- Hello everybody, welcome back
to the last panel of the conference.
Before I start I want to
say thank you to Sukti,
to Bryan, Meg, Naelofar for organizing,
it's been a terrific, terrific conference.
And to all of the
participants and the audience
for your meaningful contributions.
My name is Deborah Popowski
I'm the Executive Director
of the Center for Human
Rights and Global Justice,
the other human rights institute
here at NYU School of Law.
I am also a human rights
lawyer and scholar by training.
And the Center, after being
the lone human rights center
at NYU for 15 years has really,
really welcomes the arrival
of the Bernstein Institute
with open arms and we
are delighted to have
a new partner in our project to expand
the human rights community
at the law school and at NYU.
And we're particularly grateful
to participate in this panel
as the Center prepares
to harness its resources
over the coming years to focus
on the increased crackdown
that we're facing in the United States
from government as well as corporate
and other non-governmental actors.
And looking at what this means
for human rights defenders
in the U.S. and for
international human rights
institutions more broadly.
And at the Center, which
has a research-based mission
among other things this
means asking the question
of what happens to the
human rights project
in an era of rising nationalism,
explicit xenophobic and racist
policies, open kleptocracy,
and what are fairly
clear and loud promises
to dismantle our weakened
human rights institutions.
So with that bleak question
in mind I have the pleasure
of moderating this last panel,
a group of terrific panelists.
As with the other introductions
we will keep the intros brief
as you have peoples' full
bios in your programs.
To my left we have Baher Azmy,
the Legal Director of the Center
for Constitutional Rights.
And then Sarah Kendzior,
a journalist and a doctor
in anthropology specializing
in authoritarian politics,
a journalist who has written
for the New York Times,
the Guardian, the Globe and Mail
and many other publications.
Tor Hodenfield, Policy and
Research Officer for CIVICUS,
an international alliance
dedicated to strengthening
citizen action in civil society.
And Biraj Patnaik, South Asia Director
of Amnesty International and also Convener
of the Civil Society Organization
Support Cell in India,
making a second appearance.
That's how much we value his insight.
So today's panel is a little bit different
from the earlier ones in that
it gives us an opportunity
to take some space to collect
the wisdom and experience
that we've heard of people
gathered over the last two days.
And to reflect on what
we can learn from them
in our own struggle to resist
here in the United States.
I won't try and recap
everything that's happened
in those two days, but very briefly,
we've talked about and heard
about a wide range of ways
in which governments engage in oppression.
Whether that be through
violence, physical restrictions,
criminalization of dissent,
through detentions,
political prosecutions,
even disappearances and killings.
To surveillance to
restrictions on registration,
association, funding,
online expression and independent media.
And the deployment of
terrorism and extremism labels
to discredit human rights
defenders and their work.
We've also heard about the
equally wide range of ways
in which civil society
engages in resistance.
Some of them legal and
many of them extralegal,
whether that be through
technology, performance art,
public advocacy, media,
business, community organizing
and community empowerment.
We've talked about how corporate actors
can engage in both
oppression and resistance
and we've also talked a
lot about the ways in which
all of these categories
are not monolithic.
There are a range of
actors within government
and civil society and
it's important for us
as we engage in these
projects to map out the ways
that they all work together
to push down and push back.
I also want to make a point
that several panelists
have made, and I think it's
important to emphasize here
that although we are
seeing clear troubling
and downward trends in
all of these places,
including our own country,
that for many of our own communities
or the communities we work
with this isn't so much
a new phenomenon so much as
one that's become more visible.
A fault line so to speak
that's becomes more exposed,
perhaps because a wider range of people
are becoming affected rather than those
who are only at the margins.
And/or because the types of
restrictions are becoming
more intense or at least
more overt and visible.
So, we will hear from each panelist,
we'll have about eight minutes
for some opening remarks.
And generally, they're not
gonna touch on everything
but the general ask is
that they speak on their,
for those of you who are
based in the United States,
your perspective on challenges faced here,
strategies that have
been deployed to respond,
lessons you've taken away
from human rights defenders
in other communities and countries
and how you've adapted them,
and also really questions, right,
this is a space to also
recognize all the things
that we don't know and we
do really want to make space
for a conversation.
And for those of you who
are based abroad or for whom
much of your work is done
outside the United States
what parallels and differences do you see,
what advice do you have for us,
and what are some areas for collaboration.
So after each panelist
speaks for eight minutes
we will have about 25 minutes
of moderated question and answer here
and then we will open it up to the floor
for an open discussion
for another 25 minutes.
Thanks.
So Baher, could we start with you?
- Oh, sure.
Thanks Deborah, so as she
mentioned I'm the Legal Director
of the Center for Constitutional Rights,
which is a now 50 year
old legal and educational
and political organization that uses
litigation to, in
partnership with political
and social movements, to advance
progressive social causes.
And I think, as I understood
part of the question
to me as a sort of domestic
human rights and civil rights NGO,
how has our strategic thinking changed
since Trump came into office.
And in the spirit of surfacing
more questions than answers,
because I think there's
so much uncertainty
want to sort of tell a story about
our strategic planning
process, like a lot of NGOs
we try to develop a strategic plan in,
and it became nearly final in October,
which baked in a whole set of assumptions
about what the world would look like
in the next four to eight years.
And at first blush we wondered
if this kind of thinking was
sort of beside the point
in light of the new threats
but I think there's a way in which
it actually is maybe sort of more
resilient and more relevant now.
So we wanted to think about attacking
not any particularly sort of issue areas
in the way that sort of a
law school might break up
cases or courses around
particular social justice issues
but kind of think radically
about the ways in which
there are certain systems or structures
that repress vulnerable
communities in this country.
And in a sort of persistent longterm way
and asked to what extent we
should be trying to develop
legal and political strategies
to dismantle those systems.
And the four we identified
were state power,
particularly around the development
of this vast national security vocabulary
and legal apparatus, from
Guantanamo, drone strikes,
torture, impunity from accountability
for violation of human rights norms,
and broad-based militarism
that has an international,
externally-facing dimension
but also has seeped into
the domestic politics as well
in terms of persecution of Muslims
and militarization of
police forces, et cetera.
A second system is structural racism,
including anti-Muslim racism.
Third is structural gender oppression
including patriarchy,
heteronormative patriarchy,
and a fourth is economic repression.
And so there's, you know, at some level
it seemed sort of impractical
to be talking about
these kind of systemic
harms in our politics
given the kind of direct concrete threats,
and maybe it is but there's a way in which
it actually opens up a conversation
because I think it might have
been harder to talk about
state power and militarism
in an Obama-Clinton
axis
when in fact in the past
we've had very little traction
being able to criticize
Obama for Guantanamo
or drone strikes or militarism.
But, now given the sort of
incoherent and very
dangerous foreign policy
and the sort of unmasking
of military strength
to get domestic political support
I think there may be a
stronger conversation,
a more sort of open conversation
about the dangers of militarism
both in sort of seemingly
kind administrations
because it lends
legal sanction or permission
to subsequent crazy administrations.
Having a conversation about
structural racism is certainly,
and we sort of framed
conversations about race
in this country
traditionally around kind of
racial discrimination
rather than overt racism,
and that was a sort of harder
space for us to talk about
in an Obama-Clinton domain
but now can one, given the sort
of dynamics in the election
and the full embrace of white
supremacy in the White House
and the Attorney General's office
isn't this now a real opportunity to build
coalitions and conversations
about institutional racism,
historic racism, white
supremacy and resentment
finally sort of,
not finally, but really
more overtly seizing power
and translating that to repression.
Gender oppression, I mean, the sort of,
the sort of obvious ways in
which reproductive rights
are being curtailed even
at the federal level,
defunding Planned Parenthood,
an agenda where religious conservatism
has such a massive
platform in the White House
and their narratives around
religious freedom to repress
LGBT communities and women
very kind of overtly, I think
that's an open conversation,
it's not a silent anymore.
And of course, economic repression,
I mean what an unbelievable story
in the way in which this has played out,
the sort of faux economic
populism that has just fed
Wall Street and massive
industrial power structures
and that will screw the poor over again.
And that of course is braided
with structural racism
as it often is historically.
So maybe it's, you know,
and I'm not sure, you know,
I don't know what sort of
legal strategies necessarily
this translates into,
but it does seem like
there is an open space for
conversation and in a way
there are some additional kind of
strategic obstacles that I think
we've identified that we have
to sort of take into account
in pushing back against
these structural forces.
One is obviously the absence
of a kind of mainstream
White House presence.
So,
anti-racism work, or
police accountability work
looks very different in a
place without Vanita Gupta
running the Civil Rights Division
of the Justice Department
or without some political conversation
with the Obama administration
about closing Guantanamo.
And so that sort of middle space
in terms of like sort of
basic elementary pursuit
of equality and social justice
has now been, that had
permitted some groups
to sort of push on the
margins, is now vacated.
And it's not clear how to
fill up that mainstream space
with civil society, I think
it's doable and it seems to be,
there seems to be a
responsiveness in that direction
but that's one obvious challenge.
Another obvious challenge
is the weakness of
international institutions.
Obviously the America first
rhetoric suggests the rejection,
a sort of robust embraced rejection
of international law norms.
Even security international law norms
like at least as of until yesterday, NATO.
It just shows how little traction
I'm worried that sort of
international conversations,
international norms,
international institutions,
which are, I think vulnerable politically,
can have in this administration
even as compared to
the Bush administration
when international human
rights norms were marshaled
both around, with mixed success,
but at least it had salience and relevancy
in the conversations in limiting
some of the worst abuses.
And so what does that mean
when you have this sort of
rampant militarism, for example.
And then the final challenge,
which I've said may also
be an opportunity, I mean,
it's a challenge to the, a
threat to actual communities,
is racism,
Islamophobia, that have,
and xenophobia,
and the ways in which
those policies can be so
dangerously operationalized
in the White House.
And I think, we can get
into some details later,
we largely think the legal strategy
will be, needs to be the
same, which is, for us anyway,
using law in support of what seem to be
increasingly activated social
and political movements
who are engaged and want to
challenge these manifestations
of the Trump era.
And I can talk a little bit more about
what that looks like specifically later.
- Hi.
I'm Sarah Kendzior.
As was mentioned before
I started out my career
studying authoritarian
states in Central Asia.
And among the people who I studied
were the leaders of these states,
people like Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan,
a strongman who relied on media
manipulation and spectacle
in order to sway the masses,
who did a kleptocratic
shakedown of his country
along with has fashion designer daughter
who seemed to have political
ambitions of her own,
who scapegoated Muslims in order
to hide human rights abuses
and to try to have a pretext,
a further justification.
I also studied leaders
like Saparmurat Niyazov,
otherwise known as
Turkmenbashi, a megalomaniacal
brutal leader who built a
golden statue of himself
that rotated to face the sun
and went around naming
everything about himself,
as do other leaders in Central Asia,
constantly putting their
names on buildings.
I don't know who this reminds you of.
(audience laughing)
Anyway.
My point is when Trump
started to gain popularity
I was deeply alarmed for many reasons.
One of which was that I
saw that it was possible.
I also live in St. Louis,
I live not in Trump country
but close to it and I live in
a bottomed out part of America
that had been suffering, and
that Trump's whole career
has been based on shaking down
vulnerable people in vulnerable
situations and coming in,
so, you know, I thought he would win,
and now he did and now we have to live
with the consequences.
Trump and his policies are
not actually hard to predict.
They're hard for people to believe
and they're hard for people to accept
because if you do then
you have to consider
the ramifications of his words and actions
and the suffering that
this administration causes
and the frailty of our institutions
which has allowed this to happen.
Americans are known for optimism,
but blind optimism is only blindness.
You can't confront a problem
unless you actually
acknowledge that it exists.
In this political climate
I think you need a dark
imagination to see the light,
and I think the people in this room
are better equipped than most.
Now I know everyone was
talking before about how
we're not supposed to
leave here depressed,
and I'm sorry but you really,
like, picked the wrong person
if that was your goal.
But I actually think that
confronting the reality
of the Trump administration,
however grim that is,
is the key to possibly turning this around
or at least mitigating
the worst of the damages.
So on that note I'll
make two brief points,
which I think you already
know, in case you don't,
'cause they keep coming up in the news.
One is the alleged pivot
that we've been waiting for
for two years, Trump is
never going to pivot.
What he wants to do and has been doing
and has somewhat successfully done
is pivoted the United States towards him
and his extreme positions
so that things that
were once on the fringes
are now our mainstream rhetoric
and things that once shocked people
are things that we just sort
of, you know, many people shrug
or roll their eyes or just
don't know what to make of.
And that gets into you and
can eat away at you over time.
But that pivot's not coming.
This kind of goes hand in hand
with the Trump is going to
become presidential narrative
which happens whenever Trump
does something remarkable
like read off a teleprompter
and therefore dispute the rumor
that he doesn't know how to read,
and say something that's
not outrageously racist
but mildly racist or drop a giant bomb
in Syria and Afghanistan
and then be praised for it by cable news.
That's dangerous, that's not presidential.
There's no strategy behind this.
Where there is a strategy though
is in members of the administration
who are using Trump and
exploiting the vulnerability
and chaos of the situation
for their own ends.
And so I thought what I'd do today
is kind of try to break down
some of the key players of this
for those of you who don't spend every day
gripped to Sean Spicer's
amazing press conferences
and need a little blow
by blow of just how many
terrible people we've allowed
into the American government.
To be clear, I don't think that
we are an authoritarian state.
If we were an authoritarian state
I obviously wouldn't be sitting
here telling you about it.
I do think that we have a government
with authoritarian ambitions,
with autocratic ambitions,
with kleptocratic ambitions.
And they're held back only by what's left
of our checks and balances,
especially the judiciary
and by citizen protests and
demands for accountability.
So now I'll try to be brief,
I'll give you a little breakdown
of the different players
that are within this
administration and what they want.
And true to our great leader, Cheetolini,
I'm going to divide this
into haters and losers
and I'm going to begin with the haters.
And so, well Trump actually is both,
Trump is a hater and a loser,
or he wouldn't be manipulated so easily.
Trump's goal is basically a kleptocracy,
and in this case I think
a dynastic kleptocracy.
In every venture that he's gone through,
whether real estate or higher education,
he has taken a vulnerable
and a population in pain
and shaken it down for
his personal wealth,
and I think that's what
he views the government.
He doesn't have a coherent ideology.
He has some core beliefs, but
they're easily manipulated.
He's both sadistic and erratic
which is a terrible combination
but makes him useful
for a number of people.
I think one thing we need to
be very wary of with Trump
is nepotism and the role of Ivanka
and Jared in this administration.
I think, you know, you
see this in autocracies
all over the world, this
hiring under no merit
of relatives of the president
into positions of power,
into positions where they have clearance
and access that they shouldn't really get.
I think Trump's other goal
is to escape prosecution
for what seem to be serious crimes.
And one way to kind of
equip yourself for that fate
is to make sure that
money stays in the family.
Like a typical autocrat, he's
paranoid, he trusts his kin
and he also trusts them with his finances
and with whatever he can kind of reap
by abusing executive power.
So I think that Ivanka and Jared
are people we need to keep our eye on.
Jared's alleged rival is Steve Bannon
who I'll discuss next.
Personally I think this is fabricated,
I don't think that
they're actually fighting,
I think that there's currently a narrative
that Bannon and Jared
Kushner are in a feud.
I think this is to make
Kushner seem more appealing
because Steve Bannon's like
the least appealing person
who we've probably ever had in
a national advisor position.
He's part of this wing of
the Trump administration
that's overtly white
supremacist, overtly extremist,
and has been part of this mainstreaming
of political culture.
With Bannon, I think there's rumors
that he's going to be put
out of the White House.
Again, I stress you to look
at what that actually means.
Is he no longer going to be a public face
of the administration,
or is he actually going to be removed.
So the things to kind of look for for him,
oh boy, two minutes and I've
got so many more jerks to go.
(audience laughing)
Are access, clearance, stuff like that.
All right, real brief,
Pence kind of represents
this theocratic extreme conservative wing.
We've got all the guys who are
currently being investigated
by the FBI, Manafort, Flynn, Stone, Page,
otherwise known as volunteers,
that's a whole nother story,
but that sort of shows the again,
kind of kleptocratic ambitions.
We have Jeff Sessions, in terms
of the crowd gathered here
that know about law, I think
Sessions is one of the most
dangerous people in the administration.
I think he is a clear indicator
that whatever authoritarian tendencies
the United States is currently expressing
are not something that
we've borrowed from abroad
but things that have always been here.
And he's going to try to repeal
things like voting rights,
civil rights, so for everybody
who's talking about 2018,
we need to be looking
at what Jeff Sessions
is doing right now or there's
not going to be a 2018
in which all people are
freely able to vote.
Very briefly, the losers,
since they need a shout-out,
Carson, DeVos, Rick Perry,
Sean Spicer of the Holocaust centers,
these are people who were
put into their positions
and basically to destroy the
departments that they lead.
Who are so incompetent that
they're in direct opposition
with the goals of what
they should be doing.
That's on purpose, that is
to weaken the United States
as a country, and that's something
that both Trump and Bannon have expressed.
And the sort of group are the GOP
who I think are kind of
looking at this situation like
what the hell just happened
but how can I personally benefit from it
and what can I get out
of it before this guy
actually drops a nuke on
North Korea or vice versa.
And so they're opportunists,
I don't think that they are
acting in our best interest.
And I'll conclude by saying
unfortunately I think we need
to be prepared for the worst
particularly regarding
the North Korean situation
I just mentioned.
You can't see a mushroom cloud coming
through rose-colored glasses.
And on that note I'll conclude, thank you.
(audience laughing)
- Ahem.
(audience laughing)
So I've never been accused
of being an optimist
in my entire life.
(audience laughing)
That might change, I think.
Thank you Sarah and thank you Deborah,
and thank you to the Bernstein Institute
for organizing this important meeting.
It really is an honor to among so many
comrades and activists this week.
I'm gonna ask an indulgence
at the beginning of this presentation,
I'm gonna in a moment try to contextualize
what's happening in the United States
within the global
landscape of civil society.
But before I do that I'm
gonna ask you four questions,
four straightforward
questions, and ask yourself.
The first is, can I criticize
my head of state on Twitter?
The second is, can I
join a human rights group
to campaign for change?
The third is, can I take
part in a peaceful protest
outside my government building.
And fourth, and most importantly,
can I do all of these things
while knowing that my government
will not just protect me,
but actually enable my right
to organize, speak out,
and take action on
issues that matter to me,
and are critical of the state?
If you can say yes to all
four of these questions,
congratulations, you are
part of a tiny tiny minority
in the world.
Only 26 countries in the world
can people say with confidence
that they live in a country
with an open civic space.
Last week the organization
that I work with called CIVICUS
released a new project
called the CIVICUS Monitor
and the CIVICUS Monitor
is tasked with developing
a global depiction
of civil society landscape
across the world in real time.
So we assess every country in the world,
look at their rights
the freedom of assembly,
rights of freedom of association,
rights of freedom of expression,
and the ability of activists to operate.
And we now have covered 193 countries
and Kosovo and Palestine and what we found
is that only 3% of the world's population
live in countries where you
can exercise those rights
without fear of persecution
and in an environment
in which you're confident your government
will support you to exercise that right.
Not that they'll crack down on it,
but they'll actively help
fulfill that right with you.
We've also noted that in 106
countries across the world
these rights are being seriously violated.
That the space is closed
or extremely repressed.
That 3.2 billion people in the world,
many of whom live in America,
live in countries where they
cannot exercise their rights
without an immense fear of persecution.
And CIVICUS has been looking
at this issue for 20 years,
we've been looking at civic
space across the world,
whether it's in Ethiopia as
discussed this week, or Kenya,
or Uzbekistan.
But what we're seeing is that
this democratic backsliding
or deconsolidation is not just
afflicting emerging states
or emerging democracies
or autocratic regimes
but they're afflicting
consolidated robust democracies
across the world.
We're seeing that these
tendencies of oppression
of civic space are afflicting places
like the United Kingdom,
like Australia, France,
and the United States.
The United States,
according to the Monitor,
is thought of as narrowed,
which means that people
are largely allowed
to exercise their rights,
but are subject to
unwarranted restrictions.
We've also put the United States
on something called the
CIVICUS Monitor Watch List,
where five countries that we've identified
have had a precipitous decline
in respect for civic space in the country.
So the United States is
coupled with Myanmar, Egypt,
Turkey,
and,
so we're closely watching the situation.
If we step out of the American context,
if we can remove ourselves
from our American-centric perspective
and look objectively at
what's happening in America
you will see a few key trends that afflict
countries across the world,
that afflict Honduras, Ecuador, Brazil.
Just look at it objectively.
In the past two months state legislatures
have proposed or adopted 19 laws
attempting to restrict
freedom of assembly.
Imposing unwarranted
and undue restrictions
on the right to protest in 19 states.
Six journalists were arrested
and charged with felony rioting
during the inauguration ceremonies.
The police are infiltrating
our protest movements,
specifically Black Lives
Matter, in a systematic way.
And what's important I think,
what we've discussed this week
is that these challenges
are not just happening
in the United States,
that there is solidarity across the world.
And this is not a new phenomenon,
it might be relatively
new to the United States,
some might disagree about
the Bush era or the Nixon era
but there are lessons to be learned
from our comrades and
colleagues across the world
for 15, 20 years in Uzbekistan
have been facing extreme repression.
And we have a lot of learn from them.
This Eurocentric model,
and American-centric model
that we know that only fit for
purpose is our architecture,
needs to be rethought, that
we have things to learn
from other countries and other
movements across the world.
And very briefly, how many
minutes do I have, Deborah?
- Two.
- Two minutes, great.
Very briefly give an example,
leave on a positive note.
(clears throat) Sarah (clears throat).
I'm not an optimist.
- You are by default.
- South Korea.
In 2014, 300 people were killed
in a ferry accident in South Korea.
The vast majority of the people who died
in this accident outside
Seoul were children,
students taking a trip on the ferry.
The government did not,
according to the vast majority,
the people did not adequately
investigate this crime.
They weren't transparent
in their investigation,
there was no accountability.
A year later,
about 800 NGOs came together,
including trade unions,
including watchdog groups,
legal advocacy groups, 800
organizations came together
and developed a campaign and a movement,
a sustained movement
calling, a very discrete
issue, very discrete,
about one specific incident,
calling for accountability
for what happened
in January 2014 when
300 people were killed.
And during that movement
hundreds of activists were detained,
the security forces used
excessive force and tear gas,
rubber bullets.
And then directly following
the protest movements
the police targeted the
leaders of the movement.
So leaders of the movement
were sentenced to five years.
Whether, you know,
involved in the union side
or the NGO side, five years, 10 years.
500 activists were summarily arrested
the day after the protest,
summoned for questioned,
20 of whom were given a year sentence.
And South Korea is a government that has
a similar architecture
to the United States,
it is also assessed as narrowed
by CIVICUS in the Monitor.
But that movement on a
very very discrete issue,
which we have several of
which in the United States
grew into a national protest movement.
Starting five months ago
the same groups who were
involved in that movement
started calling for the impeachment
of President Park in South Korea.
For five months every Saturday
tens of thousands of people
joined together in protest.
Every Saturday for five months.
On March 10th, last week,
the Constitutional Court
upheld the impeachment of President Park
who was accused of a number
of illicit activities
similar to what we see in America.
So we see this nexus between
a sustained protest movement,
we see that people will have to go to,
people will go to jail,
people will be persecuted.
But that movement does impact
the larger legal architecture.
As a result of that movement
the Constitutional Court,
as I said, upheld the decision
to impeach the president.
So there is, there are positive examples
within the global context
to be learned from America,
I'm not advocating the impeachment of,
well I am, of President Trump.
Wholeheartedly.
But there are lessons to be
learned from our comrades
and colleagues and I hope
you'll be able to recognize that
this week, and I've learned
a tremendous amount,
so thank you so much.
- Thank you Tor.
- Yep, hi, my name's Biraj Patnaik
and I work with Amnesty now
but I have also been involved
with the civil society
organizing in India around
pressures of state regulation
and I want to say right away that
we were asked as panelists to
share what the U.S. can learn
from our experience,
and let me say up front
that a big shout-out to all of you
because the manner in which
the United States of America
has resisted this
administration is unprecedented.
It's absolutely unprecedented,
and I think there are lots of lessons
the other way around which we can learn.
The millions of people who
came out on the streets
to protest, the take-down of
this administration's lies
one tweet at a time,
the amount of mobilization
that's happening around social media.
I mean, this is really
unprecedented and this is something
that you should be proud of
because in most contexts across the world
you don't have an incoming president,
an incoming president within
weeks of his taking office,
within days actually of his taking office,
finding the kind of resistance
that Trump did in the
United States of America.
So I think that's something
that all of us can learn from.
Now in terms of what are
the lessons and challenges
that we are facing in India,
I mean one question that one
is always asked with is that
is Trump comparable to Prime
Minister Modi, for instance.
And this is a question
that is very common,
everyone asks how, what is the comparison.
And I say in jest, with the
bit earnest as well, but,
that Modi is Trump with work experience.
But it's actually not true.
Because unlike President Trump
Prime Minister Modi, he has an ideology,
ideology that'll complete 100
years in a few years time.
Deep rooted political ideology
of a Hindu nationalist state.
Ideology that led to the
killing of Mahatma Gandhi
and so on.
So he does have an ideology.
Second, he does have a political party
and amongst the biggest
political parties in the world.
Not in the sense that Trump
has the Republican Party
but in a real way that leaders
carry political parties.
He's not an outsider.
Third, he's,
he also has a political
cadre, a grassroots cadre
independent of the political party,
which belong to this ideology of hatred
and Hindu nationalism,
which is again the largest
civil society movement
in the world with more than
six million voluntary members.
Fourth, he has administrative experience
within government, having
been in power for decades now.
And lastly, he understands
societal fault lines in a way
that I don't think Trump does
even though it appears that
Trump is able to exploit
a societal fault line
it's a one trick pony.
It's this one major fault
line that you're exploiting,
whereas Modi had demonstrated
the ability to exploit
not just religion, not just caste,
but increasingly class as
well as a societal fault line
in a deeply divided and
disconnected society
to gather a constituency
which is unprecedented.
So in a sense what I'm trying to say,
and he's a great communicator.
He's a terrific communicator,
he's the greatest
communicator in the world
as Trump would say.
And he is a great communicator, he has a,
and what is common with Trump
is the simplicity of
his message, you know,
it's always that one line that'll,
that covers a lot of ground
which appeals to his audience
in a way that any messaging that we do
just doesn't seem to do.
I mean, here is a man who
demonetized, which has knocked off
86% of the country's currency in one go.
It's basically taking
away 86% of your money
and saying that it's not
valid from midnight today.
And what happens, he
wins the next election
with a two-thirds majority
in the largest state in the world,
largest, the fourth largest
election in the world, actually
which is the state of Uttar Pradesh,
close to 220 million voters,
two-thirds majority after a
measure which has demonetized
86% of the country's economy.
150 died just standing in the queues,
bank queues trying to get their money out
in that three month period.
Entire country thrown
into economic disarray,
informal sector, 96% of
the country's economy
is in the informal sector,
largely dependent on cash.
Barely four to 5% of the country
is in the formal sector employment.
And yet you had this election victory.
So this ability to exploit
a societal fault line
to drive a change which is
under any administration,
under any circumstance should
have been deeply unpopular
but is still popular,
I believe makes somebody like Mr. Modi
a much harder political
opponent than Donald Trump is.
And therefore the battle
with a Modi or a Erdogan,
or Duterte in Philippines
is in a sense much harder
because these leaders make fewer mistakes
of the obvious kind
because they have the
administrative experience,
they have an entire party
machine backing them
and they have people, and they have,
they know exactly which levers of power
to have complete control over
beyond just their family and so on.
Now in terms of the mobilization
I can talk about the
challenges that we face.
The first big challenge is that
every symbol of the nation,
or the citizen is being appropriated
by the right-wing today.
So if it's a national
flag, it's appropriated,
if it's a national
anthem, it's appropriated.
And appropriated in a very cynical way.
Sometimes through judicial pronouncements,
sometimes through state action,
but appropriated in the
sense that every time,
as Mathew said yesterday,
we now in every cinema hall in the country
before every film it is played,
the national anthem will be played
and everybody has to stand up.
And of course our supreme court
made a concession by saying
well if you're disabled you
can continue sitting down,
but do please say beforehand
so that you don't get
lynched by the audience.
And this is literally
happening across the country.
So how do you re-appropriate the symbols.
And I think one symbol
that we can successfully
re-appropriate still in
India is the constitution
and we haven't used that enough.
Second is organizing in different ways.
Because what 30 years of
neoliberalism has done
is it's broken the back
of the trade unions.
And trade unions always had,
the workers movement always had
a larger than disproportionate
size of the protest space,
in a sense, organized protest space.
What you are dealing with
now in the absence of that
is a mob which does not have an ideology,
which does not have a,
which does not have demands
or the ability to articulate demands
or does not have the
vision to take forward
to a logical conclusion
the demands they make.
So how do you deal with a mob.
Again, populism is not
about the installation
of right-wing governments,
as I said yesterday,
it's a process.
And it's a process successfully engaged by
from people across the political spectrum.
So there are things that Trump does
which were common to the Corbyn campaign
and to the Bernie Sanders campaign
and to the Kejriwal campaign.
Which was a way of engaging with people
that mainstream politics couldn't.
And I think there's a lot
for us to learn from that
in terms of why is it that
disengagement is succeeding
and what is it that the
lessons that could be for us.
The next point I'd like to say
is that in our traditional
civil society work in India
we were, we had the
luxury of taking democracy
and rule of law and a lot
of these things as a given.
And because you had the
luxury of that, you could do
your constituency building
around thematic issues.
So I work for instance
on mobilizing people
on the right to food for many years.
And somebody worked on health,
somebody worked on education.
That system is not working anymore
because what you're dealing
with on the other side
is a message that is so overarching
that constituency building that is limited
only to single thematic
issues or areas of work
is unlikely to,
unlikely to be able to
present a coherent challenge
to the wave of demonization
and populism that's coming.
So there's a much greater need for
intersectional work and
constituencies coming together.
Last, I think in terms
of the lessons in India
what's happening now is there's
a lot of alternative media
that's coming up.
Philanthropists are
backing alternative media.
The mainstream media somehow seems
either to be completely co-opted
or not able to, unlike in the U.S.,
and again I would like to
draw an exception here.
You have the New York Times,
you have the Washington Post,
these are not alternative papers,
these are mainstream papers
who have countered Trump from day one.
But in countries like India
the entire mainstream media
has bought into the narrative of populism,
for various reasons.
Largely because earlier the media
used to be corporate controlled,
now the corporation is the
media, in India at least.
It is the corporate that is the media
with deep financial stakes
which government can influence
at any point in time.
Which is why there is a
co-option which is unprecedented.
So one of the responses to that has been
the opening up of the internet
space with alternative media
that even philanthropists are supporting.
There are plenty of ventures coming up now
solely devoted to debunking
the mis-truths of the administration.
Fact-based journalisms,
like IndiaSpend for instance is one
which tries to nail every untruth
that's put out by the government,
every speech of the prime
minister line by line.
I think that's something
that we have learned
from the U.S. as well, successfully
because that's something
that was done in the U.S.
through the campaign.
So these are some of the broad challenges,
or lessons, rather, that we
can learn from each other.
As I said in the beginning,
I'm not in a position really to say that
we've done this greatly,
very successfully,
and here's what the U.S. can learn
because actually the
resistance that you've put up,
despite all the lack
of optimism in the room
given what you're facing
with, has been spectacular.
I think the problem that
all of us are facing
is that we are used to
speaking truth to power
and now we have to speak
post-truth, truth to post-power.
And we don't know what that means.
So good luck to all of
us for that, thank you.
- Yeah.
- So thank you all for that.
I'm gonna open up a question
for all of you, and that's,
throughout the days
we've heard a lot about
in these moments of crisis,
sometimes the importance or the need
to take a more incrementalist approach,
or the idea to, you do crisis management,
you're trying to mitigate harm.
And that's a reality
because we have people
whose bodies are on the line,
you have to get people
out of jail, you know.
Somebody in one of the panels yesterday
we talked about a law in Uganda
that restricts assembly and
association in so many ways,
among them was the use of lethal force
and how the strategy in the end was to,
the strategy was to
remove that piece of it
but the rest of the law remained.
And as somebody who's
been working in the U.S.
on more structural change and
CCR's and on that side too,
what are the strategies for
both having to deal with that
stopping from backsliding
and the crisis management
and the mitigation while
also not falling prey
to the danger of normalization
and not challenging the
structural problems.
And so Baher, you talked,
you introduced the idea
of how CCR has a new strategic
plan and is addressing that,
I'd be curious to hear more about
what that looks like in practice.
And then from all of the
panelists if you have thoughts
from your experience or advice on how you
either individually as an organization
or how you're working in
collaboration and coalition
with other groups in order
to ensure that you're both
dealing with harm mitigation
but also challenging the
under-arching structures
that are causing the harm.
- Yeah, it's a great
question and I think it's,
I think I'm ambivalent because I do see,
as I said before, the ways in
which the Trump administration
has exposed these systemic forces
and the way they've been masked by
a kind of kind looking chief
executive and the sort of
veneer of progressive action
and policies in America.
And so having these things laid bare
does create opportunities,
at the same time,
I do think that
in terms of where we can
deploy resources strategically
there are so many communities
that are directly under attack
and need legal resources
to protect them from harm.
And I think one has to be mindful of
both strategies, and if,
could I just react to a couple things--
- Yes.
- Everyone else said,
because this is such a really
interesting conversation.
Both in terms of where the threats are
and what potential responses might be.
I sort of stumbled on this phrase
but I think there's a lot to it
and I'm trying to develop it more,
this notion of living through
our 11/9 moment.
I mean just think about that
a little bit because for,
for a very long time,
sort of in this country
there was a narrative about
having woken up on 9/11
and everything having changed.
And an analysis about how
there was a genuine existential threat
as a result of the attacks on 9/11
and the development of
a series of dangerous,
in my mind, practices to respond to that.
And I think for a lot of civil libertarian
and civil rights groups, those
threats were exaggerated,
it was not in fact existential,
and I think the sort of 11/9
threat from the interior
is more dangerous,
more systemic, more permanent.
And the really, I think, great
example of that is Sessions.
I mean, I think, so 9/11 there's
the iconography of terror
that was developed to sort of scare us
into sacrificing civil liberties
and developing a robust
law enforcement response,
that sort of external threat.
It seems to me in our 11/9
moment the iconography is
around
whatever the opposite
of white supremacy is.
So, sort of black liberation
and crime and black power,
women's equality, LGBT rights,
and I'd really sort of underscore
Sarah's point that the
great threat domestically
is it seems to me Jeff Sessions.
And the other point was we can learn from
international examples, but
I think Sarah mentioned this,
we can learn from
domestic examples as well,
i.e. segregationism and the Confederacy
and someone was like,
who's not a lawyer is like,
is Sessions really that
much worse than Ashcroft,
and I was like,
dude, Ashcroft's from a
border state, Missouri.
Sessions is full-on Confederacy.
And I think he is eager to deploy
the same kinds of power structures
to subvert democratic institutions
and claims for equality
in the United States
through his language around carnage
and in terms of civil society,
his alliance with the police
in that segregationist way
is really amazing.
One, exaggerate the threat.
Two, ask whose side are you on.
He's clearly with the police
even though we have sort of
record low levels of crime,
there is carnage everywhere.
And are you with Black Lives Matter
or are you with the police.
I mean he's sort of, he's adopted
the Fraternal Order of
Police's talking points.
And then forcing sort
of repression of dissent
for those who are not with the police.
And so
I think the good news is,
as compared to the 9/11
moment, 11/9 moment is this,
after 9/11 it seemed like
there was very little
civil society mobilization.
So in response to the
national security emergencies,
there were a couple of
people waving around
a writ of habeas corpus,
now there is a full kind of ecosystem
of human rights civil society groups
who are well-coordinated, well-resourced,
who meet in funder sort of
spaces to coordinate strategies
to challenge dangerous
national security practices.
In the immigration space in 2001,
in the immigrants rights space,
I think that was also largely occupied
by a few national impact
litigation organizations
challenging federal laws
that made it harder to access the courts.
And since the conversations
around immigration policy
started in the Bush administration
there is a vast array
of grassroots immigrants
rights organizations
that are regional, that are
national, that are mobilized,
that are connected, and
that are working together.
And even in the MASA space,
the Muslim, Arab, South Asian space,
I mean when NSEERS happened,
the National Security Registration program
by the Bush administration
that required the registry
of tens of thousands of Muslims,
there was no response, no pushback,
the Muslim community was devastated.
And then in the last six weeks
of the Obama administration
this enormously well organized
ecosystem of grassroots groups
lobbied the Department
of Homeland Security
to dismantle the NSEERS architecture.
So there's sort of like
real mobilization now
for this crisis moment
that didn't exist before
and so while I think
it's both more dangerous,
I think we're also better positioned.
- Okay, so you had asked
about how do we work
in coalition and collaboration
while challenging these
overarching problems,
the overarching problem
I think is an attack
on constitutional law
and also an attack of what
our norms and values are
and questioning of what those are.
One thing I want to stress,
like I come from Missouri,
the border state he just mentioned,
we used to be a purple
state, purple like a bruise.
Now we are blazing red.
But we are not that simple.
I come from, I live about
four miles from Ferguson,
where major civil rights
initiatives were launched
and I also come from a
state where my governor won
after firing an AK into an empty field
and trying to issue ISIS hunting licenses,
so, you know, Missouri is
full of a variety of folks.
But my point here is that
every region is different,
every city is different,
and every place has a different framework
and needs and values.
And so you shouldn't expect
people to protest the same way
or to support the same causes,
I think that's actually detrimental.
I think people have things
that are of particular interest to them,
causes that they believe in, specialties,
knowledge and skills that they can share,
and the diversity of that,
when combined against this administration
I think is what's most effective.
The other thing I would say is that
it's better to focus on
laws and attack on law
than try to change people's
hearts and minds and attitudes.
We talk a lot about upcoming elections
and candidates and stuff,
and again I will stress Jeff
Sessions till the day I die.
We have to look at what laws
and rights will be taken away,
we have to look at concrete things
instead of sort of trying to
shift the political culture.
That's possible, but
it's not as important.
It doesn't matter who the candidate is
if people can't get out to vote.
And finally, as someone who hails from
not quite Trump country,
but from a state that went
overwhelmingly for Trump
there are a few issues that I do think
everyone kind of agrees on
and you see this in
protests around the world,
like in Russia, in South Korea,
people will protest corruption.
There are certain attitudes
that are horrific, like racism,
that people are happy to publicly embrace,
they feel no shame in that.
There are very few people that
are gonna defend corruption.
They're gonna be like, no don't do that,
like I'm pro corruption,
I'm pro kleptocracy,
I'm pro nepotism, I think it's awesome,
although actually I think the latter
was written about in Politico.
But anyway, most people
are anti those things
and they're a unifying point
I think between a variety of people
that otherwise don't agree on much,
and so I think if we look at Trump
as a corrupt administration
as a kind of, as a con
artist, which he is,
as a guy doing a shakedown,
that's a narrative,
that's a truth that a lot of
different people can agree on.
And so I think that's a basis to start,
it's proven effective in
other countries as well.
- I'm gonna jump in actually before
and maybe push back a little
on one of the points you made.
You said that we have to focus on laws
rather than the hearts and minds,
and I guess I'll push
back from a personal level
but I'm curious to hear other thoughts.
It's just I feel like one of
the main critiques that I have
of the human rights
movement during the Bush era
was it's focus on law, and
in fact maybe a critique
of the U.S. human rights
lawyer-driven movement in general,
they were so focused on
laws, on top-down change that
in pushing back against Bush on the norms
and really holding onto constitutionalism
and rallying around these values,
we lost a lot of opportunity
to actually shift
the way that people's attitudes,
and then when Obama came around
and many of those policies continued,
it became harder for us, and
then that maybe historically
this is what's led us to
this particular moment.
So I guess just to push
back and maybe ask for
the other panelists to weigh
in on whether you think
it's that simple, or Sarah
if you want to jump in too,
of course, to respond.
- I mean, I was thinking more
that there's this kind of
concerted we've gotta
flip the Trump voters.
And I know people who voted for Trump,
and they did so for a variety of reasons.
For some his racism and
xenophobia was the primary appeal,
for others it was
something they overlooked.
I just think it's harder to do that.
I think that that kind of
changing hearts and minds things
works on a local level
when you're surrounded by
somebody who understands
your own living situation,
not somebody from the coast
talking to somebody in a
place like where I live,
that's more what I was getting at.
And also the reason I'm
concerned with laws is because
I think that they are going
to probably be repealed,
things we took for granted
through probably an executive order
or an emergency situation and
that's why I see the urgency.
But I see your broader
points about what happened
in the Bush administration
continuing through Obama,
like that's not something
I disagree with at all.
I think honestly we kind
of need a full on assault,
but I worry about the laws more.
- Do either of you have thoughts on how
human rights defenders, human
rights lawyers especially
can be working on both of those fronts
in a coalition with other groups?
- No I think that certainly there are,
the institutional framework,
I mean particularly in
the U.S. is very robust
and in fact the biggest challenge
to the administration's newest policies
have been in the court
as much as they have
been from the streets.
So yes, we need to secure these spaces,
the institution spaces,
and work on the law,
there's no disputing that.
My only worry is that
in a country like India
where say 50% of the
population is less than 25
in that demographic to
catch people's attention
and to hold it for anything
more than 10 seconds
is incredibly hard.
And therefore for me the
messaging is equally important.
It's not just what you're doing on the law
but how you're putting
your point of view across.
And we are in the danger
of losing a generation
because we don't have the
idiom of communicating
with that generation.
We have an idiom where we are much better
at communicating with each other
and talking at them rather
than trying to convince them
or using the tools,
techniques, and methods
that they use to communicate.
So I think even if you did work on the law
how do you take this
message across to the young
and get them to be the, because that's,
in India as I said
yesterday again was that
the most effective counter
to the administration
has not come from people like me,
it has come from the university
students, as it should be.
And there's very little that
people like me have done
to support that, to make
it more sustainable,
to build it university
by university and so on
because we just don't have
the idiom to engage with them.
- Thanks everybody.
There's no one linear way to change,
there's no universal
prescription about how we
secure positive elements
in law or practice,
but I think if you look
at the United States
on January 27th Trump issued a decree,
as we're all well aware,
banning refugees and
travelers from seven countries.
January 28th thousands of
people across the country
mobilized to airports, one
day later, thousands of people
in hundreds of airports across the world.
January 29th the federal
court struck down that law.
And I think this is what
we've been saying all week,
what we need to do is build solidarity
among these different sectors.
There's no one direct path to change,
it involves the mobilization
of several constituencies.
And I want to go back very briefly
to the question about incrementalism.
I'm a bit biased, my screensaver
is a picture of Malcolm X
that says, for freedom can't wait.
And I think we need to
make a distinction between
the exercise of your right to dissent
and what your goals are.
Incrementalism in securing a
policy change is one thing,
but every human being,
every person in the world
is endowed with the inalienable rights
to speak out against their government.
That's not incremental.
If that strategy fails, if
you don't secure your change,
that's a reflection of many things,
maybe the clamp down or your tactics.
But there's no incrementalism
about your right to speak out
and criticize the government.
- Okay.
I'm gonna ask maybe one more question
and then in the spirit of what Biraj said,
that the wisdom is with the
students, and with the crowd,
turn it up and maybe open some questions
and have everybody join in,
both to ask questions
but also to answer them.
And that's to go back to
the issue of judiciary.
It's come up at different
points in talking,
and people have talked
with some confidence,
and Tor you mentioned
the fact that the law,
the executive order was struck down.
Again, maybe to play devil's advocate,
or coming from a place
of having cut my teeth
in the Bush era, I'm not
necessarily all that confident
in the U.S. judiciary's robustness
even though it is in many ways independent
compared to some of the spaces
that we're talking about,
I don't necessarily have a lot of faith
that they're gonna step in,
although I hope that this is different.
I guess I want to ask you to
what extent do you feel like
it's healthy to rely on the courts,
or that maybe we might
be in a different moment,
and then also to hear from
people, and this one I will
after each of you, or whoever
wants to weigh in, weigh in,
open it up, if any of you
have your own thoughts
as to examples from other jurisdictions
that have similarly placed judiciaries
on what you think is happening now.
- So, yeah, I mean I think Tor's point,
I think courts are
a necessary but utterly
insufficient institutional tool
to secure
protections for vulnerable communities.
They are
necessary in a way that if
you can convince a court
they can
order a government entity
to stop doing something
and so far he has agreed to comply.
So they have that important
coercive and real power.
But they're not sufficient
because they get some of the
political legitimacy
to issue those orders
from the public sphere
and that's why the marches
were so critical and
emboldened the courts.
And I think any legal strategy
has to be married with,
any sort of affirmative legal strategy
to attack national policies
has to be married with
organizing and activism
and giving political space
for the courts to make these decisions.
At the same time I think
we need to also think about
how to use courts to build space
for activists to do their work.
And so that means using legal resources
towards criminal defense work,
protecting dissent, protecting activists.
So courts as a way to sort of
challenge executive practices
that are supported by mass mobilization
that emboldens courts,
but also legal strategies
that protect activists
and organizers so that
they can continue to do
the mobilization and challenging power
that happens in this country
really in a more durable way
than any judicial change can.
- I'll just comment briefly
'cause I'm not somebody
with a legal background.
I feel like what's happening in the U.S.
is that people are realizing
their rights as they lose them,
rights that they long
took for granted before.
And so I think that that
will continue to happen
and both it spurs the protests,
which have had some effectiveness,
but it's also something
that can be deeply disheartening
and disillusioning.
One thing I'll just say
as someone who has studied
authoritarian states is
that's it's extremely typical
once an autocrat gets into power,
he will remove the judicial oversight
that can keep him from carrying out
either kleptocratic initiatives
or just straight out crimes
and we should remember that Trump
and other people associated with Trump
are under FBI investigation
for collusion with Russia
and this going to cause
him I think to make
a lot of harsh and aggressive moves
including towards those who are engaged in
investigating this
issue, people like Comey,
who he has recently threatened to fire.
And so I think that as activists
or just people concerned about this,
you know, watching, making sure
the people who are actually
providing oversight over the situation,
not Devin Nunes, the other people,
are able to remain in their
position of power is essential.
- Do you want to.
- Thank you.
I would agree completely
with my co-panelist
that there needs to be a marrying
of civil society activism
and strategic litigation.
You can't have one within the other.
There's an interesting example in Zambia,
that is of relevance where,
exemplifies this kind of amalgamation
of a legal strategy and advocacy,
where in 2009 they passed an NGO law
which was quite restrictive,
limited the work of
every NGO in the country.
And the NGOs, quite astonishingly,
an interesting example of agency of NGOs,
refused to register under this NGO law.
They just refused,
said the law is incompatible
with our constitution,
we're not gonna register.
And that will have severe
challenges for us as institutions,
it'll prevent us from receiving
foreign support and aid,
which they were quite reliant on.
And at the same time
they launched a petition
to the constitutional
court challenging the law.
And the government was so
reliant on civil society,
and aware of their
reliance on the NGO sector
that they came to a settlement
in the constitutional court
and repealed the law.
So it was a combination of both.
Civil society activists
sacrificed themselves
at a public campaign
and married that with a
constitutional appeal,
which resulted in a positive outcome.
So I think where viable
it's an important step,
but I think we also have to
recognize what Sarah said,
that in Uzbekistan you
cannot use the courts,
in Ethiopia you cannot use the courts.
In America right now you can and should.
And I hope it stays that way.
- No, I'd agree with my completely
that as somebody who has
used strategic litigation
for well over 15 years in the
right to food case in India
that courts are not independent
of the psychological
and social forces that are in operation.
And the most effective use of the court
would be to combine it
with public activism.
Because courts are also vulnerable
in terms of their composition,
in terms of who are the judges
who are getting appointed.
And in terms of the enormous pressure
that in many of our contexts
the judiciary is being put through.
So unless there is, it's
combined with very active
political, public mobilization,
courts independently will
not be able to deliver.
- Thank you, I think I'm gonna
open it up now and invite
any questions from the audience,
and also answers or comments
on the conversation.
Some of the issues that have come up
that we haven't addressed so much here
is just examples from your work
and how we can ensure our
security of human rights defenders
and the communities with whom we work.
The issue of countering
faux economic populism
came up in the panel and we
haven't talked that much,
so if you have thoughts on that.
And then also the idea
of coalition building
and the strange bedfellows that
we might find ourselves with
and thoughts on how you've
negotiated thorny alliances
and any lessons that you have for us.
- [Sarah] Hi, Sarah McKune.
I wanted to raise one concern
in particular that I have
with the Trump administration's impact
on the international human rights system.
I mean, we've obviously seen
some warning signs so far
but at this past session
of the human rights council
China on behalf of over 30
countries actually issued a call
for reform of human rights governance,
which is quite concerning
because this sounds like
an outright attack on the
international human rights system
on which so human rights defenders depend.
The mechanisms like
U.N. special rapporteurs
and various periodic reviews of states.
And obviously their intention
is to pursue a more sovereigntist agenda
that prioritizes the state
as opposed to individuals.
But given that in the U.S.
the executive has almost
complete authority
over what the state does
at the international level,
what strategies can we be using now
to prevent significant damage being done
by the time this four year
administration is over?
(muffled speaking)
- Take a few more.
- [Man] Yeah, I want to
sort of focus on something
that I think of the
several of the panelists
have alluded to, there
actually was a period
in the United States
from about 1973 to 1980
when there was a very significant control
of the national security establishment,
specifically by the Congress.
That was where the House and the Senate
intelligence committees come from.
That was when the Congress actually
legally tried to restrict the
president's war-making power
and then from 1981 on that was rolled back
and it was rolled back systematically.
It was rolled back at least as much
under the Clinton and
Obama administrations
as under the Reagan and
Bush administrations.
But it did happen, and my question is
what can we learn from that experience,
which I think is in large part forgotten
in the current mobilizations,
and on the other hand
what should we not learn
in view of the way that ultimately
all of that more or less failed.
- [Man] Oh, so this goes to
not just the U.S. context
but authoritarian regimes in general.
'Cause what happened again,
those of you who've been
paying attention lately,
so that Syria bombing,
and Afghanistan bombing,
much of that in the end
was then to distract from
much bigger issues at bay,
so how would you suggest
just keeping both ourselves
and then you have our constituencies
are focused on really the bigger issues
and given the tendency of
those with authoritarian bent
to use distractions in
order to lead people astray.
So how do they stay
focused on the main issue?
- Especially distractions
that cause so much harm.
Maybe we'll take,
can you do one more, okay.
(muffled speaking)
Next round, okay.
So we have a question on
China and the use of just,
how do we combat the rise of, you know,
states trying to dismantle
the human rights institutions.
There's a question on what
can we learn from the period
in U.S.'s own history when
there was some pushback
in the post-Nixon era.
And then how do we deal with distractions
of mass destruction?
Maybe we start with
someone else this time.
- Yeah, of course.
- I'll take the third
one, the distraction one.
- That will be good.
- I think, yeah.
I don't think that
everything that Trump does
is a distraction, I think
the distraction element,
one is reliant upon the
media actually falling for it
and doing it, but it's
also sometimes a perk.
I think that in terms of
the military incursions
that he's been doing lately,
that's in part because
he just wants to do that,
he wants to flex that muscle,
he's been wanting to play
with weapons for a while
and he doesn't have an actual
military strategy behind them.
In terms of how to keep people
focused on bigger issues,
kind of to go back to what I said,
I think everything is a big issue.
I think the loss of
healthcare is a big issue,
loss of public education,
the loss of civil rights,
voting rights, and the Russia
interference scandal, or,
what it is, the investigation,
is also a big issue.
I focus a lot on Russia
because I have this background
in studying the former Soviet Union
and so I know the players,
I know the oligarchs
and I know how they operate.
If I didn't have that background
my mind would be completely blown,
and it's very hard I think
for people who don't know this
to understand it and I think
it's hard for many Americans
to have to deal with this question of
to whom is my president most
loyal, is it the United States?
For all of the different
corruption scandals
we've had in the past
that's a new question,
and it's kind of a mind blowing one.
I think that what's important
is that that gets carried out.
That does rely somewhat
on the media investigating
because they've often been
able to relay information
through leaks from intel agencies.
But honestly we gotta keep
our eyes open on everything.
Look at the way they're connected.
A lot of this has to do with money,
it has to do with
kleptocratic initiatives,
it has to do with Trump's
willingness to abuse power,
his narcissism, so just
keep your eye on the ball
and the ball's really big, so.
- Thanks Deborah, I'm
just gonna quickly respond
to the first question
about America's retreat
from international bodies.
I work at the U.N. in New York
and worked at the U.N.
in Geneva for years,
and it is, we are,
it is an existential issue,
we're not sure how to deal with it.
In one week, two weeks ago, in one week,
the United States refused to attend
its Inter-American Commission
on Human Rights briefing
on its human rights situation
in the United States.
It boycotted the Israel debate
at the U.N. Human Rights Council
and removed itself from
something called EITI,
which is the extractive industries
global monitoring body, in one week.
There was not a lot of concern
among domestic civil society
or in national media.
And I think that's a large part
of a reflection of the fact
that U.S. civil society
has not actively engaged, historically,
with international
human rights mechanisms.
To make sure that the Trump administration
maintains its presence
within these institutions
we need to make sure that they have value
for our constituents in America.
Mathew Jacob was up here
yesterday from India,
and we've worked with him
very closely on raising
India at the Human Rights Council.
Domestic NGOs are extremely
skilled and well-versed in India
at engaging with international
human rights mechanisms.
Special reporters, special procedures,
there's a strong awareness and conversance
with these mechanisms.
That's lacking in America.
And for us to make the case
that we need to stay in these bodies
we need to actively engage in them I think
as much as possible.
- I'll pass, yeah.
(muffled speaking)
- Yeah, I was gonna try to
answer the first question,
although I don't have a great answer.
And I think one of the
other concerns I have about
the kind of relevance or force of
international norms
is the kind of
weakening of the U.N. system
and what's happening not
just in the United States
but in other places as well,
like the U.K., France,
Amsterdam, Germany, Egypt, India, Israel,
and is there, you know,
is this a sort of greater
sovereigntist tide in the
international institutions.
And I worry because I think,
and there's not much leadership here.
I mean, I think I'm optimistic
about the vocabulary
and the international human rights norms
being useful in domestic
activism and politics,
like a right to water
in Flint and other places,
a right to healthcare, the sort of,
that vocabulary in our
domestic political spaces.
But you're right, the sort of,
the engagement
with treaty bodies
and institutions
is at such a rarefied level
in a way that I don't think people feel
and are therefore motivated
to hold leadership accountable for.
So I don't really have a great
answer to that except that
potentially it links into
the second question about
the possibility of
fundamental transformation
in some time, I mean,
I think we've sort of
been basically around a sort of
center-right center-left consensus
and acquiescence around
executive power for,
since 1980, and maybe the
level of disgust and danger
around Trump will convince
people that it doesn't matter
just that you might have someone
nice like Obama in power,
that real institutions have
to fundamentally change.
And hopefully people are so disgusted,
if we're all still
alive, that there can be
a massive sea-change in
representative politics.
- Just want to really
quickly change the dynamic.
Briefly, if any of you, not
dynamic in terms of pessimism,
but just like do any of you
have questions for the audience
that you want answered,
like ideas for concrete
examples or strategies
that you didn't hear
at the conference the last couple days
that you want to directly pose briefly.
And we also welcome more
questions, but I think it would be.
But, anybody want to jump in?
All right, jump in later, okay.
- [Man] Thank you very much
for this really interesting panel.
I think it's really great that you guys
are having this discussion
so early in the new administration.
But I'm thinking that perhaps
one can also use this opportunity,
the Trump administration,
to also build civil society
where one can come up with
new mechanism and tools
of how to engage with
government to not on the same,
that's not in the same
length as what you are,
but to find that common ground.
And perhaps that in the past eight years
civil society has become too comfortable
and lost the creativity of engagement.
So I'm just wondering maybe
this is an opportunity
to make civil society stronger
and come up with new
opportunities for engagement.
But also this idea of
intersectionality within civil society
where you can engage with,
and I think that came out very
strongly with the travel ban
where civil society, even
though they work on LGBT,
but they also came out strongly
for organizations who works
on migration, for instance.
So I think those idea of intersectionality
within civil society and
how can we collaborate
and who's your allies
and finding that allies
and use that to build civil society.
Just a comment, but I
would just like to know
what you have to say.
- [Man] I'm from Hong Kong,
so I know a thing or two
about living under a government
with authoritarian tendencies
that is under the sway
of a regime that is hostile
to our fundamental values.
So that's the starting
point of my question.
And what I really wanted to
hear the panel's thoughts on
is sustaining momentum
because in the autumn of 2014
when the Umbrella Movement started
there was this enormous sense
in spite of the challenges the
movement faced of optimism,
of a sense that there was hope
that people were fundamentally decent.
And fast forward now two and a half years,
almost all of that is gone.
There is a prevailing
sense of despair, of rage,
we see localist protests
that are fundamentally
not just anti-mainland
but in some cases anti-mainlander.
There is unprecedented fragmentation
in the pro-democracy movement,
if one can indeed call
it a movement at all.
So my question is essentially
it's all very well looking
at the first few weeks
or even the first few months,
but this is a years-long campaign
if we're gonna live that long.
How do we keep up the momentum?
- [Woman] So mine is just
a comment to the panelists
and maybe just something
that you could think about moving forward.
For me the Trump administration,
I look at it positively
because it's a rude awakening
for the civil society in
America to look inward.
You've tended to look
outward most of the time,
we look at you as experts,
as the people we come to
when our government is
cracking down on us,
so those strategies you usually
give us, now use them here.
I think it's also about time.
And also this issue of
running to court all issues,
you know, the phrasing in
the state it's I'll sue you,
I'll sue you for everything.
So how about you build social,
you know, your own social movements,
build coalitions to be
able to act together.
I don't know whether that works here
but I know through, for example.
the Civil Society Reference Group,
it has been an umbrella body
when the government is
coming after Kenyan NGOs,
so why don't you have
that here as opposed to
running to court when
something small happens.
It could lead to sort of like
judicialization of conflicts
that you might not end up
sustaining for too long.
So it's something you could think about,
it might not work here, but
you could think about it.
- We'll take one more and then we'll take.
Just for this round.
- [Man] Very much appreciate
the panel and I take this
as sort of a global perspective
on the United States.
So I would say, what would
we say about a country
where all the political power
is controlled by a party
elected by a minority of the voters.
Where the congress, the
House, is so gerrymandered
more Americans voted for
Democrats than for Republicans
but the Republicans control the House.
Our Senate with two
senators for each state.
I looked it up recently, the
borough where I live, Brooklyn,
has a bigger population
than about 15 states.
So there are 30 senators
represented by those 15 states
with smaller populations than my borough,
which participates in the election
I guess of about one-eighth of a senator.
And then of course we have
the Electoral College.
So if we were looking at another country,
I think we would be quite critical
of the political institutions,
and yet we don't really talk
much about the United States.
We still accept
what we tell ourselves about
being a great democracy.
So my question is whether
or not political reform
should be part of the resistance agenda.
I'm not saying that the party in power
wasn't elected according
to the rules that exist,
but the rules that exist
allowed a minority of voters,
even with our low turnout
to control all the levers of government
and to pass, and attempt to
pass a very radical agenda
that the majority of
Americans don't support.
- Okay, thank you, so we have
four comments and questions,
one on political reform as
part of the resistance agenda,
one on why don't we use our own strategies
that we've been exporting here,
I would actually say maybe
we need to bring people,
bring you to come and train us
rather than use our own export.
One about sustaining momentum
and really how do we
both keep the optimism
and the cynicism and the
realism all in one space,
how do we hold both.
And when what do we think
about this as an opportunity
to build civil society.
Biraj, you want to start?
- Sure.
So I'll just take a couple of those.
I think a fundamental issue for me is that
what is the ideological counter
to this politics of demonization.
And the reality is that there
isn't an ideological counter
of the, which is coherent, which is clear,
which is appealing to the
people enough to stand up.
And this is a big problem in India,
we don't have a left anymore,
a party political left
which is powerful enough
to counter this ideology.
And therefore there is a
space that civil society
can fill in,
I agree this is a defining
moment for civil society,
not just in the U.S. but across the world
because when the lines
are so sharply drawn
it's better to be in this position
where you are very clear
on what the opposition is
and the way ahead, than
there being any fuzziness
on ideological grounds.
But in the absence of a more
coherent political alternative
which we have not been able to present,
at least not in India.
In the U.S. maybe yes,
but I don't know how long
we'll be able to sustain
momentum without that.
- I'll take the hope one.
You know, I think that
the concept of hope,
of hope and change is linked
to this American optimism
that has proven so detrimental
throughout this entire political cycle
because I think a lot of
people thought that one,
the impossible couldn't happen,
and two that the grownups
would eventually come in
and fix things that this
couldn't really degrade
and fall apart in this way.
And so I'm not a big fan of hope,
I'm also not a big fan of hopelessness,
I think the two concepts
just aren't relevant
to what's at play.
I'm a fan of pragmatism and of strategy,
and I think that that takes,
it's necessary to have
a realistic assessment of the situation.
And I think realistically
we are in a very bad situation.
That doesn't mean that we're
powerless over that situation,
there are still many many ways to act
which have been laid out through this.
And so I would encourage
people to just look hard
at what has happened.
Don't shy away from it,
don't gloss it over,
and don't wait for somebody else to fix it
and just think that it's gonna work out.
It could out, but it'll work
out if enough people push it
and work it and that's
what's necessary to happen.
- Oh, I'm having an existential crisis,
I have a year to live
so I just wasn't aware.
So maybe Baher, you go
first, I just wasn't aware.
- I don't know, we might
have a little bit more.
Yeah, I suppose I don't
have all that much to add,
I mean in terms of the, yeah,
the political mobilization,
it's
yeah, it creates a feeling of hopelessness
that the system is fundamentally rigged
and the system has been sort
of baked in for a long time,
the Electoral College,
part of the original sin
of slavery in this country.
I suppose, and
it's hard to imagine a kind of revolution
that would transform
the rules of the Senate
or the Electoral College
although maybe it's possible.
But there are ways in which
even within that system,
as you have identified,
the rules are dangerous
around gerrymandering
and the ways in which in the
Sessions Justice Department
they could get much worse
because I think what the right sees is,
one a demographic reality
that is so threatening that
they need to change the rules
around voter suppression
and gerrymandering
and everything to control power
because there's, it's
about managing power.
And so that's where
it's essential to resist
at least on the margins
in the next few terms
otherwise we're never be able to flip it.
I mean, the question about
building civil society
is a great one, or maybe
are there new ways to do it.
I mean, I'm only aware of one way,
and maybe there are others,
which is just to use power
through electoral
politics and the judiciary
and they have it and we don't.
And so they win and we
lose, our communities lose.
But one thing seems important to me is
the left seems romantically
fixated on just one office,
the presidency, the sort of romance of FDR
and Lincoln and Kennedy and Obama,
while the right has been organizing
in local elections for 40 years,
and controlling that power
and hopefully, and this
is to Sarah's point
about everyone getting organized
and everyone being activated,
can start doing that on a local level,
and that's a longterm
project but seems critical.
- I just wanted to add one point.
Tashwill and Pauline, you made a,
I think you hit the nail on the head.
I have two schools of
thought about civil society
and where they stand
now, I think one is that
we were so successful that
there is this backlash now.
That the 2011 people's
movements across the Middle East
and across the world
were so successful in
engendering systemic change
that the governments have
now used more insidious
and also more brutal tactics
to suppress civil society.
So the crackdown is a
reflection of our power
and our success as activists.
The second school of thought
is that we have become too complacent
and rested on our laurels as activists.
Right, we have not developed
more innovative strategies
within the current climate
of technology and otherwise.
And I think it's a reflection of both
and one can learn from the other.
And I think Tashwill and Pauline,
we do have a tremendous, tremendous amount
to learn from you, is most important.
In terms of mobilization,
in terms of using international methods,
everything discussed today.
We have a lot to learn from
our comrades across the world,
and it's been reiterated and reiterated,
but I think it's a crucial point.
- I wonder whether the question isn't that
both schools of thought can
coexist and that some of us,
some groups were pushing
back in creative ways
and suffering the backlash
while other groups were
perhaps growing more complacent
and what this crackdown
does is push the groups
that were more complacent into the space
where groups that were previously
marginalized were pushing.
We have request, we are at
time but we have requests
for one or two more, two more questions.
Bear with us, thank you.
Or comments.
- [Woman] For me personally,
more horrifying than the knowledge
that Donald Trump became the
president of the United States
was the realization
that he was elected by not,
as in the case of the election
of Hong Kong Chief Executive,
1,200 members of the election committee,
but by such a large
portion of our electorate,
even if it's not a majority.
So,
these voters voted for him
knowing that he is a liar, he is a conman,
but they were willing
to overlook those facts.
And now have put him in
place to build a kleptocracy.
These are fellow citizens,
they are not other people,
they are part of the polity.
So
how does one,
I don't know how to deal with that.
How do we go forward,
how do we, I mean they,
they have probably as much
if not more opportunities for education,
for becoming knowledgeable, smart,
than I am, a naturalized citizen.
However,
their values are unfathomable to me.
How do we as individuals
deal with that?
- Thank you.
One more.
- [Emerson] Thanks, my
name is Emerson Sykes,
I work with ICNL, thanks
so much to this panel.
One of the things that my,
the main part of my job
is working with folks
like Pauline and others
to provide advice,
an American providing advice
in sub-Saharan Africa,
so I thought I might just share
a couple of quick things that
I can bring back as well.
Having it pointed out the
complicated role that I play
in the new reality.
But I think one of the
things that we talked about
is coalition building,
and I think what I've
seen work and not work
is that you have to have,
you have to be realistic
about what these
coalitions might look like.
Oftentimes we'll go and we'll meet
with civil society leaders
in different countries
and they'll say there's
not enough solidarity
among civil society,
we need more solidarity among the sector.
And I always sort of say, well,
it's good that the sector is diverse,
the whole point of civil society
is that it represents
a variety of interests.
We shouldn't actually
expect all NGOs in a country
to be on the same page
about almost anything,
that's kind of the point of the democracy.
So it's not that we all
have to be on the same page
but what I think really works well,
and I think Suba Churchill is the Chair
of the CSO Reference Group
and I think this is probably
the prime example of this, is
when you have a broad based
but very focused issue based coalition.
So you define your one thing,
but maybe you define it broadly,
so not everybody can do everything,
but the coalition's
around a specific issue.
And I think it's important
given that there are so
many issues out there
I think we are all sort of experiencing
every morning you look at
your phone and it's like,
how do I even decide what
I'm most outraged about.
(audience laughing)
But I think, you know, it's
hard to pick one thing,
but I think many media outlets
have started ignoring tweets,
which I think is probably
healthy for all of us.
But focusing on issues where
there has been actual harm,
and there are plenty,
where people have actually
already started to feel the effects,
laws have already been broken.
There are threats, there are vibes,
there are all sorts of
things that are worrying
but there are also certain
things that have been done
that have created harm.
I think Tor you brought
up the example of folks
running to the airports,
that was this concrete issue
that we saw mobilization around.
And obviously I'm for
fighting white supremacy,
I think marching against
white supremacy is hard,
I think marching against stop and frisk,
litigating against stop
and frisk, is much easier.
So I don't know how helpful that is
but that's just a bit of
reflection from going both ways.
- Thank you.
So we have a request for
a few more questions.
We understand if some
people may need to leave,
we understand, please feel
free to quietly do that
but we're gonna continue
since there is some interest
in more discussion.
- Hi, thanks.
- Hi Sharon.
- [Sharon] I want to do a quick
comment and then a question.
I want to build on the
coalition building discussion
and I think we do have
a great deal to learn
from civil society in very difficult
other situations like
China, where we work.
But I also think that what
I've been thinking about
listening to this conversation
is we can learn a lot
from looking at the
history of this country.
And it was referred briefly,
but I'm thinking specifically
about Paul Robeson and Bill Patterson,
and I'm thinking about the
negro civil rights congress,
which was pre '60s, pre '50s,
in the height of the McCarthy era.
And they built cross-race,
including Chinese immigrant workers.
It was cross-race, it
was cross-economic class,
it included a strategy that
included cultural strategies,
gatherings, with faith communities,
performances, a calendar.
And they were the first to try to petition
for a genocide petition of,
at the time they said the negro people,
that included corporate genocide
of black companies like Dow Chemical.
Evidence-based, case-based,
thousands of cases
that were documented, and they
brought it to the baby Geneva
headquarters then in Paris.
They also had a separate
box going to another city
'cause they thought that
would mysteriously get lost
en route to Geneva, which it did.
But they had the back-up box.
So I think that there's
a lot that got lost
when they were dismantled
piece by piece, painfully,
by the IRS, attacking who
were members, who paid,
who were memberships,
and they just took down
every single state.
So I think we should look back,
'cause it was very inspiring
to see the cross-racial, cross-economic,
and the strategies were amazing.
And it was geographic,
the buses that went down
to the places under attack with
the lynchings and the mass,
those were all cross-racial.
So I want us to recover
that back, 'cause, you know,
and I think that's what happened,
they were successful is
why they were taken down.
So the question is that
we're hearing a lot
from some of our Chinese activist friends,
and also not friends, like
party official outlets saying
this is an example of why
democracy does not work.
We're like exhibit A.
Chaos,
bad things happen, worse bad things.
So I think for like Biraj and Emerson
and those wonderful folks from yesterday,
who gave such great counter-narratives,
I'd love to hear a counter-narrative
to help us think about
democracy will work.
I mean, I hope we're saying that, are we?
- We have one more?
- One more.
- Here.
- It would seem that--
- Over here is a comment.
I have a comment to make.
- Yes, one, and if you
wait just one minute.
- Go ahead.
- Go ahead.
- [Woman] This morning I
believe one of the panelists
mentioned about the Chinese
people who look at the echelon
or the leaders on the top
who send their children
or themselves, their wives
or their mistress to the West
while criticizing their values.
And they kind of laugh at
that because they realize
if it's so bad why are you
sending your loved one there
to study or be part of it.
So it creates indifference.
And I think any part of any system
that create that kind of indifference
and the result will not be that good.
- Thank you.
- [Man] It would seem that we're in a era
of unprecedented information.
So I would think that our
greatest enemy is propaganda.
And when you go and you look
at Twitter in the morning
outside of Ms. Kendzior's feed,
how do you separate the
truth from the theory
from the wishful thinking
from the propaganda.
(audience member applauding)
- So do we have time for a
few minutes of response, or,
yeah, okay, when you're ready.
- I'd like to respond on the
question of the Trump voters
because I covered the campaign
and I interviewed a lot of Trump voters
and I did in different contexts.
I went to rallies and I also
just went to places near me
in Missouri and in southern Illinois
where most people are voting Trump.
Most of the country didn't vote for Trump,
that's the first thing.
Half the country didn't vote,
I think that's very important to remember
as we're attempting to
build these coalitions
and build civil society
is that half the country
was so just tapped out and fed
up that they didn't show up.
And finding out what those
people think and what they want
and how they can be involved is important.
Of the group that voted for Trump
the way that this election was covered
was mostly coastal
media flying into places
like where I live,
finding the absolute craziest
person that they could,
putting them on TV all the
time, screaming build the wall,
and then presenting that
as kind of the archetype
of the Trump voter, and of
course if you're dedicated enough
to go around to rallies, then
yeah, you're a Trump voter,
and a lot of those people
were attracted to Trump
for his worst qualities,
they liked the racism,
they liked the xenophobia,
they liked the hate.
And I think in this situation
it's kind of hate versus hope.
You said they voted for a liar
and a conman and they knew,
from interviewing Trump
voters, they really didn't.
Especially when I would go
to small towns in Missouri
and in southern Illinois,
these Trump voters weren't
all that enthusiastic.
They were kind of like
we've got two losers,
we've got Trump and we've got Hillary
and we have had eight
years of economic misery,
that would be something
where the hope came in,
the sort of blind faith in Trump.
When he would say something like,
the economic statistics are wrong,
we've got 40% unemployment,
and I think a lot of people in
the country laughed at that,
as a Missourian that hit me in the heart,
and I hate this guy and I can't stand him,
but I felt that because that
is exactly how it feels there,
it feels like unemployment is 40%.
And so he was able to do
that and that's part of it.
I think there's also a lot of Trump voters
who just voted for, it
didn't have to do with him,
they were pro-life and that's it,
whoever the pro-life guy is
is who they get on board with.
They were Republican, that's it,
they vote for whoever the Republican is.
I wonder what they're thinking.
The Trump voters that
I've talked to in Missouri
since the election are mad.
One of the most interesting
conversations I've had
was with a guy who absolutely
hated the Ferguson protests,
he just thought they wrong,
he's very pro-police.
And he said, I can't stand
these protests against Trump,
Trump needs to change so
that the protests will stop.
And I was absolutely startled
because that's just the inverse
of every narrative of
protest I ever heard.
And he just said, you
know it's too chaotic,
there's no stability, I voted for this guy
'cause I thought he was
strong and in control
and he can't keep anything in
control, look at the airports.
And I thought, wow, this
is actually working.
I don't think this guy's
gonna go out in the street
and join everybody, but I don't think,
I think if Trump runs again,
this is not someone who
will be voting for him
and I think that you see
this gradual chipping away
at the sort of people who voted for Trump
without a lot of enthusiasm
to begin with in red states.
And that makes me a little hopeful.
He'll always have a core base though
and we just have to admit that
that they like this, they're extremists.
And we've always had
racism, this is not new.
These people just got a
lot of media attention,
we've always had a very racist population
and we should not be building them up,
we should know that they exist,
we should stop giving puff
pieces and profiles to neo-Nazis,
that's a whole nother
subject, you brought up
the propaganda issue,
that's a bit of problem.
I'll tap out now.
- Just a one line response to Sharon.
Sharon, the only answer to bad
democracy is more democracy
and power to all of us
to work that out now.
- [Baher] Thank you.
- Any final thoughts, Tor, Baher?
- Just, Emerson's right as always.
Clear messaging and
objectives are essential
but not the only thing,
and I think you also said
that as well, Emerson.
The Occupy movement was
a good example of that,
very clear messaging, 99-1
inequality, very clear.
But it was a just a solely
protest-driven movement.
There was no coalition building,
there was no direct
outreach to politicians
or allies in the government.
And I think both you
can have a really clear
two number messaging
that everyone understands
but if you don't also build
coalitions as you said,
it's really hard to get
momentum and sustain a movement.
- Yeah, I'd just echo the point about
democracy being a solution,
but embedded in democracy,
fixing democracy,
is making sure that the democratic rules
are not stacked against us
and that requires a very serious response
in the next two to four years
given the desire to stack the rules.
And I think I just want to underscore,
I agree the point about
coalition building is really
important and I think,
I'm not an organizer,
but I think a lot of
the civil society space
recognizes that, I mean
the story about the,
one story I've heard
about the Women's March
is that it was initially identified
to focus around reproductive rights,
and they brought organizers,
including organizers of color
who wanted to broaden the
scope of the coalition
and surface many other issues.
And I think that's very much
on the minds of organizers.
And finally I think,
I think it's right that,
I mean one way we may be
able to move some people
who otherwise support
some of Trump's policies
in the abstract is, to someone said,
focus on real harm to real people.
And stories.
The ways in which these policies
are damaging real individuals,
and so obviously storytelling
is enormously important
and itself a kind of ballast
against authoritarianism.
- On that note, I think
we're gonna wrap up.
I just want to say thank you to our panel,
but also thank you to all of the panelists
over the last two days
and to our organizers,
thank you to all of you who
have been to these events.
And I hope this is the beginning,
or the continuation of more collaboration
among all of our groups.
And Sukti, do you want to
say what's happening next?
- [Sukti] For anyone
who wants to stay around
we will be able to have this
room for another hour or so.
So there'll be coffee and
cookies if you want to talk,
continue the dialogue.
Otherwise thank you so
much for being here.
I don't know why I'm not
talking into the microphone.
(audience laughing)
Hello, as I said, so we have this room
for about another hour, clearly
it's the end of the day.
If you want to stick around
and continue the conversation
you're more than welcome
but more than anything thank you so much
for being such a fantastic audience
and being so engaged in the last few days.
It's really been an honor to
share this space with you.
Thank you.
- Thank you.
(audience applauding)
