Good afternoon, everybody.
Friends, colleagues,
I'm Ed Steinfeld.
I'm the director of the Watson
Institute for International
and Public Affairs.
It's really my pleasure
today to participate
in the celebration
of publication
of transnational
advocacy networks
and to participate in this
conversation about the issues
surrounding this volume, the
issues that this volume covers.
In the preface to the edition,
I am thanked, I guess,
on behalf of the
Watson Institute.
And I want to take
issue with that thanks,
because really, the thanks
needs to go the other way,
my thanking you all.
And I particularly want to
thank say Cesar and Dejusticia.
Let me say that the two
main reasons why I want
to thank you.
First-- really, three reasons.
First, Dejusticia is a model
for Watson, and for a lot of us
at Brown, the ability
and your ability, Cesar,
to combine first rate
cutting edge scholarship,
pure scholarship, with
action and advocacy
and practice is rare.
It's exceptional.
And it's awesome in the true
sense of the word awesome.
Many of us aspire to this model.
And we're learning from you,
and learning from Dejusticia.
We've been learning
over five years
and we'll continue to
learn, as I hope we do.
And that gets to
the second point,
which is about learning
and collaboration.
This collaboration, which I
had nothing to do with starting
but have been a huge beneficiary
of, this collaboration
between Watson
and Dejusticia, it
is a model for us,
for how we aspire
to partner in the future.
It's a model of equality.
It's a model-- not because it's
north, south, north, south,
it's not even so
much about that.
It's about equality.
It's about different kinds
of organizations finding ways
to come together.
And it's really about learning
in multi-directional ways.
And it's my hope
that we are going
to expand this cooperation
and deepen it and certainly
sustain it for as long
as I'm around, certainly.
And that really gets to
my third and last point.
We were talking about this
just a few minutes ago.
But in some ways, I'm
sorry about how urgent
this volume is.
When I say I'm sorry,
five years ago,
had you asked me to predict
what the state of the world
would be today, I
couldn't have come
close to describing what
the world looks like,
and what the world looks
like in the global south
and what the world looks
like in the global north.
I will say, unfortunately
circumstances
are such that the topic of
transnational advocacy networks
and their role in protecting
basic rights, human rights
of all kinds, that topic
has become incredibly urgent
right here in this country
and in many other locales
at the same time that the trends
that transnational advocacy
networks themselves
are under threat
and are being attacked by
states and others in ways
that I could never
have predicted,
and in places I would
never predicted,
including right here
in the United States.
So while I said unfortunately
a couple of times, that's
not the tone I want to set.
The tone I want to
set is one thanks--
thanks for producing such
an urgently needed volume,
thanks for educating us,
thanks for showing us
how practice and
scholarship can be combined,
and thanks for really
setting a model
for a kind of partnership, a
global partnership, that we
want to sustain and
duplicate in a lot of ways.
Sorry for going on so long.
Let me turn it
over to you, Peter.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
OK, so it's a pleasure
to be here celebrating
five years of collaboration.
And I'd like to thank
Ed and the whole Watson
as an institution
for having made
that collaboration possible
and having supported it
in every possible way.
It's also a special pleasure
to have Cesar with us today.
He had to successfully exercise
all of his formidable skills
as a transnational
networker in order
to be here in person
from Columbia.
And if he had not
succeeded in doing it,
it would have been a
rather bittersweet event.
But fortunately he succeeded.
So this is a very
special volume.
And I'm not going to talk in
great detail about the volume.
But I will try to hit
some of the highlights.
We are also celebrating
today what is really
the third volume in this
series of three volumes that
have come out of the
Dejusticia-Watson
collaboration.
And this is the
volume called Rising
to the Populist Challenge.
And I will let that Cesar
say a little bit more
about that volume.
So in any case, this
volume brought together
a group of 10 engaged
researchers and reflective
activists from four
continents to reflect
on the 20 years of evolution of
transnational advocacy networks
since the publication of
what was a pathbreaking
foundational book called
Activists Beyond Borders whose
author, Kathryn Sikkink, will
be here as soon as she manages
to surmount the obstacles
of Amtrak, which, while not
as formidable as the
US immigration system
is still an obstacle
to be surmounted.
In any case, the resulting
10 chapters in this volume
are not just insightful
and provocative, but also
marvelously concrete, grounded
in the specific instances
and experiences of the very
diverse set of authors.
So I'm not going
to try to summarize
these different
individual studies here.
Instead, I'd just
like to underline
three questions
that, for me, are
central to the
project as a whole.
And we'll run through those
quickly just to start out.
The first is, what's
changed over 20 years?
The second is, why
do we emphasize
the concept of ecosystem?
Which is emphasized
throughout the volume.
And the third, of
course, is the obvious,
what are the prospects
for the future?
OK, so let's start with
the first one, what's
happened in the course
of the last 20 years?
I think that it's fair to
say that, if we look back
at the turn of the 21st century,
there was something that I have
called millennial euphoria.
That is to say there was
a sense of expansiveness
and unlimited
possibility, with regard
to transnational advocacy.
This sense of euphoria
and unlimited possibility
was not simply an
illusory kind of hope.
It was based on the fact that
during the late 20th century,
the growth of transnational
social movements
and transnational
advocacy organizations
had been almost explosive.
Now, of course,
transnational activism
has been around a long time.
In [INAUDIBLE]
book, she starts out
with the 19th century movement
for the abolition of slavery.
But the late 20th century was
really a new era for TANS.
They burst onto the global
scene both conceptually,
and in fact, the number of
transnational social movement
organizations doubled
between 1973 and 1983,
and then doubled again
between 1983 and 1993.
That meant that people looking
at transnational advocacy
networks really felt here is a
new actor on the global scene,
one that will be increasingly
important and increasingly
influential in determining
the course of events,
not only globally, but
within national boundaries.
Now, it's not just
that there was
explosive growth in
the late 20th century,
it was also the case that there
was institutional construction
that was quite formidable.
Groups like Amnesty
International, Human Rights
Watch.
Amnesty became a 1 million
strong global presence.
Human Rights Watch
became a global presence.
Those organizations consolidated
and burgeoned as actors.
Perhaps even more important,
during the initial decades
of the 21st century, there
was a shifting structure
of transnational organizations
that reduced the geographic
asymmetries, reduced the
determinants of a few global
laws organizations-- like
Amnesty and Human Rights
Watch--
increased the diversity
not only of organizations
geographically, but
also of the themes
that organizations
were involved.
Human rights expanded to become
economic, social, and cultural
rights, as well.
And there was, together with
this increased diversity,
also increased possibilities
for collaboration,
that we'll talk about a
little more when we get back
to that concept
of the ecosystem.
Now, of course, recently, in the
last, I would say, five years,
there have been new challenges.
There have been challenges
generated by, as Ed said,
the rise of reactionary
nationalist populist regimes,
creating harsh challenges-- not
just to transnational activists
networks, but to
all organizations
and social movements
working to enhance
the dignified livelihoods
of ordinary people,
and to expand the
voice of these people
in the decisions that
affect their lives.
So this new shift--
that is, the shift to the rise
of nationalist reactionary
populist national regimes--
obviously creates a whole
new set of challenges
to transnational
activist networks,
and really sort of defines
our contemporary period.
And we'll talk a little
bit more about that
when we get to the what's
next for the future part.
But the important
thing to underline here
is that, if we look
over the last 20 years,
we've seen a trajectory
first of dramatic expansion,
consolidation and
institutionalization,
and now, challenges
that test resilience.
OK.
So why do we use
the term ecosystem?
Well, we use the term
ecosystem because we
feel that, both as
an analytical frame
and as a way of thinking
about the system
from the point of view of people
involved in being activists,
the notion of ecosystem
is a very important.
Now, why does ecosystem work?
Well, a robust, vibrant
ecosystem depends on what?
It depends, first of all, on
diversity and differentiation
among different
parts of the system.
But it also depends
upon the ability
of those differentiated,
different kinds
of diversified actors
and parts of the system
being able to
interact in ways that
enhance each other's
efficacy and enhance
each other's possibilities for
realizing individual goals.
So by talking
about the ecosystem
of transnational
advocacy, we're trying
to emphasize first, the
diversity and multiplicity
of organizations and
movements that constitute it,
and second, the importance
of synergistic collaboration,
instead of internecine
competition
among those organizations.
And this is a recurring
theme throughout the volume.
And there's some great
individual examples
of how this works
in a positive way.
There are also some
examples of how
you do end up with
internecine competition that
is counterproductive.
But the important
thing is that we
feel that you need to
think about this system
as an ecosystem, rather than
simply as an aggregation
or collection of individual
transnational advocacy work
organizations focused on
individual substantive issues
using specific kinds
of organizational forms
and strategies.
Now, this ecosystem,
which has developed
over the course of
the 20-year period
is now, as I said to begin with,
facing a serious set of threats
and challenges.
These reactionary
nationalist populist regimes
that have emerged are
not just virulent,
in terms of their impact
on rights, livelihoods,
and democratic
possibilities of voice,
they are also astutely able to
exploit the political frames
in which they operate, and
are therefore very dangerous.
They are very good at portraying
transnational advocacy networks
as alien threats to local
culture, and values,
and priorities.
They are very good at turning
the transnational advocate
into the other.
The dangerous other, as
opposed to acknowledging
the ways in which transnational
advocacy networks are both
grounded in, and in turn,
support local movements
and organizations
aimed at improving
dignified livelihoods,
sustainable citizenship,
and democratic voice.
Now, at the same
time, I think it's
important to realize
that, the environment,
even though the
dramatic shift has been
the rise of these reactionary
nationalist populist regimes,
the environment still contains
the kinds of positive elements
that were central to the growth
of transnational advocacy
networks, and continue to be
central to their sustenance.
That is to say, the normative
understandings on which
TANS are still in place.
The old days, when a national
regime was able to say,
whatever I do to my people
within my geographic territory,
that's my business that,
as part of sovereignty.
While these regimes may be
trying to recapture them,
those days, as a dominant
global norm, are gone.
And therefore, these
nationalist populist regimes
are fighting against a
different normative environment
than they were 50 years
ago, or even 30 years ago.
It's also the case
that new possibilities
for communication, new
possibilities for collaboration
have changed on the basis of
a technological evolution that
is not going to be reversed.
And so those possibilities for
communication and collaboration
are still there.
And finally, the institutional
and organizational forms
that were constructed during
the consolidation of TANS
are still there.
They don't disappear.
They are robust and durable.
They may be defeated in
particular instances,
but they will not disappear.
And so therefore, we would
argue that the current ecosystem
is more robust and
resilient, overall,
than it was 20 years ago.
So that leaves us
to the question of,
where do we go from here?
And with that question, I
will turn the floor over
to my colleague Cesar, who
thinks about it every day,
all day, and will now share
some of his ideas with you.
[APPLAUSE]
So I wanted to begin by thanking
the Watson Institute, Ed,
also [INAUDIBLE],, who
was here, when we first
started this collaboration.
And of course, Peter
and Patrick [INAUDIBLE]
personally, on
behalf of Dejusticia
for this partnership.
Anything that lasts for
five years, at least
in my corner of the
world, is a feat.
And these unlikely
collaborations
in academia and in human rights
activism and social justice
activism may be
fleeting, because there
are all kinds of incentives
that militate against doing
exactly what we trying to do.
Which is, for those of
you who go to school here,
is trying to combine
quality research
with on-the-ground advocacy.
And one of the
things that's been
most encouraging about
this collaboration
is that it's not only led to
the publication of volumes,
but to the training of students.
So there's a there's a steady
stream of Brown students going
to Dejusticia, starting with the
ones that took my class, when
I was obviously a professor
here four or five years ago.
And then they have been very
diligent in telling others--
and we have someone here to
spend some time with us--
telling their friends that there
is an interesting space there
in Bogotá [INAUDIBLE]
organization called Dejusticia
doing actual research on
international issues, but also,
of course, on Colombia.
So that's one of the beauties
of this collaboration.
Now, one of the things that
action research tries to do--
and I wrote a piece called
Amphibious Research that
tries to argue for
this type of hybrid.
The hybrid between systematic,
academic work and directly
relevant advocacy practice.
And just like frogs feels
comfortable transitioning
from water to land, the
idea is for students,
and hopefully also faculty
to feel comfortable
in that transition, and to
create spaces and nurturing
spaces, like Watson or
Dejusticia, that legitimate
and facilitate this
type of hybrid work.
Now, one of the aspirations
of actual research
is to be timely and relevant.
But as Ed said, we wish
that this time around, we
had not been as timely
and relevant, because this
is what we got now.
When we first started
this collaboration,
only [INAUDIBLE] who's
been at it for longer--
[INAUDIBLE] those were the
two pieces in this puzzle.
But everyone else has come in
between the different books
that we've published.
It's not our responsibility.
This collaboration
has nothing to do
with the rise of authoritarian
populism around the world.
But it just so happens
that it's happened while we
were working on these issues.
And this is why--
I know that Peter
wanted me to talk
about this other book,
when you said that I
would address the future.
This book actually was the
third in the Dejusticia Watson
series.
It's entitled Rising to the
Populist Challenge, a New
Playbook for Human
Rights Actors.
This was the third conference
that we put together,
but the volume came out
before the TANs, Transnational
Advocacy Networks volume,
precisely because we thought
it would be particularly
relevant and timely
for this moment of uncertainty.
And I spent part of my time
in human rights practice,
and there is this sense of both
urgency and transition, or even
crisis.
Of course, the rise of
movements and leaders--
presidents and leaders--
that very directly
embrace anti-rights discourse
and values and norms
is very concerning for everyone
in the human rights movement,
and also in the
academic quarters
that work for social justice
and social inclusion.
So the question is,
well, what's happened,
and what to do about it.
And this is what this
book tries to do.
The first chapter is
an effort at diagnosing
what these and other movements
and leaders have in common.
Why is it that movements and
political parties from very
different ideological ports--
so you have Maduro
there, and Dejusticia, we
have worked very closely with
the Venezuelan human rights
organizations that have
been going through the most
difficult times.
Venezuela is the most urgent,
the biggest humanitarian--
it doesn't get enough
attention, but it
is the most pressing
humanitarian emergency
in Latin America.
Literally hundreds of thousands
of migrants crossing over
the border into
Colombia walking,
because they have no resources
even to buy a bus ticket.
Walking down Colombian
roads, trying
to get either to
Colombian cities,
or continue down
to Peru, Venezuela,
Brazil, and other places.
And in working with
them, of course,
when we discuss the urgencies
of the moment, many of them
come from a
tradition of the Left
in Latin America, which has been
associated with human rights
activists.
But it is a supposedly
leftist government
that's making their
life miserable
and almost impossible.
And Maduro is implementing
measures against human rights
NGO that look very similar
to those that other leaders
on the Right of the
political spectrum here--
so here's Viktor Orbán,
the president of Hungary.
Small country, but
one that's probably
the pioneer in the dismantling
of democratic rules,
in this wave of
authoritarian populism.
We did that exercise as
part of the opening chapter.
We didn't publish the
whole the whole chart,
but with [INAUDIBLE] the
co-editor of these volume
and some Dejusticia researchers,
including Brown alumni Camila
Bustos, we looked
at all the laws
that these governments have
put in place to close or reduce
spaces for civil
society mobilization.
And what we found is that
they look very much alike.
So the foreign agent law
that Putin put in place
to brand human rights
activists and organizations
as foreign agents, traitors
of their Motherland,
and so on, and that
made it very hard--
actually, impossible for those
individuals and organizations
to receive any philanthropic
funding from other countries.
Well, that's
exactly what's being
done in Egypt, what drove some
large philanthropic foundations
from India.
So this really cuts across the
Left-Right ideological divide.
So that means that
there is active
learning among these
movements and governments.
And this is why we called
their standard approach
to closing civil society
spaces a playbook.
So unfortunately-- and this
is what you can achieve,
when you do systematic research
as a component of this hybrid--
we can, sadly, forecast
some of the measures that
goes on that Bolsonaro
will take in Brazil.
I can tell you what you'll
do within the next 100 days,
among many other things.
So he will try to make
it hard for before NGOs
to receive those foreign funds.
He will make it harder to
for organizations in Brazil
to register legally as
NGOs, as nonprofits.
he will very likely
withdraw state advertisement
from independent media,
from media outlets that
depend heavily on that
source of revenue,
to try to control the media.
And he try to do things
like what Orbán did,
which is to chip away at the
institutions that might prove
too independent for his
government to take over
the state.
Ministério Público,
the Supreme Court.
So this playbook has been quite
effective, and undermining--
or some people
would say hacking--
the basic rules and norms
of democratic governance.
And that's a very
worrying development.
I don't need to get
you even more worried
about this, because
you're worried enough.
But this is an effort in
understanding the connections
among these seemingly
disparate dots
in the political landscape.
And of course, one
of the connotations
and characteristics
of this wave that
make it very hard for
human rights organizations
to push back against this
is the fact that there's
most of these threats are coming
from democratically-elected
governments.
So this is what [INAUDIBLE] the
great Venezuelan human rights
think-do tank has
called dictatorships
of the 21st century.
So if they award dictators
and dictatorships
or the usual kind, of the 20th
century-- here's Katherine.
Hi.
Of the 20th century--
well, the 20th century,
democratic governments
used to be undermined
through spectacular moves
like a military coup.
And then, human
rights activists will
be able to denounce
those governments
as being illegitimate on
grounds of not respecting
the basic rules of democratic--
[INAUDIBLE] access to power
through democratic means.
However, [INAUDIBLE] called
them 21st century dictatorships
or 21st century
dictators get to power
through the democratic
means, and then
tinker with the rules of
democratic governments,
slowly but surely, to the
point that they rig the system
and make it very hard for
anyone from the opposition
to win any election.
So that's what
happened in Hungary.
Katherine and I have
been teaching together.
And I just remember
that you recruited me
for that course and that
program here at Brown.
So we met here at Brown.
So Brown has all kinds of
interesting side effects.
And so we've been teaching in
Hungary for five years now,
every summer.
And this year was the last one
in Budapest, because the CEU,
the Central European University
will need to move elsewhere.
So that course will have
to be taught in Berlin,
as opposed to Hungary.
And this overlaps partially
both with the duration
of our collaboration,
and now I'm
getting worried
that everything has
to do with what we're doing.
So Orbán, over the
course of five years,
has continued to
undermine piece by piece,
to dismantled piece by
piece the basic institutions
of democratic governance.
And the initial pieces
came in the early 2000s,
when his a movement took over
one of the most independent
judiciaries in Central Europe.
Actually, [INAUDIBLE]
Hungary was
a model for the rest of
Central and Eastern Europe.
He copped to the
courts, and then he
continued on from there.
This is why the signs
of the tinkering
with the rules of the
electoral game here in the US
are so concerning.
What's happening in Florida,
what's going on in Georgia
is exactly what's
happening in other places.
And this is why some
people talk about the Latin
Americanization of the US.
So this is what we have in this
book, in terms of diagnosis
of authoritarian populism.
There's more, but I don't have
time to go into more details.
But I will say something
closing about the future
and the responses.
Because most of the
book is about how human
rights organizations and
actors have responded
to these formidable challenges.
And we have chapters by
colleagues from Hungary,
from India.
We had one on South Africa.
I'm going through the list here.
We have a couple of colleagues
writing about Turkey,
and we also have a
chapter on Venezuela.
And we have a number of chapters
that try to connect those dots,
including Katherine's chapter
contesting the idea that this
is a global trend, and trying
to put this in perspective,
and trying to figure
out what's new
and what's business as
usual, in the attacks
against human rights
organizations.
Let me finish with
a couple of ideas.
Some of those are
already in the book,
and some others have
emerged in the context of--
[INAUDIBLE] discussed this
book with many human rights
organizations in different
parts of the world.
So one encouraging sign
about a discouraging trend
is that people have found this
volume relevant in thinking
about these challenges.
And one of the
things that I've come
to conclude in
those conversations
is that there is
[INAUDIBLE] need
for longer term thinking about
the challenges of human rights.
Because many of these
developments will probably not
go away very soon.
These trends are here to stay.
[INAUDIBLE] a German researcher,
spends time at Harvard.
He wrote this piece after
the Bolsonaro victory,
and he said, look,
this is probably
not the cusp of the
wave, of the [INAUDIBLE]
authoritarian populism.
Because some of the
underlying trends,
like technological
disruption, or the fact
that we're siloed
into echo chambers,
and that social media
get us to behave
in our worst possible personas.
All of that is
probably here to stay,
unless there is radical
reimagination of the business
model of the regulation
of social media.
Likewise, there are systemic
challenges, systemic issues,
and global issues
like climate change,
we now know are even more
urgent than we had anticipated.
So because of all of that, one
of the things that I believe
can be learned from
these collaborations,
and this book, in particular,
is the need for thinking more
systematically about what
those longer term trends mean
for human rights advocacy.
And finally-- and
I'll end with this,
because one of the things
that we all share here
at this [INAUDIBLE]
and in the larger
collaboration between
Brown and Dejusticia
is what [INAUDIBLE]
called a bias for hope.
And Katherine published
a fantastic book
entitled Evidence For Hope.
So this is not to
be Pollyannish,
and this is not just
to cheer you up,
but there are reasons to
believe that a human rights
actors, in combination
with other movements,
with other transnational
advocacy networks
are already developing seeds
of responses that hold out
the prospect for a more
effective, impactful form
of advocacy.
And illustrations of some
of those forms of renewal
in human rights strategies
are illustrated in this book,
and also in the newer book
that we just published.
So we invite you all to
take a look at both volumes.
They're all available for
free on both websites.
We believe in Creative
Commons and the free flow
of information and knowledge.
So they're out there for
practitioners, students,
and academics to
take advantage of.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE]
So you have been speaking
now for about 15 minutes.
Is that right?
Started at 4:30?
It started late.
It started at about
quarter to 5:00.
OK.
[INAUDIBLE]
Hi, Peter.
Hi, Patrick.
Hi, Cesar.
Good to see you all.
Hello, Brown folks.
And I'm sorry I'm late.
Let me explain to you.
I taught a class at the
Harvard Kennedy School,
caught the train, and
was slightly delayed.
But I made it here on time.
And I wanted to come,
even I had come late,
because my collaborations
over the years with colleagues
here--
I would say [INAUDIBLE]
colleagues here at Brown--
have been so important to me.
So much so-- and can
I tell this story?
If it weren't for Peter
Evans, I might not
have started working
on human rights.
And the reason for that
is, when I was the age some
of the students here, I
worked at an NGO in Washington
called the Washington
office on Latin America.
I decided I wasn't cut out
to be an activist, actually.
I loved the cause, I
believed in the people,
and I didn't want to
go to work on Monday.
And what I realized was I was
more inclined to research,
I liked research
more than activism.
But I believed in the
importance of activism.
I just wasn't good at it.
And so I did my dissertation
on some other topic,
and I was working
on other topics.
And Peter gave me a
call, and he asked
me to be part of a
volume, [INAUDIBLE]..
And he said, we want you to work
on human rights in Argentina.
Now I said, Peter, I
don't think you know this,
but I actually know a
lot about that topic.
And so I did my first ever
chapter on human rights,
and that was published in '93.
And I haven't stopped
doing it ever since.
So I'm sure I've said
this to you before,
but I'm still grateful to
Peter for having turned me
to a researcher that's
been so fruitful for me.
And so today I saw this book,
just as I walked in the door.
I hadn't seen it before, so
I am very happy to see it.
And I'm particularly
happy because it really
makes me reflect on a book that
I wrote over 20 years ago--
20 years ago now--
with a colleague,
Margaret Keck, Mimi Keck,
called Activists
Beyond Borders, and you
may have mentioned it earlier.
And we wrote that book because
both of us had lives working
in the human rights movement--
what I'd done in Washington
before I went to
graduate school--
and what Mimi had worked on
the environmental movement,
a lot in Brazil.
And then we went to graduate
school in the early '80s,
so ages ago.
And we discovered that the
lives we had lived in activism
were not at all reflected
in the academic literature
of the time.
And so we wrote
Activists Beyond Borders.
It's hard to think that
now, because now, we're
awash with literature on
transnational activism.
And so you see it
everywhere, and it may even
be kind of stale and
old-fashioned nowadays.
But back then, really, there
wasn't very much written on it.
And so we wrote it
trying to make a point
to political scientists
and sociologists and others
that these were important
issues to study.
Then, in the meantime, the field
has transformed dramatically.
We asked four main questions.
We asked, what are
transactional advocacy networks?
Why did they emerge?
How do they work?
And number four, under
what conditions can they
be effective?
And I think our book provoked
a big reaction, and part of it
was pushback, part
of it was critique.
And a lot of that
was more focused
on questions one,
two, and three.
And in particular, there
was a huge debate about
whether or not these activist
groups were indeed principled.
We had said at one point,
these are principled groups.
I actually said it in
another point of the book.
They were principled
and strategic.
But people just focused on
the fact they were principled.
And so there was a big fight,
were they really principled?
And they did other things.
They raised money.
And so I felt like
not enough attention
was directed to
what, for me, was
the most important question.
And that is, under what
conditions can transnational
advocacy groups be effective?
And we developed a definition of
what we meant by effectiveness.
That definition had five levels.
And the fifth level was
we get behavioral change
by states or other
target actors,
like transnational corporations.
But we realized that that's
what we all want, eventually.
But we can't measure
effectiveness only
when you get behavioral
change, because activists
are doing other things.
They're literally
creating issues.
They're making us
aware of new issues.
Something like LGBTI rights
would be a good example.
It wasn't on the agenda.
Activists put it on the agenda.
And just getting that issue
on the agenda in itself
is a measure of effectiveness.
But ultimately, that's great.
We want to give credit
for effectiveness
to get an issue on the agenda.
But if you start not
getting behavioral change,
ultimately, you want to
say what's wrong with that.
And so I feel like, if
we look to the future,
I want to look at the future,
both in terms of research,
but also in terms of just
activism that more needs
to be done for understanding
under what conditions can
advocacy networks be effective.
And one reason for
that, of course,
is when I started running
advocacy networks,
they were mainly a
phenomena of the Left,
of mainly progressive groups who
are organizing transnationally.
Since that time, as
Cesar pointed out,
advocacy networks
have become used also
by groups of the Center
and also by the Right.
Right now, and we're thinking
what's going on in our world,
one of the things we know is
that we've had this dictators
learning curve.
That governments, dictators,
and the electoral authoritarians
have learned how to respond
to these advocacy networks,
and groups of the
Right have learned
how to use the same tools
to organize transnationally
and organize domestically.
And so understanding
under what conditions
can advocacy networks be
effective is really important.
And one hypothesis we
actually had in the book
is that the issues
themselves mattered.
That there were
issues, that when
we look historically and in the
current period at the advocacy
networks that appeared
to be most effective,
we saw they were characterized
by a handful of issues.
Those issues we
said, at the time,
it looks to us like issues
involving bodily harm
to vulnerable or
perceived innocent groups,
and issues involving
equality of opportunity
were areas where we saw
some of the biggest change.
So we looked at
suffrage movements,
we look at anti-slavery,
look at anti-apartheid.
Those were all movements
for equality of opportunity.
But we'd also look at the
human rights movements
in the '70s that were really
organized around disappearances
and richer political
imprisonment.
And so we wondered whether
there was something
about certain issues
that made them more
amenable to be more effective.
That piece of the book we've
never carried through on.
And I think it's a little
bit more important today,
it was all the more
important in the context
of these right-wing populist set
that Cesar was talking about.
Because we can see that the set
of issues that are mobilizing
people are broader than that.
And we don't understand yet
very well how issues that
the right-wing
populist are using--
we don't understand
why they're effective,
but we see that
they are effective.
We see they're
effectively mobilizing.
And they're mobilizing
around other kinds of issues.
They mobilize on issues
of we versus they,
the creating of the other.
Often the immigrant other, but
not only the immigrant other.
And that's an issue
of nationalism,
of course, which is
always we versus they.
They're organized around issues
that have to do with authority,
and being traditional authority.
And so I would like
to suggest that we
have a lot more
to understand what
are the kinds of issues that
really are mobilizing people.
We need to understand
not just what
works for left-wing groups.
We need to know why
things are working
for some of these
right-wing groups, as well.
What my chapter in this book
was about is a second issue.
When you try to
measure effectiveness,
you have to have you
have to be able to know
what you mean by
effectiveness and know
how you would measure it.
And in the book,
20 years ago, we
suggested in passing,
buried in chapter 5
that there might be something
called an information paradox.
That social
movements themselves,
by creating new issues and
by publishing more reports
and really getting on the
agenda might be inadvertently,
sometimes, giving the
impression the situation
was getting worse.
And there was a whole chapter
on violence against women,
where we made this example.
Women's groups around the world
had united transnationally
to literally create the issue
of violence against women.
Right now, we go,
of course there
was an issue about
violence against women.
But at the time, it
was not a global issue.
There were a series
of national campaigns
about dowry death in
India, about domestic abuse
in the United States, about
rape of political prisoners
in Latin America.
And they were united as a
global campaign around something
that was named
violence against women.
And for the first time,
people started gathering data
on violence against women.
Because people were
not gathering data.
To date, still today, we don't
have good data comparative data
on rape in the
world, for example.
And we only start
getting good rape data
because women organized
against rape and demanded data.
So what happens then, when you
first start demanding data,
and you have more and more
groups doing more reports,
your data starts getting
better over time.
And when data it's
better over time,
it may start looking like
the problem is getting worse.
And this has been the case
with rape data, for example.
There is a perception
today that we
have an epidemic
of rape in wartime
in the world, and the
truth, is we don't know
if we have an epidemic of
rape, because we didn't collect
data on it before, and now
we're starting to collect data.
And we may have an epidemic,
or we may have good data on it.
And so I started
getting concerned--
and this is a topic of
my chapter in the book--
about this information
paradox, or what
I called information effects.
And that is that,
inadvertently, activists
could be creating more and
more information about a wider
variety of human
rights violations,
and providing evidence
to their critics
that the world was
actually getting worse.
In other words, that the
critics of human rights
are using the data produced
by activists themselves
in order to say, you are
not making an effect.
And I want to just give you
an example, because it seems
a little counter-intuitive.
So [INAUDIBLE]
Posner, who is one
of the legal scholars at
the University of Chicago,
who wrote a book called The
Twilight of Human Rights Law.
And he basically said,
human rights, there's
been no improvement
in human rights
basically since the
Universal Declaration Human
Rights in 1948.
And he goes, there's
no marked decrease
in human rights violations.
Let's face the fact--
human rights law doesn't work--
and let's move on.
And the first example
he gives them that book
is an example that will
be familiar to Peter,
and those of you
who work on Brazil.
He said, for example, today,
in the favelas of Brazil,
the police go in the
favelas, and more and more
especially black young
men are being killed.
And he said, if we look at
extrajudicial executions
in Brazil, there are more
extrajudicial executions today
than there were in the past.
He was using data from a
group called the Observatorio
in Sao Paulo, that was a new
group formed in Brazil, that
started, for the
first time ever,
to document killing
in the favelas.
But he was making
a comparison, he
was using a database
that had started
to be only about extrajudicial
executions when the government
killed its political opponents.
It didn't include going into
favelas and killing young men.
It included the
government, under
the military
dictatorship, killing
its political opponents.
And so the good news was
that the human rights
activists in Brazil
were able to say,
oh no, we have other kinds
of extrajudicial executions
in this country, ones that
we've never counted before.
We've never talked
about them before.
And that's when the
police go into favelas.
And so we started
seeing an increase
in extrajudicial
executions in Brazil.
It wasn't at all
clear that this was
because, under the
democratic Brazil,
there were more
extrajudicial executions,
or whether there was more
knowledge about this new form
of extradition execution, and
we were finally counting it.
So it's a dilemma we
face in this field.
It turns out it's not only
a dilemma facing this field,
it's a dilemma they face
in other fields, as well.
You may have heard about
people trying to count autism
in the public health field.
We actually don't
know where there's
more autism in the world,
or whether we are diagnosing
autism, or whether or both.
Maybe there's more autism and
more diagnosed with autism.
Public health people call
this issue surveillance bias.
The issue is, the closer
you look, the more you find.
And they know that if you did
a double-blind study, where
you have your control group,
if you put the control
group under an MRI machine,
they get sick more often.
What does that mean?
Obviously, they're
not getting sick
because they got
in an MRI machine.
The MRI machine finds illness.
It finds illness.
It's because you're looking
closer you find more illness.
So these public
health people doing
these double-blind
studies know they
have to control for what they
call surveillance or detection
bias.
We in the human rights field--
and for that matter, I would say
in the transnational advocacy
field--
actually have surveillance bias.
But we don't know it.
We don't know it.
We don't we don't
control for it.
We don't we don't
try to figure out
how that could affect our
perceptions of effectiveness.
And not only that,
we're a little worried
to even talk about it this
way because we're worried--
activists, I believe,
need as part of the power
their message to say that
things are getting worse.
How are you going to get people
to follow you and believe you
and organized with you
say, actually, we've
been working hard, and
things are getting better,
but there's still problems.
So activists fear, they say
things are getting better,
that there'll be complacency,
and maybe indifference.
On the other hand,
if you keep saying
things are getting
worse, we've been working
50 years on human rights--
70 years [INAUDIBLE]---- and
things are getting worse,
then maybe Eric Posner is right.
Maybe human rights don't
work, and we should give up.
So we're kind of
caught in this bind
of how to recognize progress
and say we've been effective.
And just from a social
science point of view,
how to measure progress in a
serious social science way.
And at the same time,
keep making sure we're not
making people complacent.
And so you can read my
chapter for the details,
but I want to just
end-- and this
is an issue that I'm
dealing with in my book
Evidence for Hope.
The reason I put the word
hope in the title of the book,
in what many people think
are these dark times,
is because I draw on the social
change organizer, Saul Alinsky.
Alinsky said that to
bring about social change,
you need three things.
You need anger, you
need hope, and you
need to believe you
can make a difference.
And so anger is important.
But for bringing social
change, it burns out quickly.
[INAUDIBLE] said, anger is like
the spark plugs in your car,
but hope is the gasoline.
So what keeps you going
over the long term
is you have to also hope.
And then finally,
you have to believe
you can make a difference.
And not only that you
can make a difference,
you have to know how you
can make a difference.
And so unless we do
the kind of research
to be able to really explore
things that have really
worked in the past,
we won't know how
to sustain change in future.
So on that note, let me end, and
we'll have time for [INAUDIBLE]
[APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE] give us [INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, [INAUDIBLE].
I'll try to start
the discussion.
I'll be really brief.
I just have four questions
for the three of you.
One, do institutions matter?
This literature,
social movements,
transnational activist networks,
it's always about contention,
and it's always about
[INAUDIBLE],, et cetera.
And a lot of the criticisms of
the social movement literature
is it doesn't pay
a lot of attention
to institutionalization.
And yet, especially
thinking about Latin America
over the last 30 years.
If there's one huge,
massive, significant effect
that movements have had,
it's been institutions.
And in light of the
reversals we're seeing,
et cetera, how much do
institutions matter?
A second question--
and this was already
raised in Activists
Beyond Borders.
Essentially, the Thames
argument is an argument
about the articulation between
this global human rights
field and local civil society.
And it strikes me that that's
an important articulation,
but that there's
tremendous variation.
Latin America is maybe
the more synergistic case.
And most recently,
we have [INAUDIBLE]
book on [INAUDIBLE]
political subjects,
which really shows
that articulation.
But there is a piece
by Harsh Mander in one
of these volumes--
I'm losing track of
all these volumes--
but Rising to the
Populist Challenge.
And Harsh Mander is a
well-known Indian activist
who's been a key
player in every piece
of rights-based legislation
in the last two decades.
He basically says, the
international human rights
regime doesn't matter in India.
And, in part, because they have
democratic spaces themselves.
They don't need the boomerang.
And yet, I think it has
mattered, but in ways
that are maybe different.
And maybe we can think
about that a bit.
I want to ask the $100
million question, which
is, across different
sectors, where,
in the millennial euphoria
that Peter talked about--
in which sectors did TANS
get the most traction?
So there's a huge difference
between violence against women,
and say, labor, and
environmentalism,
somewhere in between there.
I know you all have a
lot to say about that.
But just to get some
sense of what you
think the variation looks like.
And then the fourth
big question,
to build on Katherine's
point, I agree
that the most important
thing that movements do
is problemetize the
unproblemetized.
And the question is, what's
the next thing that's
going to be problemetized?
And I think, possibly--
and this is a bias for hope--
the next thing that's going to
be problemetized is democracy.
Here in the US, the
most interesting thing
about the last two years
is we've actually had
a conversation about democracy.
About voter suppression,
about the electoral college,
about the lack of participation,
and about the importance
of keeping the
institutions separate,
and checks and
balances, et cetera.
And in India, one of
the striking things--
[INAUDIBLE] always
said, the fish
never talked about the water.
And Indians are like Americans.
They never talk about democracy,
they just sort of take it
for granted.
And yet, India's had, I think, a
really interesting conversation
of late about democracy.
And then the most
interesting case, to me--
and I just have
to highlight this,
because it's the one big
positive change that we've seen
since we had this conference.
The one personality, the one
charismatic, patriarchal,
autocratic personality
that you didn't have
up there was Jacob Zuma.
And Jacob Zuma is gone.
And he was ousted
democratically,
and he was ousted
by civil society.
And has been very much
part of a conversation
about revitalizing
South African democracy
after 20 years of sort of
top-down [INAUDIBLE] rule.
So maybe this is
the new issue that's
been problemetized by
transnational advocacy
networks.
OK.
I think that what we should do--
we're threatening here to
be running out of time.
So I think what we should
do is to just gather--
in addition to Patrick's
four questions--
we should gather three or
four questions from you all,
and then let folks
respond to those.
And then we can go out
and have our reception,
and think about it
more informally.
So let me open up the
floor to questions.
Questions, questions, questions.
Yes?
Do you say who you
are, especially
since you've been partly
identified previously.
[INAUDIBLE]
I'm a senior at Brown.
Right before coming in, I was
reading about the appointment
for the new foreign
minister of Brazil,
who's a guy who say that climate
change is Marxist plot that
is meant to stifle
Western economies.
And he's saying that there's
a criminalisation of red meat,
and oil, and of
heterosexual sex,
responding to movements
against violence
against women, on
movements against violence
against homosexuals
in Brazil, which
are very much connected to, I
think, movements in the United
States and elsewhere.
[INAUDIBLE] of things that have
been problemetized globally,
and partly, because
of social media,
it's more of a conversation.
And thus, obviously, also
the case with climate change.
And his statements really
echo what Trump would
be saying in the United States.
So it seems like the similarity
between populists coming
to power in different
parts of the world
is not only the
question of tools,
but a question of the issues
that they're responding to.
Like what is the
backlash against.
And the issues that
are being raised
in different parts of
the world by activists
are also connected.
So I wonder, how
much can we connect
the rise of these new
democratic dictators
to also transnational
activist movements,
and what they've done
in the past 20 years?
OK, well that's a small
question that we can--
yeah?
[INAUDIBLE] Sorry?
Can you speak up a little bit?
Louder, yeah.
I have a question about where
is subnational politics in all
of this?
Which is that, again,
between the transnational
and the local, we've
completely missed
how feature variations
within countries
and subnational
political leaders
actually becoming, in
some ways, bulwarks
to these national populist
authoritarian [INAUDIBLE]
electoral authoritarians.
So where are the subnational
political leaders [INAUDIBLE]
some sort of safeguard.
And the second point was
the information paradox.
I thought this was
super interesting,
and I remember this
from your book.
And I wanted to just
add here that there
was a rape case in Kashmir,
where an 8-year-old girl was
raped in the temple.
And when human rights activists
began to publicize that,
to make that an issue of
national outrage, just making
that information available
in terms of counting
the number of rapes of
Muslim women and girls
actually resulted in a counter
data collection exercise.
Where the same rape cases
were counted with, oh,
but look at the
selective outrage,
no one's reporting how
many young Hindu girls have
been raped, and using that
to counter this human rights
activists, and
celebrities, and so on.
So I just wanted to add that
really resonated with what
we're seeing in India today.
And so it's not just
fake news, but it's
being used to legitimize
how the Right is also
entering the space of
sort of human rights
activism [INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
Yes, in the back.
Does this imply that
the United Nations
has failed in these efforts?
Or does the United Nations
indeed active already?
OK.
And in the middle back.
So my question has to do with
the transnational advocacy
[INAUDIBLE] civil rights
groups, et cetera [INAUDIBLE]
versus the governments.
So it's interesting that we
see this international network
of activist groups are trying
to bring about changes.
And a lot of times,
a lot of changes
are quite deeply
ingrained within
the fundamental
structure of the society.
And we can't say, using
the [INAUDIBLE] saying,
a fish thinks with its head.
So a lot of times, it could be
some of the institutional bases
with the government
functioning, as we can see
in Hungary, China, et cetera.
But at the same time, we
see this populist movement.
So why do you think
that is, that this sort
of international civil
rights group that
are trying to promote the
interests of the people who
are victimized by many
of the state policies
are not gaining so much
traction in some places
within these people?
But rather, the government
who, in some cases,
are exploiting the people, are
gaining more traction among?
Number one case coming out
of my head would be Hungary.
Hungarian citizens
in rural Hungary,
they don't believe in the EU.
We're actually
allocating them so much
funding with these
kind of things,
but they believe in the
Hungarian government, which is,
right now, massively corrupt.
OK.
I think that's probably
enough on the table.
I think we've got, as I
estimate, three minutes a piece
to deal with these questions.
And we'll start with
Katherine, reversing the order.
Well, I guess each of
us can only do a few.
So I'm going to talk about--
No, very few.
--do institutions matter?
Because one, transnational
advocacy networks
were an effort to begin
with to not only be
about social movements, because
the advocacy network often
did link together
people in institutions.
Second, social movements
often work very
hard to create institutions.
And this may go to the
question about the UN.
So sometimes people want to say
there is the good human rights
groups--
little H, little R-- those
are the domestic pure groups.
And there is the bad human
rights institutions-- capital
H, capital R-- that's the UN.
But if you look at the fact how
hard human rights organizations
have tried over the years
to create institutions,
the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights.
Cesar's worked a lot
in the American court
was very much a desire and an
effort of social movements,
and good government
jurists, and diplomats
and then it's been
used very successfully
by social movements, as well.
And Cesar's done a great case in
the Sarayaku indigenous people
in Ecuador, to show how
these indigenous groups can
use institutions.
So at their best--
and not all institutions are
the best, at their best--
these institutions can be
arenas for effective action
of advocacy networks.
I'm just going to end
with the Zuma issue.
So one of the
things is actually--
and I'm using three different
databases that political
scientists use to
measure democracy--
there are a lot
of big challenges
for democracy in the world.
The number of
democracies is still
either equal to or quite
close to the highest number
we have had, historically.
That's using polity, Freedom
House, and [INAUDIBLE],,
for those of you who
are thinking about it.
And so what does it mean?
It means we hear about all the
ways democracy is challenged,
and we don't hear about
ways where democracy
is sustained or improved.
And it's the nature.
We're not hearing about
South Africa after Zuma.
We're not hearing about
Armenia, for example.
We're not hearing [INAUDIBLE]
Ecuador.
We're not hearing Ecuador.
Because as soon as a topic
falls off the front pages,
because things are
getting better,
you don't hear about it.
You hear about the bad things.
That's the news bias.
That's fine.
But again, we as people
trying to keep stock of what's
happening, need to consult
some of these sources
and realize that there's big,
big challenges of democracy
in the world, but democracy
in their total number
is still pretty close
to an all-time high.
Cesar.
I [INAUDIBLE] a
couple of questions.
One, [INAUDIBLE] question
about the backlash.
I think that that's a very
important question, very much
along the lines of what
Katherine said about pending
issues for research to
study right-wing movements
and transnational
advocacy networks.
And also to theorize an
empirical document reverse
spiral.
So this is something that
pioneer human rights scholars,
like Katherine and
her collaborators,
thought about very
rigorously early
on, about how
human rights norms.
And basically went through
this process of expansion
of a standard
setting, but also led
to ever-increasing forms of
compliance with the rules
by states.
So that was the
moment of expansion,
or norms cascade in the 1990s.
And naturally, we were--
I wasn't part of that group--
but [INAUDIBLE] community,
and also practitioners were
interested in understanding
this hopeful moment of
expansion of human rights
[INAUDIBLE] global
framework for global justice
and the common language that
states and activists could
speak to make each
other's claims for justice
commensurable.
What happens now is that we see
in the swing of the pendulum.
So there's two ways that
we were discussing this
with Patrick earlier today.
One way to see this is
in the long [INAUDIBLE],,
like long-term changes
in historical trends.
So that's why
Polanyi, Karl Polanyi
is also coming back in
sociology, law, and everywhere
else, because you can see
there is a countermovement type
of dialectic.
This is a word that Patrick was
trying to revive earlier today.
So just us we had a
moment of expansion,
now, this is somewhat
of a contraction.
That, I think, is
very perceptive
from a theoretical
analytical point of view,
but it's not very helpful
for practitioners.
I love Polanyi.
I've used it in my dissertation.
But I can not go to Dejusticia
and tell them, look,
let's just wait out
this issue for 10 years.
Things will get better.
So at the more
granular level, I think
what needs to be done is
to pay close attention
to those moments of backlash.
And there their examples
and their illustrations
that you gave are
quite on point.
One huge backlash
in Latin America
is coming from the
evangelical right.
Transnationally organized,
highly sophisticated,
reacting against the
decades of expansion
of women's and LGBTI rights.
What's worrying to me is that,
because human rights activists,
we tend to feel strongly
about these issues.
And also righteousness
is in abundant supply
in the human rights
movement, for good reasons,
but also it makes us
blind to countermovements.
And we tend to discount
the way in which
the targets of human
rights activism
also have capacity
to learn over time.
They wise up to the strategies
of human rights organizations
and react.
And this is what's
happening on each
of the [INAUDIBLE]
environmental activism,
gender, the very idea of
transnational advocacy
networks.
If I read correctly--
because these days,
you don't know whether this is
coming from reliable sources--
but I read also that
the new minister
of foreign affairs of Brazil,
the newly appointed one
said something like,
globalism is something
that needs to be dismantled.
So the very idea,
globalism is another way
to say transnational
efforts, among other things,
bringing people
together to fight
for human rights and
environmental issues,
and so on.
And we know that Steve
Bannon is creating
his own international rights.
So there is a learning
process on both sides.
And one thing that needs
to be done urgently
is to learn and do more
systematic research,
and take seriously
the countermovement.
Who are they?
I'll give one final example
coming from Dejusticia's work.
When we had worked
very intensely
in support of the peace
accord in Colombia
between the government
and the FARC.
Spent years and
years, my colleagues,
who were working in
the [INAUDIBLE] justice
line of research,
had spent a lot
of time trying to come up
with sophisticated ways
to make compatible
the [INAUDIBLE]
demands with the needs of the
political context in Colombia,
and the possibilities for
a peace accord between FARC
and the government.
Long story short,
by a slim margin,
the peace accord was
defeated in the polls.
Next [INAUDIBLE] discussion that
we had was with a [INAUDIBLE]
of religion, who,
for the first time,
explained to us who the voters
from the evangelical churches
that had come out strongly
against the accord were.
We had no idea.
And it's not just
Dejusticia, it's
the human rights
camp writ large.
So that learning process,
sometimes it's painful,
but it's absolutely necessary.
OK.
I'm going to use my last 90
seconds here to respond both
to Patrick's last question
about the problemetization
of democracy and also,
hopefully simultaneously,
to respond to the question
from the back on why does Orbán
and his ilk, why do they
get such good traction,
particularly now?
And I'm going to respond
to both of those questions
by throwing in a curveball here.
And that is by starting
with the word capitalism.
I just happened to just
finish reading a dissertation
on Hungary, and it was called
The Wounds of Post-Socialism.
And it, of course,
could have been
called The Wounds of the
Introduction of Capitalism.
And it was a very carefully
done dissertation.
It was about mortality rates.
And it started out by saying
the demographic catastrophe that
occurred post-liberalization--
i.e. post the introduction of
capitalism in Hungary and other
parts of Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union--
was the worst
demographic catastrophe
to have occurred in the
last 50 years, perhaps
outside of China.
OK, so where do we
go from the Wounds
of the Introduction
of Capitalism
to Patrick's question?
I would argue that one
of the reasons everybody,
from Trump to Orbán
gets traction,
is because democratic
regimes have proved incapable
of responding to the destruction
of people's quest for dignified
livelihoods, which is the
product of global capitalism
at work.
And I would argue further that
transnational activist networks
also have to confront
the fact that,
as long as the operation of
global capitalism destroys
people's opportunity for
dignified livelihoods,
then people like everybody
from Orbán to perhaps now
Bolsonaro-- interesting-- will
be able to manipulate political
frames, so as to say,
democratically-elected folks
in the past haven't done it.
I will do it, because I
don't follow the rules.
I'm an authoritarian,
therefore I can do it.
Now, of course, the good
news here is they can't.
And the question is, what
happens when people figure out
that they can't, and will
that create new opportunities?
OK, time for a drink.
Thanks to everyone.
It's been a--
