Reclaiming Activism.

World Peace Foundation
 
For most of my adult life I introduced myself as an “activist” first
and a writer, researcher, or practitioner of humanitarian action or
peacemaking second. Then, about seven or eight years ago, I became
rather uncomfortable with the word. Not because I had diluted my
personal commitment to working in solidarity with suffering and
oppressed people, but because a group of people, in whose company I
didn’t want to be, were claiming not only to be activists but to
define “activism” itself. I am speaking of course about the policy
lobbyists in Washington DC, also known as “designer activists,” who
took on the role of promoting certain causes related to Africa, and
who arrogated to themselves the privilege of defining these problems
and identifying and pursuing ostensible solutions. It was no accident
that those purported solutions placed the “activists” themselves at
the center of the narrative, because many of them were Hollywood
actors—or their hangers on—for whom the only possible role is as the
protagonist-savior. The actions they promoted all had one thing in
common: using more U.S. power around the world.
 
I was not the only one to find this arrogation of “activism”
offensive, demeaning and counter-productive. One of the most
refreshing aspects of our recent seminar at the World Peace Foundation
was finding out just how much the consensus among national civil
society activists from Uganda and Congo, as well as Sudan, has
coalesced around the view that the basic narratives and policy
prescriptions of the Enough Project and its ilk are not only
simplified and simplistic, but actually pernicious. Theirs isn’t
activism: it’s insider lobbying within the Washington establishment
using celebrity hype as leverage. They are not just a benign variant
of advocacy, perhaps somewhat simplified: they are wrong.
 
It’s time to reclaim activism. It’s time to reassert some of the
fundamental principles that made activism an honorable vocation and
practice.
 
Some of the principles are contained in blog posts relating to our
February-March seminar, easily findable under the tag “advocacy.” Let
me outline three such principles.
 
First, activism should be undertaken in partnership with affected
people, under their leadership. It should facilitate those people
defining the problem for themselves—it is only by defining their
problem that they can ever be master of it, rather than it becoming
master of them. It should be sensitive to their leadership. Activists
should be alert to the possibility that local people will be dazzled
by the illusory prospect of outside salvation and surrender their own
leadership to their supposed foreign friends. And so activists should
approach the people with whom they hope to act, in a spirit of
humility and self-effacement. That is the practice of solidarity.
 
Second, activism should seek truth and speak truth. That means being
honest to the facts, and doing the hard work of finding out realities,
and when required, changing one’s mind accordingly. There should be no
sacrifice of uncomfortable and complicated truths for the sake of
simple messages that foreign audiences can understand and to which
they can relate easily. A central part of activism is the hard
intellectual work of understanding.
 
Third, activism should challenge power. That doesn’t mean abandoning
the pragmatics of calculating effort and impact, of calibrating
intermediate and strategic goals. But it does require being honest
about where the greatest concentrations of power lie, and how that
power is utilized, and making that power uncomfortable, at least.
Lobbying that merely adjusts the trajectory of super-power policies,
in directions that are not uncomfortable for that superpower to shift,
is not challenging power, but giving power an alibi. The U.S.
government didn’t need the Enough Project to know that bad things were
happening in Darfur, that Joseph Kony is a villain, and that the war
in eastern Congo is causing desperate suffering. But maybe it needs
principled and brave people to tell it that the interventions in
Somalia, Libya and Mali are deeply problematic, that its friends in
power in Juba, Kampala and Kigali need to be more honest and less
militaristic. “Activists” who pick only on the already-identified bad
guys are at best activists-lite, whose inconvenience to policymakers
is that handling them takes up precious time. If these policy
lobbyists did mount such challenges, they might lose some of their
insider access and glamour, but they might gain our respect.
 
So: three clear principles to guide an individual or organization
aspiring to the honorable term “activist.” One: act in solidarity and
support of the affected people, and don’t impose on them. Two: be
honest to the facts, and open to inquiry into the facts. And when the
facts change, change your mind. Three: be ready to challenge the
biggest powers: the U.S. government and its allies.
 
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