucian traditions. The idea is that the individual must, through performing her duties, serve society, i.e., surrender to the collective. The individual is not a goal in itself - only the broader community is.
9. These cultural underpinnings are reinforced by the socialist understanding of human rights where the idea of inalienable and pre-state-natural-rights is lacking. The source of citizens’ rights is not an innate human right. Citizens’ rights stem from the situation of the individual in the specific social context, from her role in the production process and in the socio-economic structure of the State itself: citizens’ rights are class rights. (David Lempert)
10. The difficulty to reconcile the political and philosophical tradition just described with the tradition that generated the idea-of-human- rights is obvious. Human rights concepts were developed as part of the struggles of the bourgoisie against the absolute power of the feudal State in Europe. Thus the basic idea of rights is to empower the citizens vis-a-vis the State and to limit the arbitrary use of State power against individual citizens, among other, through abusive laws. In the socialist view, laws and rights are granted to the citizens by the State. Some have said this concept equals the idea of a ‘gardener state’ that ‘cultivates’ people: the State is seen as knowledgeable and pro-active and the citizens are seen as passive receivers of State inputs that gear them to become useful to society.
11. In the case of citizens’ claims, judges may interpret the laws from the perspective and interests of the State and society as a whole. This means judges are not necessarily neutral in their accountability to the actual respective laws, but are part of the apparatus of the State that defends the collective rights and policies against unjustified individual claims. This may leave judges little space in cases where citizens claim the non-fulfillment or violation of their individual rights by State institutions (or, in our example, the violation of selected children’s rights). Less possibilities currently exist for an NGO to question decisions by State authorities through the court system.
12. These types of conflicts give citizens in this part of the world limited possibilities to have their rights enforced (and legal claims upheld) when using the justice system. The more effective current way is to make a complaint to the respective authorities directly and hope that claims are taken into account.
13. It is this strong duty bearers’ position that is at the center of changing human rights attitudes overall in East Asia. There are still important spaces to fill. Among them, legislation that allows the evaluation of the performance of duty bearers. Citizens simply have to have the means to hold them accountable.
14. [The other side of the coin is also not well known, namely, that progress in women’s and children’s rights has really been impressive in China and Vietnam in the last 15 years. But that is the topic of another Reader...]
15. In what remains to be gained, progress will be slow though, because State priority in East Asia is on passing new economic - and not human rights - laws. (Joining the WTO is a priority here). Technical assistance for law reform in the area of human rights, as well as ad-hoc training are still needed in the years to come.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Mostly taken from Christian Salazar Volkmann, ‘A human rights-based approach to programming in UNICEF: The case of Vietnam’, mimeo, July 2003.
Food for a pan-historic thought
MORE ON THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS WORK.
What should drive human rights (HR) activists in their daily work? Why choose HR and not another field? Why the appeal of working, either locally and/or globally, to alleviate the suffering of those whose rights are being violated? Are HR activists more aware of the political implications of their daily activities both as professionals and as concerned citizens (two inseparable spheres of action)? Can anybody working in development evade the responsibilities that these questions bring with them?1. It is the prevailing determinants of the social and economic conditions of a society that lead to the violation of the rights of a sizeable sector of the population; these we consider to be the basic determinants. The more proximate causes resulting in the host of human rights (HR) violations we see on a daily basis we consider to be immediate determinants.The following series of Readers explores what the political awareness of HR activists entails, what the political implications of their daily activities are, and further suggests the actual key role they are expected to play henceforth in the global fight for the respect, protection and fulfillment of Human Rights.
Over the next sixteen Readers, then - in short, punctual page- or two page-long pieces - , I will explore different aspects of the politics of HR work; all of these Readers together still are but an incomplete (admittedly subjective and thus controversial) attempt to set the political infrastructure of the new Human Rights-based approach to development. Reactions are thus welcome; I promise to post those to all the current recipients of the HR Reader series.
C. S.
2. Basic (structural) causes explain most HR violations in
societies around the world.
They usually relate to the major dialectical contradictions in
a given society; they are not removed or even touched by traditional development
programs or projects. Therefore, in the long run, the fight against the
violations of the right to food, for example, becomes an eminently political
struggle and not a technical one. Technology cannot achieve the fundamental
structural changes needed to end hunger and malnutrition...or, for that matter,
end most HR violations. Removal of a few (or even one) of the main basic causes
is more likely to secure the right to food than acting on many immediate
determinants simultaneously.
3. Nowadays, basic determinants are more frequently than not indeed mentioned and identified by development planners analyzing specific situations, but the plans they devise seldom address these determinants frontally.
4. Immediate determinants are more directly related to the actual conditions that result in violated rights. Among other, they include health, nutritional, environmental, and educational determinants, which are those most frequently identified and selected for direct intervention by Western (Northern) development planning approaches. In the past, emphasis on these technical approaches has also justified the need for Western-trained experts who often come with ready-made analyses.
5. Taken together, any attack on the immediate determinants only leads to a package of solutions or interventions that pretend to be apolitical and free of ideological connotations or influence.
6. However, in the final analysis, one is either bowing to the system or objecting to it, totally or partially. Any of these are political stances.
7. Development planners keep inventing new "more comprehensive" or "multisectoral" approaches to old problems as if these would change the major contradictions and the distribution of power within the system that is at the root of the many HR violations to begin with.
8. The following are but some examples of national-level consequences of basic causes: Low percentage of national income received by the lowest 20 percent of the population (income maldistribution); land maldistribution; high percentage of landless agricultural laborers; rural unemployment; urban migration and urban unemployment; low minimum wage policies in all sectors of the economy - not in tune with the cost of a minimum food basket and not following food price inflation; low farm-gate prices for food crops as opposed to their urban retail prices; agricultural marketing boards' exploitative practices towards small farmers, imbalance between cash and food crops (biased land allocation and incentives in favor of the former); low percentage of foreign agricultural export earnings reinvested in agriculture; food import policies contradicting national efforts to increase local food production; neglect of the primary (agricultural) sector with the share of agriculture in the national GDP slipping in favor of the secondary (industry) and tertiary (services) sectors of the economy; credit bias towards the modern agricultural sector as opposed to the traditional agricultural sector; lack of agricultural input subsidization for small farmers, especially for food crops; foreign aid not reaching the neediest; women left outside development programs with little incentive to incorporate them in the money economy; little emphasis and scanty budgets for genuine community development and for rural cooperatives; low primary school enrolment rates especially for girls; feeble efforts to increase adult literacy - especially for women; and, scanty budgets for preventive health services.
9. What is here being emphasized is that, in the same example, malnutrition as a social disease cannot be cured through medical interventions (not even in a wide comprehensive package) nor can it be cured through the latter plus a package of agricultural interventions: redistribution of resources and the consequent increase in purchasing power of the needy masses is a necessary, though not sufficient, solution to this problem so much at the center of a host of HR violations.
10. Many development planners have artificially divided the remedial actions they finally propose into two groups: recommendations and interventions. The former, which often concern basic determinants and the need to change or remove them, are worded in very vague, general terms and have no specific implementation timetable or budgets assigned; the latter, which often concern immediate determinants, are prepared in more detail, have a fixed implementation deadline, and are usually budgeted for.
11. The directness with which these planners state the need for (and carry out) corrective measures directed at the basic determinants will depend on the political environment in which they work. Political and ideological constraints, as well as the attitude and commitment of decision-makers towards eradicating HR violations of any kind, will ultimately determine how far the planning team can go in its recommendations. (Do not assume that decision-makers are rational, righteous and pious, and will accept hard scientific evidence in their decision-making...or react to outrageous or more hidden injustice and HR violations!).
12. Human Rights work thus is as good an entry point as any other (employment, health, nutrition, education, energy, natural resources, ecology, etc.) for getting involved in questions of equity in our societies. Any of these can lead to global and structural considerations if they are not seen as isolated domains.
13. The ideology and outlook on world affairs of the individual searching for the determinants of HR violations (largely determined by one’s social class extraction) play a vital role in one’s selection of the contents of the final in-depth situation analysis one makes: ultimately, one only sees what one wants to see...
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Food for a not so objective thought
MORE ON THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS WORK.
What should drive human rights (HR) activists in their daily work? Why choose HR and not another field? Why the appeal of working, either locally and/or globally, to alleviate the suffering of those whose rights are being violated? Are HR activists more aware of the political implications of their daily activities both as professionals and as concerned citizens (two inseparable spheres of action)? Can anybody working in development evade the responsibilities that these questions bring with them?14. Two questions arise in relation to the objectivity of our work:
a). Would the outlook for eliminating human rights (HR) violations in the world be any better if the people involved in this work go through a concomitant process of more in-depth political awareness acquisition and creation?15. The possible answers to these two questions are, again, ideologically charged.b). Would more efforts towards demonstrating the futility of assorted ongoing development programs trigger such a new, more militant, political approach?
16. The needed creative anger to address so many of the injustices at hand can only be mustered within the framework of an ideology consciously acquired.
17. HR activists should be searching for a new ethos, a professional, more explicitly political ethos. The sense of (general) social responsibility found in many (good) scientists and development workers does not seem to be sufficient to see necessary changes occur; alone, it leads nowhere. It may solve the conscience problems of the person who devotes time and effort to doing "something" to solve HR violations. But it has little effect on the real problems of the poor. An isolated emotional commitment is loose and romantic; ideological commitment is militant.
18. Popular involvement is absolutely fundamental to success in HR work. What is therefore needed is more dedication to working directly with the claim holders so they can tackle the violations they are victims of themselves. This calls for us to go, as much as possible, back to field work to learn from the people’s perceptions of their problems, and to participate in their consciousness raising. As outsiders, our role is to ask the right questions and not to point at what we think is wrong: It is only through praxis that political consciousness can be strengthened.
19. In our work with communities, we have to pass from mutually understanding the local immediate determinants to the analysis and understanding of the local and then general basic determinants of their condition. It is important to demonstrate to the claim holders that it is in their power to change, not only the physical reality that surrounds them, but the social reality as well.
20. Local felt needs and claims have to be converted into concrete issues so that a course of action to address them can be mapped out. This may involve people becoming more keenly aware of their rights, as well as through challenging public agencies, landlords and/or other duty bearers (individuals or institutions) by placing specific demands.
21. The question that pops up at this point of our discussion is whether this approach is realistic or not. If it is not, let us keep in mind that not being ‘realistic’ is a judgment that history can change: what may sound unrealistic today can very well become true tomorrow - if we work for it with decision.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn
Food for a fragmented thought
MORE ON THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS OVERALL
What should drive human rights (HR) activists in their daily work? Why choose HR and not another field? Why the appeal of working, either locally or globally, to alleviate the suffering of those whose rights are being violated? Are HR activists more aware of the political implications of their daily activities both as professionals and as concerned citizens (two inseparable spheres of action)? Can anybody working in development evade the responsibilities that these questions bring with them?22. When looking at totalities, what will count as facts will depend on the concepts we use, on the questions we ask. Asking different kinds of questions produces quite different kinds of answers. It is well and good to question the violation of human rights (HR), but in so doing, are we asking the right questions? That is, do we not obfuscate the problem by avoiding the real issues behind these violations, i.e., the issues of wealth and power and their distribution in society?
23. For example, there is the naive perception that food and nutrition interventions are intrinsically good; who can be against feeding mothers and children? But many do not realize the importance of addressing the social and political context of the often abject poverty in which those programs play themselves out.
24. How does one deal with abject poverty around the world if, by our behavior, we bend to those who favor an elitist and authoritarian view of society (and who see left-wing-subversion in every attempt to change the way people have been treated unjustly)? Whether we like it or not, which ideological positions we take towards the problems we want to solve guides the choices we make and the things we actually end up doing. And what we teach also depends on what we are all about. The subjective conviction that one is in the right gives one the inner strength to do what one is doing. But we too often find ourselves accepting or supporting ‘ethically neutral’ although ‘value biased’ premises.
25. When people who hold the fate of how HR are respected in their hands make fine distinctions, semantics become statements of policy. Words have always been ideology and ideology has been policy.
26. To put it more bluntly, in terms of political reality, outcomes depend on whose claim(s) can muster more support - based on the real interests of those who have the power to grant, sanction or deny unpostponable actions. This, then, is what the public is made to accept.
27. Morally, might is not right. Politically, it often is. If we had the might, flowing from the fact that we know that we are doing the right moral thing, we could, perhaps in time, receive the sanction of a growing number of people and of time itself. But not only do we not have the might to overcome blatant HR violations, not only do we not have the power to rally the needed support, and not only does time work against us, but the very attempt to rely solely on our moral strength may lead to disaster. It may be good rhetoric to say that we need no one’s confirmation of our rights, that we will in all likelihood win morally, but politically, however, it may bleed us to death. The question is not our right to fight for these rights, but how - and that, unfortunately, can not easily be imposed only from an ethical vantage point.
28. To fight HR abuses we have a supreme moral claim, sanctioned by the entire world. For the solutions we propose, the claim for structural social changes, we have no universal sanction. (Note that the moral code of any given community also legitimizes established relations of power!).
29. A system that has no decent place for the majority of the people has lost the moral authority to prescribe what should be done. It has lost its civilization.
30. It is by participating in the political life of a community that one acquires a sense of who one is. It is through such a political discourse that a rights-oriented new system or paradigm comes into being. The right to equal access to such a political discourse should be the essence of our demands.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Food for a thought that explains itself
YET MORE ON THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS WORK.
31. ‘In-the-way-things-are’, society makes disprivilege look right. Human rights (HR) violations are simply ‘explained-away’.
32. Although development scholars sometimes engage in an ideological debate with the culture that breeds them, they almost never confront that culture with another ideology, with political possibilities that are new or challenging. For without challenging the ideology many of them find abhorrent, they only perpetuate the political passivity that has become the central theme in Northern-led development efforts. Intellectual liberation is difficult to achieve, since many of us are prisoners of our own past training and somebody else’s thought.
33. We also often use ‘statistical-illusions’ or ‘computer-models’ (tricks?) devised by our own academic elites which do not fit any real-world cases anywhere in the world. Measuring poverty in detail can often be a substitute for - or an excuse for - not acting in response to perfectly visible needs. (Some have called this "paralysis in analysis"). In that sense, regression analyses, for example often lead us to the cardinal error in reasoning of confusing correlation with cause.
34. Moreover, too many of our economists and too many
international organizations are seeking to take the politics out of the
political economy of HR and of the daily decision-making process: basically
to-avoid-discord-or-conflict. I think many, if not most, aspects of life should
never be decided by the economists’ yardstick only.
The abolition of slavery or child labor laws certainly never
would have passed a cost-benefit test.
35. Among others, excessive institutional compartmentalization has separated political from socio-economic analyses resulting in a passive reluctance to-call-a-cat-a-cat. There is a tendency to stop the analysis where ‘politics’ begins, with formulations like: "this, however, is a political question". Of course, that is where the analysis very often should start. Our task is not merely to reflect the world, but to do something about it. A goal which is not at the same time a process becomes a dogma. It is the principle of ‘recognizing- trends-and-acting-promptly-at-the-right-time’ that mainly differentiates the politician from the theoretician.
36. The complex nature of the problems of HR complicates our policy making. The essence of the problem transcends its interdisciplinary nature. Comprehensiveness cannot be obtained by achieving all-inclusiveness of the parts, but by creating a new philosophy into which all parts fit (and interact dialectically). The development of such a philosophy has been avoided, because it automatically raises larger issues about the direction of society and challenges the current system. The essence of the matter is the need for new philosophies, methodologies and processes which help us work towards a society inspired by a different world view. We need tactics, yes, but first we need innovative strategies. As I have said so many times, it is more necessary than ever to pass from a state of critique to actual concrete actions. Tactics must be shifted from a defensive position to one that offers positive choices. A positive strategy will be most effective if efforts are made to go beyond the political goal of obtaining the-type-of-lowest-common-denominator that only serves to alleviate guilt feelings.
37. We ought not to retreat into helpless passivity, watching the HR values around us deteriorate. We can alter trends and avert catastrophes if we recognize and exercise our own power to make a difference. We all carry around with us a bag of unexamined credos, and this unexamined life is what comes under pressure when we are faced with decisions. One of the greatest challenges facing humanity today is the challenge to meet the fundamental (denied) rights of the poor. In that sense, research, even applied, has acquired an elitist character, with little or no relevance to our concern for the real needs of the people.
38. From the effectiveness-in-combating-HR-violations-point-of-view, in international and national HR meetings, HR activists should, more than others, leave behind academicism and begin to look at real people and their bare rights.
39. Fulfilling the minimum entitlements of the poor majority will, in most countries, hardly require any new knowledge or any new hard technology. However, it will require political solutions which are likely to have a number of technological inputs...but the political solutions are not dependent on first making the technological inputs available.
40. Human rights defined in material terms, with services delivered by a bureaucracy and planned by an elite, can create client groups, can demobilize community groups and do create new patterns of dependence. Devoid of a clear ideological orientation, human rights work does not clarify but mystifies, does not mobilize but manipulates. Technocratic approaches assume that the problems are largely management gaps within the decision-making groups together with a lack of ability to grasp opportunities by the poor.
41. The technocratic approach ends up just keeping track of HR violations, because it has so many non-solutions built-in masquerading as answers. An example of such an approach is the implication that ‘salvation’ lies in obtaining for the poor countries those features of richer countries - doctors, hospitals and staff, field services, equipment and a rich pharmacopeia of drugs - which ‘ostensibly ensure health and long life’ But disease is not the consequence of a lack of health services, and the provision of primary health care alone will not bring about better health. Ultimately, the fulfillment of health and nutrition rights and of decent living standards overall are determined by national development strategies and priorities, as well as by the international economic order.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Food for a non-accidental, unfair thought
ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS
42. It should not come as a surprise that social and economic injustice is not an accident. It springs from the very nature of capitalism, now in its phase of globalization. When profit governs the day-to-day decisions of business, the effect on the ordinary person will inevitably be considered secondary. Policy cannot be governed by the profit motive and by love-thy-neighbor (or the rights of thy neighbor) at the same time. Under capitalism, the most that can be hoped for are a few compromises. These alleviate some misery, but those underprivileged millions whose rights are being abused are still among us, suffering (in growing numbers?).
43. Let’s face it, Capitalism, even if attempts are made to modify and humanize it, is our way of economic life - and we are indoctrinated to it.
44. The poorest are the same everywhere. They are poor primarily because their rights are not central to the political priorities of governments. They are prevented from translating their rights into effective demands or claims in the only terms that the market understands: the power of cash.
45. The problem is that the institutions that create wealth
are not neutral as to its distribution. The concept of market demand mocks
poverty or plainly ignores it as the poor have very little purchasing power.
Market demand should be substituted by a system that somehow sets
national-consumption-and-production-targets-based-on-minimum-human-needs.
A spirit of ‘noblesse-oblige’ towards the
poor is not enough. Development must be redefined as a selective attack on the
worst forms of poverty.
Development must thus be measured as the level of rights
achieved by the two poorest income quintiles.
46. The Establishment is not those people who hold and exercise power as such. It is the people who create and sustain the-climate-of-assumptions-and-opinions-within-which-power-is-exercised by those who do hold it by election or appointment. The ruling class imposes its morality and puts it into practice in accordance with its historical class interests. Politics, science, morality, art and religion are all forms of ideology.
47. Many people believe that the scientists’ psychic energy is so powerful it can transform all around it. The question is: How can this gathered energy confront the Pentagon, Exxon, IBM, Nestle or any other political or economic giant? What is missing, then, is an urgent political strategy for committed scientists.
48. Our acceptance-of-the-established-ways has an important consequence: It leads to a belief that those with wealth and power - even if inherited - deserve their good fortune. If the rules are fair - and we seldom question that they are - those who make their way must deserve what they have amassed. But a corollary of the acceptance of good fortunes is the acceptance of bad fortune. A man who is poor deserves to be poor - he must not have tried hard enough; perhaps if he had worked harder, he might have inherited something. Abroad, Americans, for example, doubt that poor nations really deserve its assistance: They must not have tried hard enough or, had they looked harder, they might have found oil... This attitude towards the permanently poor is confused with the Americans’ attitude towards the temporarily afflicted, those faced with sudden disaster; few nations are generous as the USA. Yet, this generosity is only a natural extension of this same vision. Victims of disaster cannot be held responsible for their plight. This being so, any poor nation should not only be grateful, but permanently beholden to the donors for any aid, because it should be recognized that the receiving nation really does not deserve the money... But this is deadly wrong; charily cannot do the work of justice. The barriers of class, race, and ethnic prejudice and discrimination, along with political and economic naivete separate such an approach from reality.
49. So, are we afraid of radical change? How can we reduce our fear - transform our cowardice? This, really, is a mystery that somebody has yet to figure out.
50. Unless ideologically inclined, many of us are content to take life as it comes when things go reasonably well, preferring to evade the troublesome question of life’s purpose or meaning.
51. As scientists, technicians, intellectuals and activists, we are restless, dissatisfied and often rightly critical, but often also urgently in need of a more radical ideology. (We are also doing quite nicely: we have a vested interest in the status quo). We prefer to emphasize morality and fundamental values and are good at exposing (and explaining away) unintended-consequences-of-well-meant-interventions. Such a position has evolved into an independent force (or non-force) threatening to give legitimacy to a situation where essential conditions are set by corporate elites, where great inequalities are rationalized and where democracy becomes an occasional, ritualistic gesture.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn
Food for thought, or a thought for food?
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52. Much of what has been called liberal activism in the last half century has been merely an accommodation to historical change - to circumstances. It represents a triumph of circumstance over ideology.
53. Not too differently,
in-the-world-that-liberalism-finally-forged, the world of the welfare state and
the transnational corporation, liberalism itself has become politically and
intellectually bankrupt. (...is Kerry really so much better than Bush for the
world’s human rights cause..?).
The disparity between what liberals say in public and what
they do in private is actually the reason why it is so easy for young people to
unmask the hypocrisy of their liberal parents.
54. For many human rights (HR) activists, the freedom from hunger and disease and from other HR violations is as important as the freedom of expression, but the latter, by itself, is a value devoid of sincerity.
55. When we think of the ‘left’ or leftists, we think of people who espouse equality as an absolute and who measure injustice by distribution of wealth. But the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ do not occupy two extremes with a middle made up of liberals. Liberalism is another dimension altogether. It remains empty of standards, committed to everything and, therefore, to nothing.
56. We can tell in the greatest detail what liberals are opposed to or simply worried about. But when it comes to the question of what, in positive terms, they stand for, answers are often fuzzy.
57. The long march of liberal solutions to social injustice is really devoid of the more fundamental questions about wealth and power and their gross maldistribution.
58. One can see a political commitment to the ‘idea-of-upholding-human-rights’ without the same commitment to deal with the concomitant praxis to tackle the deep-rooted social and political problems behind the impunity we encounter when HR are violated.
59. Our use of HR education interventions alone can thus be the result of our adherence to a ‘concept of society’ which derives from functionalist social theory. For the functionalists, there are ‘practical-difficulties’ and ‘obstacles-to-desirable-changes’, but fortunately there are also ‘various-services-and/or-facilities’-to-overcome-them. So, in the end, everything will be fine.
60. It is incumbent upon us to make governments conscious of HR problems, but at the same time emphasizing that HR education interventions alone do not solve the problems at hand and that the answer is not to be found in small projects or in having a few experts running around.
61. Is it fair to say that we keep diagnosing the obvious and giving a prognosis of a tragedy? Why do we keep emphasizing sectoral solutions that deal with what is important and not with what is fundamental? Everything is important. But what is fundamental? Important is the help given to some marginalized groups, but fundamental is the promotion of more permanent structural changes that will avoid those groups being marginalized in the first place.
62. We keep projecting tendencies of all what we do not want to be continued. But tendency is not destiny. The destiny is in our hands. When dealing with HR problems, it is important to act on the causes, as well as on the effects. It is useless to take care of those whose rights are violated the most while the root causes of these violations are not solved. The greatest waste in this latter task is time. Time wasted on exhaustive diagnoses for checking easily verifiable tendencies; time wasted on excess methodology. Decisions thus tend to be delayed by a system without any synchronization with the speed of events. We often fail to strike the right balance between theory and practice, academicism and activism.
63. All the elements needed to study HR violations in their wider economic and political context are there (i.e. unequal distribution between the various sectors of society, the role of state and private interests and the conflicts between them), but in spite of this, our colleagues continue to discuss matters within a framework of cultural differences and ignorance in the area of rights. Their implicit social model (ideology) does not enable them to handle the complex social and economic phenomena they themselves witness. A classless approach in sociological studies, for the most part, focuses its analysis on the poor, not on the economic system that produces poverty. Thus, not paradoxically, most of the strategies for eradicating that poverty have been directed at the poor themselves, but not at the economic system that produces it. Problems are thus ‘solved’ in an isolated and totally a-political way, because there is still a lack of understanding of what determinants are really important and how they need to be tackled.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Food for dreamed-up thoughts
MORE ON THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS
64. The objective consequences of many a development project
may turn out to be different from their original subjective intent. We
need human rights (HR) activists who are strong and elastic enough to ask
the right questions rather than sell the wrong answers. In this context,
intervention strategies can, therefore, be classified in three categories
according to the principles that govern them:
‘comprehensive strategies’ that are
multidisciplinary in nature and call for multisectoral cooperation - assuming
that this meeting of minds sowed differently will solve all problems;
‘improvement strategies’ that
put-the-needed-spare-parts-to-the-system by assuming that only some things can
be changed now; and
‘transformation strategies’ that call for
radical changes of the environment and/or the social system.
The bottom line is that only those strategies that somehow
(and at some point in time) include the latter optic have any long-term
potential.
65. The problem with HR activism is that, too often, we try to find reducible solutions to irreducible problems. Technological fixes are the answer to reducible problems, but many hoped they would solve the irreducible problems as well. Misjudgment of the kind of problems and type of solutions needed actually compounds the problem.
66. Good young people respond to the seduction of technology. "It’s more independent of experience and you don’t have to know much". But technology is not the origin of change; it merely is the means whereby society changes itself. Technology comprises not just tools and machines, but also skills and motivation. The wrong technologies have for too long been destroying genuine community life and have thus led to maldevelopment.
67. Technology dilutes and dissolves ideology. Political revolutions always have motives - a Why. Great technological changes, on the other hand, do not have a Why. Technology, unlike politics, is irreversible. We may be able to develop a new strain of wheat and so cure starvation somewhere. But it may not be in our power to cure injustice anywhere, even in our own country, much less in distant places.
68. The obvious question, then, is: Why not changing our order of thinking rather than trying to reverse hunger and malnutrition, for example, by the use of technology? Technology is basically improvisational. It treats the symptoms; it provides no lasting cures. Moreover, technology is part of the problem. New policies will thus require a patient and possibly painful re-education of us all. A technocratic utopia is the most banal of all utopias.
69. Technical pragmatism by men of good will can build national, regional and global strategies with no political sensitivity, appealing to all reasonable men and capable of being implemented. So, faith in technocratic warriors developing the world, remains unshaken. This leads an outsider to see a picture of general harmony of interests. It also leads to incoherences. We need to drop the fallacy of this universal harmony of interests.
70. The real challenge in our present world is not to maximize happiness (in practice interpreted as maximizing economic growth, GNP, or the quantity of goods and gadgets), but to organize our society to minimize suffering. Human happiness is undefinable; human suffering is concrete; it manifests itself as hunger, sickness, unemployment, poverty, illiteracy, ignorance and the whole host of other HR violations.
71. The power of new ideas needs to be mobilized through the communications revolution which is upon us. New forms of learning, education, awareness creation and ‘conscientization’ (P. Freire) need to be pushed in this endeavor.
72. Conflict is common where there are competing interests. Therefore, avoiding it - as we often do - is no solution. Conflict is not necessarily violence. Conflict is a necessary means to attain true dialogue with people in authority. The poor do not achieve this until they have shown they are no longer servile and afraid. They need to move from the culture of silence to a position of dignified persons.
73. Success in HR work means liberation. Any action that gives the people more control over their own affairs is an action for HR, even if it does not offer them better health or more bread. But this approach needs to be built from the bottom up. If this does not take place, one has Social Darwinism: the ones who survive and whose rights are not violated are the richest, the most powerful, the whitest and the malest.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Food for a committed vs an emotional thought
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74. An emotional commitment to human rights (HR) work is loose and romantic; a political commitment is more militant. People or institutions that fall under this category strongly feel that the prevailing market economy system and the economic globalization process at its core are wrong, that they generate and maintain existing HR violations; they thus set out to fight these injustices, either by reforming the system deeply or by trying to replace it with a more human-oriented system - one more responsive to the human rights of the marginalized worldwide. ('So foul a sky clears not without a storm' - Shakespeare's King John). People who take this latter position also depart from a moral imperative, but have gone several steps further. (Of course, one should also keep in mind the political imperative from the right: pro-status-quo, conservative, and in favor of an unbridled global free market economy, as well as of an unrelenting war against terrorism. But this group is rarely vocal on HR issues in development work...they rather worry about the civil and political rights of those who live in non-capitalist or, sometimes, dictatorial regimes).
75. Are individuals who take a militant anti-Establishment position, on a more realistic track? It is clear that they look more into the ultimate determinants of human rights violations that are to be found in poverty and in the different parameters of social injustice. Therefore, they would seem to be on the right political track, or at least asking the right questions.
76. HR activists are also influenced by the experiences they have had in the different political systems in which they have operated. Cultural and ideological bias is, therefore, unavoidable. Too many of our colleagues tend to think of themselves as a-political: but there simply is no such thing. Despite the fact that the spectrum of choices is a continuum, in last instance, one either condescends to the system or one objects to it - totally or partially; any of these are political stances.
77. It is ideology that channels our social behavior in predictable directions. On the other hand, ideology as an 'integrated politico-social program' is the result of a voluntary internalization of the values of a given society, be it real or utopian.
78. Radicals or 'leftists' are probably more affected than liberals by the use of this pejorative labeling. They are thought of broadly as revolutionaries or temperamental activists ready to destroy the free enterprise system. Ninety nine percent of the time. this simplistic view is not accurate. Radicals are generally characterized by a more idealistic commitment to pursue the solutions to the final and most important determinants of poverty and HR violations. It is not infrequent that some have adopted a socialist ideology, at least as an analytical tool. They definitely question the principles of social justice of the capitalist system and its ideology: they strive for a better, more rational politico-social program; they aim at generating social commitment in science. Because they use an ideological approach in these efforts, there tends to be more internal consistency and more comprehensiveness in their approach to resolving the problems of HR.
79. Radicals tend to be action-oriented, verbal and constantly try to point-out contradictions in the system leading to HR violations. They spend quality time denouncing the inequalities and injustices they see and, within their ideological framework, they make an effort to propose possible solutions to solve the major contradictions; they use every opportunity they have to share these concerns with their peers, sometimes with decision-makers and, as often as possible, with members of the community that are suffering the problems themselves. They often work for the same bureaucracies as liberals do and academe is also one of their preferred refuges. They tend to be skeptical about traditional top-down intervention programs although, as do liberals, they often participate in some of them (but more often as a vehicle for organizing the beneficiaries at the base to let them start solving their own problems, and to help them gain some additional power to do so). They feel an urge to contribute to the liberation of the socially oppressed groups.
80. Radicals prefer to by-pass traditional government bureaucracies and work as much as possible at the grassroots, organizing the people around their problems. An important intervention for radicals, at that level, has to do with the task of making the people aware of their problems in an ideological context through organization and political consciousness raising.
81. Of course, some of our colleagues fall in in-between categories, between liberals and radicals. After all, each of us arranges her/his universe and her/his role in it as well as s/he can. People in such a position are either in a slow transition to either category, or are permanently in-between. The latter, for sure, have a heavier burden to carry, since one can presume they have to confront more everyday contradictions within themselves.
82. In the long run, there will have to be more radical moral changes in the attitude of many of our colleagues. The question is, will these lead to ideological changes in some? We have already passed the era when we asked scientists to become more applied researchers; now we are asking all development workers to become more socially conscious and more committed to become real change-agents, leaving behind a lot of epidemiological finery. De-politicized science is not science in the real service of man (Franz Fannon).
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Food for a not-really-dirty thought
MORE ON THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS
83. Moralists, too often insist on quixotic actions against the injustices of the prevalent social system - which they also clearly condemn. But they do not seem to realize that, in the end, they are being instrumental to its maintenance. Colleagues cannot use social theory implicitly rather than explicitly. This is where the challenge lies: searching for the political interpretation of harsh social realities.
84. Does all this mean that the more radical among us have a higher level of social consciousness than our moralist peers? It would seem that the answer is yes, and it has certainly cost the more radical an additional effort. Once a certain level of consciousness is attained (is there a threshold?...) an often markedly more action-oriented attitude follows. At that point we say there is a convergence of ideology and action which makes the difference between taking an observer's or a protagonist's role. Knowing about injustices and blatant human rights (HR) violations does not move us. Becoming conscious about such injustices generates a creative anger that calls for involvement in corrective actions. The latter can only happen within the framework of an ideology consciously acquired.
85. Political forces are fought with political actions, not with morals...or with technological fixes.
86. Many development professionals feel that their positions in academe, government, international or private organizations may be jeopardized if they 'come out of the closet' with more (radical) political positions. Is that a 'survivor's' attitude?
87. If we could, at least, begin giving priority to some key structural interventions (e.g., employment generation and income redistribution measures), we would be contributing more to solving assorted HR problems of deprived populations than by devising sophisticated, for instance, micronutrient interventions.
88. We have to stop thinking that we cannot contribute much to
the selection and implementation of non-technical interventions, because they
are outside our immediate field of expertise. Otherwise, we will continue to be
champions in denouncing transgressions to the rights of women and children, for
example, but will not be half so active - and much less effective - in
doing something about the same transgressions.
Do not a good number of the development programs many of us
are involved in only scratch the surface of the local problems and, therefore,
contribute to the status quo in these countries? (I am aware, though.
that most Third World countries' governments would not accept foreign aid
programs, at all if otherwise).
89. You and I know every donor brings with him his own ideas of development and his development programs will reflect that ideology. The influx of foreign experts tends to mystify the planning process and reinforces of people's feelings of inadequacy about their own capabilities.
90. Doesn’t this make it evident that we need to take up a new role? Te role of denouncers of non-realistic goals of current development programs and the methods of achieving them?
91. For those accustomed to solve problems (‘wang-bang’) and putting them aside, grasping a problem as intractable as HR violations in many areas of development guarantees frustration. The solution to these problems is not in nature, but in ourselves, in our approach to the fundamental social relationships among human beings.
92. We need to think about ourselves as political human beings working as technicians, remembering that the chance of doing something meaningful about seemingly intractable global problems does not begin at the global level, but starts with individuals. Many of us have initially been motivated to simply transfer knowledge to the people; the need is now to start focusing more on the political dimensions of the problems of mass poverty, ill-health, preventable hunger and the many other HR violations.
93. Human rights seems to be as good (or bad) an entry point as any other (employment, education, energy, natural resources, ecology, health, nutrition, etc) to get involved in questions of equity in our societies, if it is used as a tool. HR can and does lead to global considerations - if not falling in the trap of making it a 'single-issue' campaign.
94. There are too many substitutes for in-depth political action, e.g., in single-issue politics: in the long-run, this approach leads nowhere. The worst is that many people do not see this difference and a lot of political motivation and sometimes talent in scientists or lay people is lost, because of a pseudo-ideological approach to global issues. Single-issue politics (pro-choice, anti-nuclear, environmental movements, etc) often suffer from a lack of an all-embracing political vision of society and, in particular, a lack of will to demand desperately needed (and all-embracing) structural changes.
95. Finally, to whom should HR activists be accountable to for their work, besides themselves? Traditionally, we have been accountable to our peers and to funding agencies. We too often neglect our accountability to the public at large and, more specifically, to those whose rights are being violated.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Food for a not so hopeless thought
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96. Given the present conditions, the outlook for quantum changes in the human rights (HR) situation in the world appears to be limited, but certainly not hopeless.
97. The room left for meaningful action has, I would argue, shrunk due to the overt and covert repression mechanisms at play in most of the countries where HR violations are rampant.
98. But changes are occurring everyday in the field of HR and these changes are the result of the constant confrontation of the different actors in this struggle, be it at the local, regional, national or international levels. These actors have different weights and power in each specific context and include such dissimilar groups as the organized peasants or workers, the bureaucracy representing government interests, the local elites, the church(es), the transnational corporations, the armed forces or yet other groups.
99. Be it as it may, any proposed action to tackle HR violations requires a correct analysis of the correlation of forces at the various levels, their roles and their underlying overt or covert interests as they shape the current, concrete situation (a part of capacity analysis). Only this will enable us to actually strengthen and help all those deprived of their various rights in their daily struggle (plus their strategic allies) to promote or precipitate the structural changes needed to ensure a more permanent access to their rightful entitlements. This effort includes the critical analysis of the existing measures to combat HR violations that are not really succeeding in addressing the problem and are thus ultimately contributing to demobilize the poor through the use of populist rhetoric and programs which leave the exploitative structures intact.
100. The special needs of women and of indigenous people have to be addressed explicitly as well in any forthcoming comprehensive HR strategy.
101. Carrying out HR education only as a mostly passive activity serves more to self justify our doing 'something' about the many problems rather than really significantly helping the poor whose rights are being violated. Many single-shot interventions have been tried in the past, each depending on the prevailing theory of underdevelopment that the international development community shared at a specific time. Aid programs have followed most of these theories (fashions?) in the past decades.
102. In the last 100-150 years, many underdeveloped countries have passed from outright colonialist exploitation to neocolonialism in which the exploitation might be more subtle, but still dominates their fate. The classical example for this is the competition for farmland by cash crops versus food crops. The underdeveloped countries have become so indebted, because of deteriorating trends in their international trade so that the balancing of their balances of payment has become a key issue in their economic policies (most often pushed by the International Financial Institutions); and when the country is basically a cash-crop exporter this is achieved at the cost of a lower food production and the hunger of the poor. Examples of the latter are numerous and seen in at least three continents.
103. The UN agencies directly or indirectly involved in HR have not escaped the fashions in foreign aid. The agencies 'neutrality' has been both an asset and a burden. It has enabled them to achieve a worldwide presence and prestige and, in some cases, enabled them to bring governments’ attention to HR problems. The burden, on the other hand, is their inherent advisory role with no power to implement programs along the lines of their perceived priorities - HR now centrally among them. These agencies have become an excellent source of collected data and statistics, but they can do very little to change some of the observed trends without the cooperation of each government. Their opening to work with civil society directly gives some reason for optimism.
104. Northern development planning has thus tended to disregard the overall revolution of expectations that modernization brings with it, especially that of the poor rural populations. Planners keep planning for the poor without incorporating them into the process. I think we simply fail to ask the following type of questions at the grassroots level: What are you and your family's expectations? How do you see them materializing? Does the system, with its rules of the game, allow for your expectations to become true? If the system would not put a limit on your expectations what would your expectations be? What would your priorities then be? Which of your expectations would you like to fulfill first, and how? What in the present system does not allow for your expectations to become true? What can be done about the latter?
105. Too often we operate from our desks, submerged in complicated schemes and organizational charts. We tend to produce long documents for programs to be carried out by others and eventually get involved again with reality only to evaluate outcomes which are, not surprisingly, often poor.
106. To go anywhere from here, the future graduates of development disciplines will have to be true change-agents, HR activists, and generalists, not only experts in their own narrow fields. Health, education, ecology, sanitation, agriculture, management, nutrition, food technology, family planning and the many other fields have to be seen as contributors to the assessment, analysis and action on the-HR-improvement-front. More than our generation, they will have to get involved with the people they want to serve in community diagnosis (causal and capacity analyses included). For this to happen, existing curricula beg for substantive changes and this is a concrete area where many of us can contribute creatively.
107. As an international consultant, in this context, the role of the HR activist is beyond doubt a delicate one. As an outside observer s/he should help the local people and local officials see things from another angle - help them to explore their contradictions, perhaps being softly critical, so they can come to their own new conclusions, hopefully without creating false expectations. Sensitization and advocacy skills are perhaps more important to the consultant’s success than technical know how. Paternalism, often a subconscious attitude in consultants, should be actively combated.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Food for a questionable thought
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108. As I had said earlier, factors such as foreign debt, international and national income maldistribution, the exploitation of the primary (agricultural) sector, the commoditization of agriculture, overt or hidden un- or underemployment are some, but by far not all, of the causes at the root of human rights (HR) violations looked at as a social disease. This, for instance, means that poverty rather than any microbe, parasite or worm is the key vector of preventable disease and malnutrition.
109. But more often than not, we get involved in providing pat solutions that hardly dent the basic problems founds worldwide. (One often wonders if things would have been any worse without all these interventions...). It has been argued that what we have been witnessing (or been actors in) is rather a process of ‘modernization of poverty’ in which a myriad of new approaches have been tried that have mostly only complicated the problem.
110. All bilateral and multilateral development institutions channel their aid through governments. The state, in Third World capitalist-dependent countries where most of the aid flows to, is too often sustained by the local dominant class that has shown and shows little genuine interest in altering the status-quo beyond keeping the overall situation in the country politically under control.
111. Foreign development aid models are thus enthusiastically adopted by these ruling elites of recipient countries, basically because they do not erode their power base and still give them an aura of commitment. If this aid would somehow dent their power base, governments would flatly reject it even if grants would have to be foregone.
112. Short of an overt class struggle, a number of grass root organizations (sometimes called people's development organizations, PDOs) have begun springing up taking their fate and future into their own hands - some more successfully so than others. Cooperatives, labor unions, consumer unions, popular organizations, women's organizations of many types and purposes have started to directly or indirectly look into HR issues. It is to this phenomenon and its potentialities that we should definitively be paying more attention to. Bringing together these individual experiences and distilling their successes in tackling common challenges face-on is to become a higher priority for all of us so they can be replicate manyfold.
113. We are otherwise being used in one way or another and are thus, knowingly or not, at the service of status-quo. We do get involved in pat solutions, often dreamed up in a vacuum. We often even begin to believe in these solutions coming from our own ideological biases which are sometimes not too different from those of Northern donor agencies. In so doing, we legitimize this process. Ideological barriers act as a stained glass through which all of us look at one reality, but nevertheless draw different conclusions. Worse even, many of us never leave our ivory towers to look outside and see what is happening in the real world.
114. We have not succeeded. HR violation have not really decreased. We have even failed to show a more decisive support and to speak up for the more successful experiments in countries trying to tackle these violations with actions directed at the basic level. Some of them are even right now in jeopardy through external aggression and would need our full support.
115. We thus need to revise our role as advocates and genuine change agents. Our own personal political inclinations may be hampering us to become such agents. As HR activists, we can ill afford having split allegiances when we are out there trying to solve the problems of disease; hunger and malnutrition. We cannot afford to say "this is what science has taught me to do, I do it and anything beyond is not up to me and thus, none of my business". Who are we cheating? Ourselves? The people we pretend to work for? Both?
116. But beware. We should, not primarily aim at developing a political- economic approach to the study of ill-health and malnutrition and other HR violations. Together with the affected, we need to come up with a concrete and sensible set of solutions and with a renewed commitment to see them through.
117. HR violations surveillance systems have, so far, served more as an instrument to keep a log about (mostly) deteriorating conditions and have seldom been used as a base to put in motion commensurate solutions to reverse the recorded trends when these have been negative. The same can be said about limited HR education programs: alone, they end up teaching people to do what is not in their power to do (as claim holders); thes pograms thus have only limited potential; they somehow reflect an attitude of: "Keep them poor, but teach them".
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Food for a dead-end thought
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118. A word of caution is called for at this point on the issue of what I call "pseudo-basic intervention techniques or approaches" that many of us have advocated-for at one time or another. These attempts at acting in the context of basic causes depart from a flawed analysis of reality and have consequently mostly failed (and are doomed to continue to fail). Among the most prominent of these are "Multidisciplinary Approaches" to solve the problems of so many different human rights (HR) violations. There is nothing terribly wrong with this concept, but it just gratuitously assumes that looking at the problem of these violations from a ‘wider’ multi-professional perspective is going to automatically lead us to the better, more rational and egalitarian solutions.
119. The call for multidisciplinarity, for sharing paradigms amongst the different scientific disciplines where practitioners come from, falls under the same optic of my criticism all along. Just by putting together brains "sowed" differently, without considering where they arc coming from ideologically, is not going to, all of a sudden, make a significant difference in the outcome and the options chosen. They may well stay in the domain of immediate causes, only now everybody involved contributing a small monodisciplinary window to the package of (still pat?) solutions proposed.
120. Multidisciplinary approaches - as opposed to a dialectical approach - simply most often take the social and political context (i.e., the individual and institutional power relations) as given; they therefore end up being conservative in their recommendations.
121. What this boils down to is the need to reach the point
where we really get politically right in our search for solutions. But, for now,
doing so seems to be like the old philosophical riddle of the turtle trying to
finish the race: At every instance, it has first to go half the remaining
distance to the endline before being able to actually get there; therefore, it
never arrives.
We seem to get as far as a locked gate. The conservative
elements of our ideology prevent us from trespassing or unlocking the gate; of
reaching the endline.
122. Nothing short of the equivalent to a second adolescent crisis will allow us to take that step. Need I say it again? The problem is a political one, and we are not living up to it.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Conciliatory food for a confrontational thought
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123. To make sense of current world problems, we too often fall back on a "shish-kebab mentality". This much easier and convenient approach looks at the various problems affecting the world as if they were all separate events skewed together by tragedy or destiny. So we set out to tackle the morsels...when the problem is in the skewer.
124. Tackling the skewer calls for:
a) an active effort on our part to identify the present sociopolitical structure(s) that lead to the major constraints at the base of the self-generating cycles of poverty and human rights (HR) violations (= politically oriented causal analysis),125. Most interventions we see being implemented deal with the symptoms and immediate causes of HR violations as a final outcome. These symptoms - which we are relatively better at dealing with - will continue to be a problem as long as actions to combat their roots do not attempt to make real basic, structural changes that effectively change the power base of those sectors of society that suffer from such violations.b) a comparable effort to identify and isolate the main actors or duty bearers (individual or institutional; public, private or corporate) responsible for the sorry present state of affairs - in an effort to elucidate who and what forces we will have to oppose or support in the formidable task of eradicating HR violations (= politically oriented capacity analysis), followed by,
c) an identification of the current methods and interventions being proposed and/or implemented to tackle the existing and foreseeable future problems related to HR violations (= politically oriented situation analysis).
126. We must keep our eyes constantly open lest - while "trying to help" - we be "used" (in a national or an international context) to bolster the existing unfair system. Our energies may thus end up being devoted to maintaining a status-quo we basically want to redress.
127. It is the powerlessness of the poor and the hungry what ultimately needs to be reverted and that requires some bold, decisive steps to break the status-quo. The question is, can we become catalysts in this process?
128. Governments, we know, have little genuine interest in making the needed structural changes and prefer to "patch-up"" the existing system.
129. In the same context, strategies to face transnational corporations and international financial institutions (IFIs) - also central actors in the potential resolution of world HR issues - are in dire need of being revamped as well. For this to happen, as many as possible of the adversely affected governments of the South have to exert concerted pressures on these corporations' and institutions’ operations. Cancun was a good start in this direction. Being watchful and openly outspoken on issues regarding transnational corporations and IFIs, especially as relates to foreign debt, is central to a committed HR activism on our part.
130. As Paulo Freire noted: People have to be present at the historical process as thinking activists, not maneuvered by the Establishment thinking for them.
131. In working with people, one should always ask why things are the way they are - specifically avoiding to provide answers (!). Such a methodology exposes felt needs, contradictions, and also politicizes the issues bringing out a strong sense of collective identity in people. Additionally, it cultivates any existing spark of political awareness into workable concrete actions, at the same time providing the pertinent rallying points for such action.
132. Social mobilization (also called "practical politics" by some) can indeed initially call for distinctly non-political issues and actions, i.e., those enhancing self-help measures and lobbying capabilities; but they should all end up placing very concrete demands.
133. One should start with small, attainable goals, i.e., organizing unpretentious local voluntary work, posing relevant questions-to or making specific demands-from authorities and duty-bearers. This, by itself, is a giant step forward. The existing discontent and anger can be mobilized creatively and can be used as a force to start proposing some structural changes.
134. Social mobilization ultimately leads to a process of empowerment and to some degree of control of the situation(s) through building confidence in the ability to act and make a real measurable and observable difference.
135. Networking: Working together and organizing and coordinating work with others is of paramount importance in the process of empowerment. It helps create necessary support systems. Networking can also link together, in coalitions, a number of dispersed, existing single issue constituencies, be it around limited or more general strategic or tactical HR objectives and be it temporarily or permanently. This facet of organization can be particularly relevant and positive in the First World, where single-issue constituencies have become very vocal and visible (e.g., environment, women's rights, consumer rights, anti-nuclear, etc.).
136. Also, do not skip critically analyzing the role of particular NGOs (some of you may work for them) working (or not working) on human rights issues. In last instance, ask yourself if those NGOs are working for or against the best interest of the people. Ultimately, our responsibility to the marginalized is not to go in and "do for them’, but to help-remove-the-obstacles-preventing-people-from-providing-for-themselves. It is not for us to go into other countries and "set things right".
137. So, do not rely on others doing these kinds of things; speak up! Be counted! Each one of us must speak up and act at our very own levels. Every bit helps.
138 Keep asking: why? Constantly expose and denounce contradictions you find in your analysis of specific situations and, most of all, do not be intimidated. The "silent majority" is probably behind you on most issues, and certainly in HR issues. We need to become change agents and effective advocates for social change and HR - leaving old fears behind.
139. Finally, never forget that doing our technical work better and putting in place more and more efficient training, management and supervision only diverts the attention from the more basic political/structural issues which we have to address if we are serious about wanting to do away with HR violations as a constant sign of inequity. Efficiency is important. But not if only applied to the more technical aspect of combating these violations.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Food for an anti-discriminatory thought
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140. Discrimination against women (and minorities) is still
common in countries that have undergone significant economic growth where one
would have expected these groups’ rights to also have improved. [But then,
‘economics is a relatively macho culture’].
The ‘empowerment’ measure most used these days to
address the violation of women’s rights is income-generation-activities and
micro-credit-schemes for them (plus perhaps primary-education-for-girls). Yes,
income earned by women is, to a much higher degree than men's, used for family
wellbeing expenditures. But let us be clear: These activities for women do
not correct the roots of the immiserizing (poverty-creating) process of
an unfair political and economic system that ultimately explains their
status.
141. The point here is that governments (as well as other organizations) that only passively respect or actively claim to protect poor women’s entitlements (to food, care and health among many other), but do not proactively fulfill their state obligations to change the system that is perpetuating the problems should be openly confronted. Women’s rights violations will not respond unless immediate, underlying and basic causes are tackled simultaneously, i.e., interventions at each individual level are necessary, but not sufficient.
142. Therefore, sharing a common conceptual framework has proven to be crucial to understand and act upon the causes of all human rights (HR) violations and to develop at least the budding of a shared political view on these issues...and that is where our personal-interpretative-political-acumen comes in.
143. Efforts to revert the violation of human rights in the world should thus start with a declaration that effective democracy, economic equality AND the empowerment of women must underpin any proactive efforts to revert such violations. Unfortunately, we always append this requirement at the very tail end of proposals and never focus on it as a real prerequisite.
144. This brings us to the issue of empowerment. Empowerment is not an outcome of a single event; it is a continuous process that enables people to understand, upgrade and use their capacity to better control and gain power over their own lives. It provides people with choices and the ability to choose, as well as with the chance to gain more control over resources they need to improve their condition. It ultimately thus expands the 'political-space' within which Assessment-Analysis-Action processes operate in any community.
145. Furthermore, what needs to be unmistakably understood is that - in a mostly zero-sum game - the empowerment of some, most of the time, entails the disempowerment of others: usually the current holders of power.
146. As a corollary, social mobilisation is a needed step in the road to empowerment. Here, social mobilisation is to be understood as the community development approach that gets people actively involved in development (Assessment-Analysis-Action) processes that address the more basic causes of maldevelopment. This, in an effort to increase their power base; social mobilization engages people in actions in which they actively fight for their rights and for positions from where they can gain greater control over the resources they need. Social mobilisation aims at mobilising resources, placing concrete demands, networking, building coalitions and consolidating sustainable social movements.
147. But, beware, not any social mobilization is empowering. For social mobilisation to be empowering it has to:
- Articulate people's felt needs into concrete demands and these into claims so they can ultimately better fight for their rights (i.e., mobilization of their social power).148. Not all of us are, therefore, currently involved in work that really empowers beneficiaries. I contend that we tend to choose tracks in our careers according to our preference - plus the level of tolerance of frustration we can stand in our work. The question is: Do a political ideology and ethical commitments also play a role in our choices, when faced with only snail-pace-progress-in-what-we-do? In other words, are ultimate goals of social transformation part of the equation in our choices? If the answer is 'no', I see a bleak future for the role our guild can play in the battle against HR violations in the world; changes will come about without and despite us; history will bypass us.- Mobilize people's own and other identified needed resources from outside including those not previously used.
- Exert an effective demand for resources other than those readily available.
- Organize people's actions to effectively use and progressively control external resources (leading to a consolidation of a new and growing power base).
- Network with others, striving to achieve a critical mass of concerned people (locally and externally) and, in the process, building coalitions (i.e., expanding the power base through solidarity).
- Operate in complete Assessment-Analysis-Action cycles, thus collectively identifying problems, searching for solutions and implementing needed activities to, then, assess their impact...and so on.
- Give people power over key decisions thus increasing their self-esteem and self-confidence.
- Increase local democracy, with people (especially women) participating more actively in local government.
- Decentralize decision-making, including shifting control of finances to the local sphere (i.e., devolution of power).
- Include working proactively and concertedly with all strategic allies.
149. [I actually worry further, because I see these future challenges that will have to be faced by our young and upcoming colleagues not being clearly spelled out in their curricula during their undergraduate and graduate training].
150. More activism is badly needed along with our efforts to overcome specific HR violations. We need to recommit ourselves to it. We also need to train our new generations of colleagues accordingly, not neglecting preparing them much better for their role as activists with a clearer understanding-of and capacity-to intervene in the political dimensions of HR work.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Food for thought for a new beginning (part 1)
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What should drive human rights (HR) activists in their daily work? Why choose HR and not another field? Why the appeal of working, either locally and/or globally, to alleviate the suffering of those whose rights are being violated? Are HR activists more aware of the political implications of their daily activities both as professionals and as concerned citizens (two inseparable spheres of action)? Can anybody working in development evade the responsibilities that these questions bring with them? (from HRR 55)151. Sustainable development is about processes of popular enrichment, empowerment and participation which 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’.
152. 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).
153. 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.
154. 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.
155. 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.
156. 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.
157. 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.
158. 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
Food for thought for a new beginning (part 2)
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159. At the risk of sounding panfletary, I think the (mostly normative) elements that could begin making our work yield more potentially sustainable and equitable outcomes are the following: (presented in no particular order).
160. We need to de-professionalize our work. This will mean seeking, re-valuing and incorporating popular knowledge and know-how into actions we help to plan. Beneficiaries are to define what changes we will be looking for and let these guide the drawing of action plans. Action plans are thus to be negotiated and finalized in the field, not in our offices.
161. In the process, Third World colleagues and local civil society organizations must take a more visible lead in human rights (HR) work (even at the cost of making some possible mistakes).
162. All relevant knowledge has to be shared with the beneficiaries openly and upfront for them to fully participate in the decision-making process from the very start. We need to move away from the project-oriented approach and move to processes of popular enrichment and empowerment (‘consciousness raising’ of Paulo Freire). Needed expertise now has to be drawn not from academicians, not even from professional practitioners, but much more from the 'everyday-sufferers-of-the-effects-of-the-prevalent-inequitable-system'. Development education has to be carried out from the beneficiaries' perspective with their choice of contents and priorities.
163. All this means we have to shed many of our own biased values and be more open to the beneficiaries' values. Our analyses need to incorporate more the structural causes of HR violations so as to see them as part of the 'big picture' (including those changes brought about by Globalization). Such analyses will force us to tackle not only the multidisciplinary aspects, but the complex social and political issues preventing people from realizing their rights to the fullest (mostly related to control processes in society). We will have to confront face-on (and expose) the forces that oppose greater equity and full respect of HR so as to neutralize them (from the local level to the international arena). This means that we will have to adopt a dialectical approach as a more effective means to lead us to the needed structural changes at the base of the major contradictions shaping and responsible of the present situation.
164. We will also have to;
- intensify our efforts at using the internet to build networks of like-minded colleagues that can consolidate a strong worldwide, solidary HR movement.165. All the above (being desperately incomplete and a bit caricaturesque) sounds quite grandiose (and even romantic) and is packed with heavy-sounding, politically-charged action verbs.- become more active and vocal open critics of the type of (often tinkering) bilateral and multilateral aid that is perpetuating old non-empowering/non-equitable approaches.
- actively help forcing institutional changes in bilateral and multilateral aid agencies (the UN system included) to make them more democratic and transparent, as well as once and for all, more focused on HR issues.
- embark in a significant overhaul of the curricula of development professionals that will prepare a new generation of more sustainable development- and HR-oriented colleagues.
We are in for an exciting new era. We need all the courage we can muster. Wouldn't you rather become a protagonist than a bystander?
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
This Reader marks the end of the series entitled ‘More on the Politics of HR Work’. All the good and wise in the series came from others; that of lesser importance was mine.
Food for a necessary, but not sufficient thought
1. For decades the ‘Development School’ and the ‘Human Rights (HR) School’ had progressed in a parallel manner with very limited exchange and interaction. It is only recently that both schools have started merging.
2. Human development is now understood as a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the achievement of HR.
3. Why? Because the HR-based approach requires that communities be empowered in a way that service-delivery-focused-basic-needs-strategies cannot (and have not) normally achieve(d).
4. Also, as opposed to needs, rights are inalienable, i.e., they cannot be taken away.
5. Still at present, a very limited proportion of resources of UN and other aid agencies and NGOs actually contribute to really developing-critical-capacities-within-communities in a manner that empowers-the-most-vulnerable-segments-of-the-population-to-claim-their-rights.
6. Perhaps refreshing our minds, here, is useful:
Civil and Political Rights are: the rights to life; to
freedom from slavery, servitude and forced labor; the rights to liberty and
security, to freedom of movement, to equality before the law, to freedom of
thought, conscience and religion, to freedom of expression and peaceful
assembly; also the right to vote and be elected; and the rights of every child
to be registered, have a name and a nationality.
Social, Economic and Cultural Rights are: the rights to
work and to unionize; the rights to social security, to food, to education and
to health; and also the rights of children to be protected from exploitation and
work that is harmful to their development.
7. Furthermore, all individuals have both rights and duties, except for very young children who have no duties.
8. Civil and political rights are defined as specific demands that must be fulfilled (ruled by Obligations of Result) while the requirements to fulfill social, economic and cultural rights are left more ambiguous by the respective UN Covenants - dependent on the availability of resources (ruled by Obligations of Conduct). But scarcity of resources, as we have said before, does not relieve States of minimum obligations as regards the implementation of social, economic and cultural rights!
9. As I think has been made plenty clear in this Reader, assisting people to assert their rights, most often means getting involved in political processes.
10. Why? Because rights are precisely violated due to the fact that claim-holders lack the capacity to claim their rights, and/or duty-bearers lack the capacity (or dodge their responsibility) to meet their duties.
11. Introducing the concepts of ‘obligation’, ‘duty’, and ‘roles and responsibilities’ to duty-bearers is, therefore, crucial to empower them.
12. On the other hand, marginalized people (those who do not enjoy many rights and develop coping strategies that allow them merely to survive, but not to attain the majority of their rights) can only make effective claims if they have the ability to alter the social context where they live and are empowered to negotiate changes with those who hold power. This has to start by giving claim-holders better access to information, to duty-bearers and to the networks around decision-makers.
13. It has, therefore, been variously said that the HR approach is about:
- Giving voice to claim-holders and building the listening skills of duty- bearers.14. In this context, always keep in mind that the motivation for HR is based on a-desire-for-justice, not simply on benevolence. This is easy to say, but not so easy to achieve...; such a value needs to be actively internalized. So, it is us who need to engage in increasing the pool of justice-conscious and rights-conscious people.- Only when claim-holders communicate with duty-bearers on an equal footing will the power structure be altered in a way conducive to overcome all HR violations.
- Both solidarity and empowerment are vehicles to help people claiming their rights.
- The HR approach often demands an in-depth political analysis and an ensuing commensurate engagement; a better understanding of the political economy of the countries where we work is, therefore, a must. and
- When duty-bearers are unwilling, political development and action may be required before HR programming can be possible.
15. In many communities, HR values need to be promoted from above, because they have not yet been internalized by the people. (HR advocacy, used as a technique, will have to be used to build commitment for more rights-oriented processes at various levels). But we have to avoid situations in which HR are seen as imported-values-that-impose-on-local-cultural-beliefs. For this, we have to engage in an open debate with government and civil society partners.
16. The worst tactic is to impose the transition to a HR-based approach (HRAP) by fast-tracking. More sensitization and in-depth training on the HRAP is needed. Good time has to be spent on training a core group. Then one can move on to district trainers and facilitators and finally to community mobilizers; all this with the aim of developing HR-based community action plans.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Mostly taken from Urban Jonsson’s book Human Rights Approach to Development Programming, UNICEF, ESARO, April 2003.
Food for a gap in our thoughts
1. For claim-holders to build their capacity is for people to understand their rights, to claim them and to contribute to realizing them. Claim-holders simply have to hold duty-bearers accountable and, to do this, claim-holders themselves have to set up systematic monitoring systems. Human rights (HR) monitoring IS about assessing accountability. (Do not forget, here, that international monitoring also is a cornerstone of accountability analysis). Among other, monitoring by claim-holders has to look into whether development processes are ethically acceptable and of a minimum quality; are non-discriminatory and participatory; are owned by beneficiaries and empower them in a way that respects their dignity.
2. Capacity is the key factor determining how well rights are claimed and how duties are fulfilled. In HR work, it is ultimately the basic causes of HR violations (e.g., malnutrition and preventable ill-health) that determine capacity levels and the degree of control (power) that both claim-holders and duty-bearers end up having.
3. Therefore, a given duty-bearer cannot be held accountable for not fulfilling a duty if s/he lacks the conditions necessary to do so. For someone to be held accountable, s/he must accept the responsibility (SHOULD act), must have the authority to carry out the duty (MAY act), and must have access and control over the resources required (CAN act).
4. The identification of capacity gaps in failed human development (or maldevelopment) is thus to become the starting focus of development programming. Therefore, it is capacity gaps that claim-holders need to assess and subsequently monitor. But because the Right to Development implies disparity reductions in many aspects pertaining different basic causes, it demands action to eliminate HR violations in many contexts and domains.
5. Key elements that are part of the capacity of duty-bearers that we need to strengthen in the direction of HR are:
-responsibility/motivation/leadership;6. It needs to be kept in mind here that helping-people-claim-their-rights is different from helping-them-change-their-behavior! The behavior-change model is essentially one-way in nature (from duty-bearer to claim-holder)...as in social marketing.
-authority;
-control over resources (human, economic and organizational, including access to networks);
-capability to make informed decisions and learn from results; and
-communications capability.
7. So, claim-holders are to change their behavior - yes. But in a way that helps them to assert and claim their rights. Behavioral change will then occur as a result of empowerment. Ergo, claim-holders, not duty-bearers, are to set the development agenda.
8. Claim-holders and duty-bearers have to dialogue as equals to find out why expected duties have not been carried out. Developing active communication channels therefore helps claim-holders express themselves and helps duty-bearers to listen and respond.
9. We have to stop this attitude of ‘we tell them how to behave and how to use their scarce resources’. Such an approach is clearly incompatible with a HR-based approach. HR is about communication strategies based on dialogue and consensus rather than about top-down message transmission.
10. In HR programming, the causality analysis will result in a list of rights that are either being violated or are at risk of being violated, together with the causes of these violations. But the list risks to be too long. When shortening the list, we will have to recognize difficult trade-offs that will have to be made (at least initially) in the face of objective resources constraints.
11. The reality is that it is necessary for us to set priorities for addressing rights being violated. Focusing on priority problems will help reduce the analysis to a more limited set of claim-duty relationships. For each right chosen, a list of claim-holders and duty-bearers should be prepared. But note that the final prioritization should be a result of negotiations and consensus building, and not arrived at from the top. HR programming is, therefore, about making strategic choices and arriving at a set of priority actions required to accelerate the realization of selected HR.
[Two important caveats:
a. Prioritizing does not preclude that HR have to progressively be made more ambitious!12. All the above can guide us in actions at the community level. But the biggest challenge in the HR approach to (development) programming (HRAP) still remains sustaining community motivation and commitment. This invariably requires for the community to perceive key needed changes and to discern which changes they can realistically make happen. A step-by-step approach with emphasis on actions controlled by the communities themselves - as well as lobbying for those actions needed for which resources are controlled by duty-bearers outside the community - will eventually pay-off.
b. Strong and separate efforts will also have to be devoted to developing the capacity of children and adolescents to claim their own respective rights. It is unacceptable for children and adolescents to be regarded as ‘targets’].
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Mostly taken from Urban Jonsson’s book Human Rights Approach to Development Programming, UNICEF, ESARO, April 2003.
Food not only for a needed, but a rights-based thought
1. Needs are met or satisfied.
Rights are realized (respected, protected, facilitated and
fulfilled).
2. Needs do not imply duties or obligations, although they may
generate promises.
Rights always imply correlative duties or
obligations.
3. Needs are not necessarily universal.
Human rights (HR) are always universal.
4. Basic needs can be met by goal or outcome
strategies.
HR can be only realized by attention being paid to both
outcome and process.
5. Needs can be ranked in a hierarchy of priorities.
HR are indivisible, because they are interdependent; there is
no such thing as "basic rights"
6. Needs can be met through charity and benevolence.
Charity and benevolence do not reflect duty or
obligation.
7. It is gratifying to state that "80% of all children have
had their needs met to be vaccinated".
In the HR approach, this means that 20% of all children have
not had their right to be vaccinated realized.
8. The government does not yet have the political will to
enforce legislation to iodize salt.
The government has chosen to ignore its duty by failing to
enforce legislation to iodize all salt.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Taken from Urban Jonsson’s book Human Rights Approach to Development Programming, UNICEF, ESARO, April 2003.
Food for a trillion dollar thought
Development in the wrong direction?:
1. Development cooperation can neither be reduced to fighting terrorism nor can development policy remain a repair shop for the longstanding damage done by a whole series of wrong - purportedly anti-poor (??) - economic policies.
2. Those responsible for those wrong policies, i.e., the (macro) economic and trade policy makers, we have not seen and still do not see as the persons or institutions to whom we should be addressing our angry criticism. Ergo, we have been sending the letter to the wrong address...
3. We, as part of civil society, should therefore, not look to Development Ministries and Development Policy Agencies, but rather to Ministries-of-Trade-and-Finance-senior-officers to take our claims to. [Our claims should also go to the private-sector-that-so-clearly-influences-the-latter and interprets business ethics only as (sometimes) ‘honest-book-keeping’ and not as ethics also shouldering a clear responsibility for domestic and Third World poverty. In the same context, do not overlook the fact that the existing body of laws is like a tailor-made-suit that fits the interests of the more privileged in the private sector].
4. In part, this has happened, because in our development and human rights (HR) work we have not focused on finding the hidden (or not so hidden?) connections between the different forms of injustice, inequality and HR violations we witness day-in-day-out and their (sometimes removed) basic causes.
5. That is why this Reader has insisted we need ideology: to become aware of how hidden (political and philosophical) assumptions influence us, our theories and our praxis. The price for showing contempt for ideology has been that many of us are liable for grave past and present political mistakes.
6. The Reader has many times, and in different ways, pointed out that - in the words of E.F. Schumacher - ‘markets are the institutionalization of individualism and irresponsibility’ and that the basic principle of Capitalism is money-making which is always valued higher than democracy, HR, environmental protection, or any other value dear to us. So, changing the rules of the game will mean, first, changing this basic principle. (Note that the right to ‘material acquisition or accumulation’ has falsely been portrayed as another HR...!!).
7. The Reader has also repeatedly made calls to de-mistify the false division many among us still see between what is considered to be political and non-political: HR is politics, as is food, health, education, the environment...and we unfortunately have little sustainable progress to show for in any of these fronts.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Through much of this Reader I distilled arguments found in several issues of D+C the German development journal, the book ‘The Hidden Connections’, by Fritjof Capra, the book ‘Heading South, Looking North’ by Ariel Dorfman and the book ‘Refugiado del Iraq Milenario’ by Claudio Sepulveda.
Food for do-gooders thoughts
1. As said so many times before, our ‘do-gooder’ zeal is not good enough to objectively improve the human rights (HR) situation of the have-nots in the world. I am amazed at the ‘deafening silence’ I find on this issue in most of the virtual and printed NGO and academic media.
2. The bedrock is to start with oneself. I know who I am. I am someone who cannot live in this world unless he believes there is a hope. Further, for me, writing is first and foremost a private act whose audience is primarily my own self - and then, all of you, the readers of this Reader.
3. Individually, we all carry conflicting arguments, reasons, desires and fears as a sort of contraband we do not declare in customs; they all are so secret that we hardly dare to admit them to ourselves. But these credos have to be unveiled, addressed and debunked - one-by-one.
4. None of us can turn a blind eye on HR violations any longer
- out of pure insensitivity and/or political convenience. Period.
Our actions have to flow from the conscious meaning we
attribute to the social and political surrounding of where we work.
5. What it ultimately is all about is basically to search for a space inside the system from-which-to-perturb-the-same.
6. We thus need to look for new mechanisms that shift social controls to the poor, the marginalized and those whose rights are being blatantly violated.
7. This will mean engaging in a joint enterprise with a recognizable bond - and, in our case, that bond is HR-understood-as-the-leit-motif-of-development-work. Therefore, important will be the creation of an identity, of a sense of belonging to such a worthy cause...and this Reader attempts just that.
8. Embarking together on the right actions will, for us, mean using factual-truth, moral-and-political-rightness, and anchoring them both in total-sincerity-in-our-inner-thrust.
9. In practical terms, we are called to interpret HR violations by putting them in the context of all the United Nations HR Covenants. HR violations are not meaningful by themselves; the existing codes put them in the right perspective and on the road of being abolished.
10. A machine can be controlled; you, my peers, can only be influenced...and force is not the issue here; the issue is meaning: meaning that will trigger action aimed at structural changes.
11. Outwardly, our message will have to get through, not only loudly and frequently, but also providing meaning and direction to people. (Where do we need to go so quickly that we cannot stop to look at where-we-are-going and what-we-are-going-through?).
12. Our ‘aliveness’ will reside in our practice - in our setting in motion processes of structural change. (In a way, we need to become healers of the collective being, because it is society that is sick).
13. Each of us should engage in multiple dialogues and invite colleagues to join in a process of rethinking and creating a new future that has each of them in it (engaged in the design and implementation of meaningful structural changes); we are not thereby selling-or-bribing-anybody-into-compliant-behaviors.
14. We are at a point of crisis: the system may either break down or it may break through to a new state; every one of us counts to pave the way for the latter to become the final outcome.
15. We already undertake and carry out projects to help others and, in the process, discover great satisfaction. But we also witness extreme injustice which gradual changes will not overturn; we need those major breakthroughs. Only meaningful structural disturbances will lead to a new order. (As in complexity theory, chaos or major crises are the breeding ground for radical change...).
16. We work on a type of development of ‘doing-things’ and have no proposals for a development-that-fosters-liberation-from- (evident) oppression; without such proposals, we are left not knowing what all the doing is for.
17. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense - regardless of how it turns out. (Vaclav Havel)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org
Through much of this Reader I distilled arguments found in several issues of D+C the German development journal, the book ‘The Hidden Connections’, by Fritjof Capra, the book ‘Heading South, Looking North’ by Ariel Dorfman and the book ‘Refugiado del Iraq Milenario’ by Claudio Sepulveda.
