Tag Archives social justice movements

EADI ISS Conference 2021 | How social accountability initiatives are helping pursue social justice aims

Achieving social justice in service delivery in the health, social welfare, and humanitarian sectors is still a formidable challenge in most developing countries. Poor and marginalised people generally lack the voice to make their demands heard and the awareness to claim their rights. However, social accountability initiatives have become a promising way to address these issues, as a panel discussion at the recent EADI ISS Conference showed. In this article, Elsbet Lodenstein and Sylvia Bergh highlight the key insights that emerged during the discussion, which focused on issues related to ensuring substantive citizenship and legitimacy and the role of interlocutors, donors, and of researchers themselves in helping pursue social justice through such initiatives. 

Traditional ‘democratic’ accountability mechanisms such as elections are failing citizens. In response, citizens have set up a range of initiatives called social accountability initiatives to demand the respect of civic, political, and social rights and improved public service delivery in their interest. Such social accountability initiatives are targeted at holding the state and service providers accountable and are – under certain conditions – proving rather effective. What can we learn from these initiatives?

A lively panel discussion that took place at the recent ISS EADI 2021 Conference showed that such initiatives can help pursue to social justice in a number of ways, contributing for example to equitable participation or greater respect for diversity. Participants in the panel session considered how these could be supportive to the transformation of power relations between marginalised groups and the state or other duty-bearers such as humanitarian agencies.

Convened by Elsbet Lodenstein (KIT Royal Tropical Institute) and Sylvia I. Bergh (ISS and Centre of Expertise on Global Governance at The Hague University of Applied Sciences), the panel reviewed experiences from the humanitarian, health, and sexual and reproductive health and rights sectors in several countries where participating researchers conducted case studies. The following social accountability initiatives were discussed during the panel session:

  • K. Sandhya (SAHAYOG) described how NGOs, CBOs, and grassroots organisations of poor and marginalised women in Uttar Pradesh in India jointly demanded accountability from Hospital Management Committees who are responsible for ensuring patient welfare and quality of care.
  • Another initiative in India was presented by Jashodhara Dasgupta (independent researcher), who analysed the trajectory of the transgender community’s claims for state recognition and access to the benefits of the welfare state.
  • Afeez Lawal (University of South Africa) shared insights on the role of health committees in the oversight of a Community-Based Health Insurance programme in Nigeria.
  • Seye Abimbola (University of Sydney, Australia; National Primary Health Care Development Agency, Abuja, Nigeria, and current Prins Claus Chair) explored how health committee members in Nigeria perceive their role in social accountability and how these perceptions shape their motivations to demand accountability for the underperformance of health service providers and policymakers.
  • A research team led by Thea Hilhorst (ISS) explored the social accountability mechanisms in place in the humanitarian sector in Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Myanmar. Mechanisms include feedback channels on programme delivery, community-based indicator setting activities, and complaint mechanisms.

Some key takeaways

What can we learn from the case studies about the potential of social accountability to contribute to social justice? The key takeaways of the panel discussion are summarised here:

  1. Ensuring the ‘right to have rights’ is a crucial first step in enacting change.

Many social accountability initiatives are based on the assumption that citizens are able and willing to express their voice in the face of injustice regardless of their gender, age, class, sexuality, or education and regardless of their experiences with and position vis-à-vis the state. Yet many citizens are discriminated against, whereby intersecting identities can influence the way in which citizens engage with the state and the way in which they participate in social accountability initiatives.

For example, Jashodhara Dasgupta noted how the recent Indian law on transgender persons makes no provision for ensuring gender non-conforming individuals’ access to public goods and denies them adequate protection from violence and discrimination. This makes it challenging for these groups to develop the confidence to demand accountability and take collective action.

Donors and funders in conflict settings may also need to be more aware of how different social markers may constrain the possibilities for exercising voice. Thea Hilhorst for example highlighted how internally displaced people, and within that group, minority groups, such as the Rohingya in Myanmar, cannot be reached by formal accountability initiatives.

Jashodhara Dasgupta and Y.K. Sandhya suggested that for marginalised groups, their own realisation that they are rights holders, i.e. having ‘the right to have rights’, needs to become a primary focus of social accountability initiatives. Attention could be drawn to this by strengthening the political capabilities and negotiation skills of marginalised groups to articulate and voice demands. Doing so means moving beyond just improving service delivery or effectiveness of humanitarian interventions to strengthening the agency of citizens in a way that can help further equitable participation towards changing the norms of engagement that challenges power relations.

  1. Your understanding of your role in society may influence how engaged you are in pursuing social justice.

Research plays a significant role in unpacking the assumptions about agency, motivations, and capabilities of intermediary organisations such as health committees or community governance boards in voicing demands on behalf of citizens. Afeez Lawal talked about how health committees in Nigeria have helped improve dialogue between health service providers and users. For example, they facilitated joint monitoring with traditional leaders, enrolees, and health providers to demand programme managers to address drug stock-outs and preferential treatment of non-enrolees. But, he noted, their ability to influence larger political agendas remains limited.

Seye Abimbola confirmed this based on his own research in Nigeria. He found that the perceptions of health committee members of their roles influence their level of engagement in social justice agendas. For example, they could consider themselves either representatives of the health sector aiming to improve the uptake of services and/or advocates for communities and patients. In general, though, the way in which health committees are created and trained tends to limit committee members’ sense of legitimacy to challenge governments and service providers, thus giving them a marginal role in fostering social accountability.

  1. Identifying interlocutors can help citizens act strategically.

Interlocutors or agents that catalyse change were considered crucial by many of the discussants. These individuals or associations are allies of citizens that share a common goal in helping to address injustices. They may have resources or networks that make it possible for them to connect individuals or groups to each other or to find ways to communicate with government officials, whether formally or informally. Often, as Seye Abimbola suggested, these may be the local elite who have the resources to bear the costs of participation and who have the connections to make a difference.

The identification of interlocutors who speak for marginalised groups requires longer-term and in-depth participatory research such as that conducted by Y.K. Sandhya and her team in India. Interlocutors might be individuals who act on behalf of citizens in their individual capacity; an example is a clerk of a health facility with whom the NGO informally built relation of trust and who pushed for internal reforms to intensify community-based monitoring.

Interlocutors might also be members of grassroots organisations – Sandhya noted that legitimate and established community-based organisations, such as the grassroots association of marginalised women in India, are able to navigate institutions, identify opportunities for legal and policy change and identify opportunities for support by influential actors who want to reverse situations of marginalisation and poor accountability. Other organisations with fewer resources might struggle more with this. It’s therefore crucial to find individuals who know how to navigate the institutional landscape and who hold power to facilitate dialogue or strategic action.

  1. Long-term support building on community initiatives is needed.

Social accountability initiatives need intensive, long-term support from funders in the humanitarian and development sectors. Sylvia Bergh flagged the danger of technocratisation of social accountability initiatives by donors, who often frame them as a technical and neutral process that leaves political struggle aside. If more initiatives would build on existing solidarity groups and indigenous forms of collective action and get support from these groups, the chance of enacting meaningful change could be much greater.

  1. Questioning own assumptions can help academics do better research.

The panel was concluded with an observation by Elsbet Lodenstein that (operational) research is required to break down assumptions about the voice, behaviour, and agency of citizens, civil society, and institutions and to understand how context influence these. Too often, external interventions in humanitarian and development sectors are based on problematic assumptions about how and why citizens act for change, or how and why governmental actors and other duty-bearers react to social accountability initiatives. Researchers can support the development of grounded, contextualised and ‘smart’ approaches to social accountability in terms of whom to engage, where to push the needle, and how to leverage existing forms of collective action by adopting methods of longer-term (participatory) research and in-depth analysis.


With thanks to Francesco Colin for the notes taken during the panel session.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Dr Elsbet Lodenstein is a senior gender and governance advisor at the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) with 18 years of experience in international development. She has a keen interest in integrating a social science and gender perspective into development programming and research and specialises in community engagement and the governance of local health systems, citizenship and the empowerment of marginalized groups, including women and girls. She is skilled in gender and intersectional analysis, gender integration, monitoring and evaluation, learning and knowledge management, policy review, evidence synthesis, and research capacity building.

Sylvia BerghSylvia I. Bergh (a Swedish national) is a Senior Researcher at the Centre of Expertise on Global Governance at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, as well as Associate Professor in Development Management and Governance at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam. Sylvia has a keen interest in multi-level governance issues, and has published widely on state-society relations in the Middle East and North Africa region.  She currently leads a research project that studies the effects of heatwaves on vulnerable populations in The Hague.

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The noise never stops: life in Palestine during the Israeli occupation – a conversation with Rana Shubair

The noise never stops. The sky is filled with the buzzing of drones, echoing on and on, and with the sound of buildings collapsing as they are bombed. It’s not safe anywhere. There’s nowhere to flee to. And amidst a crumbling country and the chaos that is life in Palestine, people are trying to keep themselves upright. Rana Shubair in this article talks about life under the Israeli occupation and how parents have to stay strong as they watch their children face the hardships the occupation and grow up before their eyes.

A woman holds a Palestinian flag during a protest demanding the right to return to their homeland, at the Israel-Gaza border fence in Gaza October 19, 2018 [File: Mohammed Salem/Reuters] Credits: Al Jazeera, available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/3/30/how-the-great-march-of-return-resurrected-palestinian-resistance

Since the 1948 Nakba, Palestinians have been resisting colonial aggression from Israel at the cost of risking their lives. Over the past decades, the intensity of violence by Israel appears to have been rapidly increasing. The Israeli aerial bombardment of Palestine, especially of Gaza, has claimed many lives of innocent Palestinians. For example, the 2008-09 air attacks and ground invasion by Israel led to at least 1,100 Palestinian deaths. The 2014 air attack and ground invasion resulted in the killing of 2,100 Palestinian civilians in Gaza. And the aerial, sea and land bombardment that happened weeks ago ended in the killing of 254 persons in Gaza, including 39 women and 66 children.

These numbers are important for revealing the extent of violence and brutality on Palestinians by Israeli occupation, but it should not diminish other aspects of the daily struggle of those Palestinians who live under siege and occupation of Israeli forces. Apart from these killings and air attacks, Palestinians resist, struggle against, and experience everyday aggression, restrictions, and sanctions that affect their economy, wellbeing, health, and every other aspect of their life. The most vulnerable among them are children and women. This piece thus focuses on the life and struggles in Gaza and learns from the lens and perspective of a Palestinian woman, Rana Shubair, whom I interviewed about her lived experiences of the conflict and life in Gaza.

Rana Shubair is a survivor of latest aggression of 2021 in the Gaza Strip. She is an activist, mother of three, and author of two books. Her first book ‘In Gaza I Dare to Dream’ recounts details of her own life under the Israeli Occupation and the Gaza Siege. She presents Gaza as “a land where joy and grief are entwined, yet its people dare to dream, dare to love and struggle to gain their basic human rights”. Her second book, ‘My Lover Is A Freedom Fighter’, is a historical fiction that reflects about romance in Palestine while living under occupation.

While her narrative and personal experiences are heartfelt and reflect the hardship of Palestinians in present, in this interview she also reveals how Palestinians express their agency and determine their resilience and their power of resistance. You can listen to the entire interview (in English) at Global Development Review Podcast or watch it here. A shortened version of the interview follows.

Jaffer: How do you experience of being mother in Gaza at present, and what does it mean to be a mother in Gaza?

Rana: A mother in Gaza is a hero. We are stereotyped in the Western world as having domestic roles, but this is not the case. Mothers, wives, daughters, sisters – they all have a critical role in the Palestinian society and Palestinian resistance. So when I first had my children, I had hoped that by the time they grew up, this occupation would have ended. But I found myself confronted with new realities and much harsher ones. I grew up under occupation, but it wasn’t as brutal as the occupation my kids and their generation are witnessing. Because there was no aerial bombardment at that time.

So as my children grew up, they started asking me questions that sometimes I couldn’t find answers to.

One of my most famous entries I wrote in my book is when my two daughters were arguing with each other. One was saying, “we live in Gaza” and other was saying, “no we don’t live in Gaza, we live in Palestine”. I overheard it and my heart was broken because my own kids who live in their own country don’t know where they are located. They think that Palestine is a foreign land. They learn about Palestinian cities in their schools. But they have never seen those cities and were never allowed to go and visit their own country. So there was this dilemma that if we are living in Gaza, if we are living in Palestine, how come we can’t see it? As a mother I have come across situations where I can’t explain to them why we can’t go there.

This was one issue. Another issue that they were faced with the issue of Palestinian prisoners. One day my son came and wanted to make a poster that teachers often ask children to do for extra credit. When he came back, he brought a poster that was about a girl Wafa who was recently released from Israeli prison. And my son asked me innocently why she went prison. So I had to explain why they were in prison.

When we are walking down on the street, we see pictures of martyrs that are pasted on the walls. And they would ask you who these people were. Then you would have to say them that they are martyrs and explain what a martyr is. So one day my son came home and said, ‘mom I wanna go and see the hole where they put the martyrs in’. I was really shocked, because I don’t know where he got the information from.

For me, you can’t prevent your children from going outside. And this is something that is very painful for us as parents and as mothers. They don’t go through the normal phases of childhood that other children go through. They can tell you what kind of warplane is flying over them or what kind of rocket or missile is being launched. So as a Palestinian parent, you have to be strong, you have to be resilient, and you have no choice. It’s a heavy burden that we shoulder.

Jaffer: When people’s houses are destroyed, where do they go?

Rana:  Those whose houses are targeted – the one that were recently targeted – were not as lucky as those who were prewarned. People living in the tall towers were warned. They could flee from their homes, some of them going to nearby relatives and some of them going to UNRWA schools (United Nations Relief and Work Agency Schools). And I believe that many of them took refuge in UNRWA schools because it is presumably safer, as it was assumed that Israel would not target a UN school. But in 2008 and 2014, Israel did target schools and they killed people who took refuge there. There is no safe place. If I want to leave my home and go to another home, it doesn’t mean that I am going to a safer place. Because what happened to two families that I know is that one of the women went to her parents’ house and she was killed there. So it’s like another displacement in the Gaza Strip and these people really have nowhere to go.

I would like to say that ordinary Palestinian life here is not ordinary. Israeli drones don’t leave our skies. And these drones are the surveillance drones, but they can also shoot and kill. So it’s not safe. So you think that it’s a surveillance drone, but a few years ago children were playing at the nearby park and they were killed and targeted by the drone on the spot. So by day and night, you can’t ignore the noise; you can’t pretend that it’s not there. I can’t really pretend that nothing is going to happen. So life here is very unstable and unpredictable.

Jaffer: As an international community, how can we support Palestine or how can we stand in solidarity with the Palestinians?

Rana: What I see is that the media outlets in the Western world is that they block the Palestinian narrative or twist the facts. So number one, I think we need to promote awareness about the Palestinian cause, no matter how small your role is. For me, connecting through this kind of online webinar or meeting between you and I is one way in which to do so.

In the recent attacks on Gaza, I have seen dozen of protests across the world, such as in America, in Britain, and even in Arab countries. They were people who responded to the protests and they are people who still protest to this day. And this is something that is very crucial. I think we have to keep making noise. Tell your government to keep making noise and keep being vocal about what the Palestinians are going through.


This article comes as a collaboration between Jaffer Latief Najar and Rana Shubair with an aim to spread awareness about the life and struggles in Palestine, especially Gaza. The collaboration was in the form of interview with Rana Shubair.

Opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the ISS or members of the Bliss team.

About the author:

Jaffer latief Najar is a PhD researcher at International Institute of Social Studies, and Rana Shubair is a Palestinian survivor, activist and author of two books.

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Tearing down the walls that colonise Palestine, a thousand bricks at a time

Palestinians are showing enormous bravery during this moment of horror. The walls of intimidation and despair that Israel has erected in the minds of Palestinians to prevent resistance are being torn down. Now that everyone has seen that Palestinians will no longer be silent , we need the rest of the world to respond with corresponding acts of courage and support, tearing down the wall of silence, inaction and complicity so Palestinians can finally enjoy freedom, justice and equality.

A man waves the Palestinian flag for Eid al-Fitr prayers at the Dome of the Rock Mosque in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem, Thursday, May 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

Yesterday, without prior warning, a close relative of mine, 84, experienced an eruption of long-suppressed memories of his traumatic childhood during the 1948 Nakba and was overcome by mixed feelings of ominous fear and liberating hope. While unbearable, the images of the latest massacre of Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip did not bring him to this emotional tipping point, nor did the images of the brutal repression of worshippers in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound or the relentless forcible displacement of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah and around occupied East Jerusalem.

What did was the view, from his little balcony in Akka (Acre), of young Palestinians struggling to fend off a mob of far-right Jewish Israelis roaming the streets, chanting “death to Arabs”, and hunting Palestinians to lynch. The same thing happened to indigenous Palestinian communities in Lydda, Jaffa, Ramleh, Haifa, Bat Yam and in other places, triggering calls for international protection.

As my relative looked on, memories of his beloved Haifa in 1948 gushed through his mind – of Zionist militias aided by British soldiers literally chasing Palestinians at gunpoint to the sea. Of the makeshift raft his family had to board, heading to Lebanon ‘for safety’. Of his father’s wise decision to disembark in Acre instead.

Yet, even as these memories filled his mind – memories of existential fear and the trauma of vulnerability – they shared space with a new and inexplicable hope. “My generation lost Palestine,” he said. He then continued with a defiant inflection and a smile: “But this new generation is courageous, resilient, determined to resist and to overcome 73 years of our ongoing Nakba. All they… I mean, all we need is some, just some, more courage from the world.”

Cracks in the walls that colonise the mind

It is not naïveté or fatalism that gives hope to my elder relative or the Palestine diaspora. It is the fact that the dual walls that Israel has so systematically erected over decades – the walls it is truly trying to ‘guard’ – are showing some serious cracks, if not beginning to topple. The first of these walls is Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s ‘iron wall’ of despair that has colonised Palestinian minds. The second, just as inhibiting and debilitating, is the wall of intimidation that inhibits many people of influence worldwide from speaking out for Palestinian rights.

In 1923, Jabotinsky, a prominent Zionist leader, theorised the necessity of the first wall: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized…. Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.” He recommended an ‘iron wall’ to overpower the native Arab Palestinian population, partly by colonising our minds through instilling a sense of hopelessness and making us internalise a sense of inferiority, as Frantz Fanon puts it. Decades later, and backed by the United States and the European Union, Israel had built concrete walls and employed its Dahiya Doctrine (a doctrine of extreme, ‘disproportionate’ violence targeting Palestinian – and Lebanese – civilians and civilian infrastructure) precisely to sear into our collective consciousness the futility of resisting its colonial hegemony.

As for the other wall, Israel and its lobby groups have invested massive resources in building it in the minds of opinion-shapers globally, especially in the West, making the price of dissence, of defending Palestinian rights, ruthlessly painful to one’s career, reputation, and even mental health. Analysing this wall, Edward Said explained how ‘avoidance’ and “fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history [Palestine] has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it.”

Cracks in both walls have started to widen under pressure from fearless Palestinian popular resistance across historic Palestine and the corresponding courage that Hollywood celebrities, prominent musicians, star athletes, and millions of activists worldwide are displaying in standing up against the injustice. The bravery of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah defending their homes against forcible displacement is among the factors inspiring tens of thousands of other Palestinians to participate in acts of civil disobedience. The same Palestinian bravery was visible in the thousands who defended the occupied Old City of Jerusalem against a ‘pogrom’ by Israeli ‘Jewish fascists’ – a pogrom, moreover, encouraged by government officials expressing “racist, even genocidal animus towards Palestinians” – as the progressive Jewish American group If Not Now described it.

This bravery has inspired an outpouring of support across new and vital parts of the US landscape. Expressing a growing sentiment in the US Congress, and connecting military funding to Israel with social and justice struggles at home, representative Cori Bush said, “The fight for Black lives and the fight for Palestinian liberation are interconnected. We oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation, and systems of violent oppression and trauma… we are anti-apartheid. Period.” Susan Sarandon tweeted, “What’s happening in Palestine is settler-colonialism, military occupation, land theft and ethnic cleansing.” Halsey wrote, “It is not ‘too complicated to understand’ that brown children are being murdered + people are being displaced under the occupation of one of the most powerful armies in the world.” Viola DavisMark RuffaloNatalie Portman, and many others expressed solidarity with Palestinians.

These cracks, which shatter much of the silence that Palestinians have often witnessed, reflect the cumulative, creative, and strategic efforts exerted over years by Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) and other Palestine solidarity campaigners around the world, including those by progressive Jewish groups. A 2018 US poll for instance shows that 40 percent of Americans (56 percent of Democrats) support imposing sanctions or more serious measures on Israel to stop its occupation.

A particularly important source of Palestinian hope is the growing impact of the Palestinian-led nonviolent BDS movement, which aims to end Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid and defends the right of Palestinian refugees to return home. Sovereign funds in NorwayLuxembourg, the NetherlandsNew Zealand, and elsewhere have divested from Israeli or international companies, and banks that are implicated in Israel’s occupation. Mainstream churches in South Africa have endorsed BDS, while major churches in the United States, including the Presbyterian Church and the United Methodist Church, have divested from complicit US companies and/or Israeli banks. The city of Dublin in 2018 became the first European capital to adopt BDS, while tens of other cities and hundreds of cultural institutions and public spaces across Europe have declared themselves Israeli Apartheid Free Zones. BDS has won the endorsement of major international trade union federations in South AfricaLatin America, India, Europe, Canada, and the United States. Thousands of artists, academics, and hundreds of student governments, LGBTQI+ groups, and social justice movements across the world have also endorsed BDS accountability measures.

The main contribution of the BDS movement to Palestinian liberation, however, is its role in decolonising Palestinian minds from deep-seated powerlessness, and in leading a radical praxis of globalised, intersectional resistance, transformation, and emancipation.

Today, more than ever, Palestinians are telling the world that true solidarity with our struggle for freedom, justice, and equality spells out BDS. We are shattering our wall of fear every day, and we need not just “some more courage”, as my relative from Acre said, but an eruption of meaningful solidarity that ends all complicity in Israel’s oppression.


This article was edited by Lize Swartz. The original appeared here.

Opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the ISS or members of the Bliss team.

About the author:

Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights defender and cofounder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, former ISS Visiting Research Fellow. He is corecipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award.

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#SOSColombia: A call for international solidarity against the brutal repression of protestors in Colombia

The recent surge in violence against Colombian citizens has led to thousands of reports of police brutality in a matter of days as the state cracked down on protesters taking to the streets starting 28 April. This has prompted a global outcry and pressure from international organisations and several countries on the Colombian government to end the violence so that the human rights of the protesters remain guaranteed. In this article, Ana María Arbelaéz Trujillo and Diego Hernández Morales present a brief overview of the situation and propose some ways in which the general public can get involved in raising awareness about the events and what they mean.

Photo: Fabio Tejedor

Over the past weeks, Colombians have been witnessing the brutal repression of their legitimate right to protest. According to reports by non-governmental actors, between 28 April and 9 May, at least 1,876 cases of police brutality had been recorded. This includes 39 deaths (34 caused by the use of firearms)[1], 963 arbitrary detentions, 278 instances of physical violence, 12 acts of sexual violence, and the disappearance of at least 500 protestors. The severity of the situation has led the United Nations, the European Union, Amnesty International, and several other international organisations to express their concern about the situation and remind the Colombian government that in any democracy, the state must protect the human rights of protesters and the public assembly of its people, not prevent and purposefully undermine it. The crackdown was particularly severe because of its swiftness – the police managed to threaten or cause harm to thousands of people in a matter of days.

Why were people protesting?

The spark that ignited the fire was a tax reform. The government upon initiating a tax reform argued that the new package of taxes was necessary to fund social policies to protect vulnerable people. However, the proposal included new taxes on essential goods which would had put additional pressure on the working and middle classes[2] who were already struggling to cope with the economic impacts of the pandemic.

Last year, the living conditions of the population, who already lived precarious lives before COVID-19 swept across the globe, worsened as the pandemic raged on. Colombia is the second most unequal country of South America, with a GINI coefficient of 0.53. In the last year, the monetary poverty rate increased from 37.5% to 42.3%, and 21 million people now live on less than USD 2 per day. Additionally, the unemployment rate for March 2021 was 14.2% and informal workers remain disproportionately affected by the restrictions imposed during the pandemic.

To oppose the tax reform and overall decreases in welfare, the National Strike Committee called for a national strike on 28 April. This call was supported by trade unions, indigenous groups, students, and social organisations that also protested against the persistent killing of social leaders and new proposals to reform Colombia’s health and pension schemes. Thus, what started with a tax reform ended in a massive protest about both old and new problems that led to thousands of people taking to the streets.

Following widespread popular discontent, the proposal was retired, and the Minister of Finance resigned. However, after several days of protests, people continue to protest, in part due to the outrage caused by the state’s violent response to the protest and the persistence of the additional reasons that motivated the national strike.

Why is the Colombian case different?

The introduction of new or higher taxes has led to discontent and triggered protests everywhere. But these changes need to be put into context in order to understand their significance. Social protest has historically been criminalised  in Colombia. The dominant discourse of the political and economic elites of the country is that protesters are violent and associated with illegal groups. This narrative is harmful for democracy and puts at risk the life and health of peaceful protestors.

Recently, former president Alvaro Uribe used his Twitter account to delegitimise the national strike and encourage the use of deadly force against protestors:

Let’s support the right of soldiers and police to use their firearms to defend their integrity and to defend people and property from criminal acts of terrorist vandalism.”

Twitter deleted this tweet due to the violation of its rules – a welcome step.  The former president is also using the controversial concept of a ‘dissipated molecular revolution’ to discredit the demonstrations. According to this theory, social protests, even when peaceful, are deemed crimes against state institutions; protestors accordingly must be treated as internal enemies.

The spread of this hate speech, which defines protestors as military objectives, is especially problematic in a country with a long history of armed conflict where the military forces have been involved in several human rights violations against civilians, such as the ‘false positive scandals’. The violent oppression of protesters thus serves as a stark reminder of the power of the Colombian state and how the signing of the peace agreement may not be a guarantee for peace or political reforms.

Moreover, such rhetoric is especially dangerous in a country in which social leaders are routinely murdered with impunity. The ‘Front Line Defenders Global Analysis 2020’ reported that in 2020, half of social leaders killed in the world were assassinated in Colombia. According to Indepaz,[3] between the signing of the peace agreement in November 2016 and December 2020, 1,088 social leaders have been killed. The stigmatisation of social leaders and human rights defenders increases their level of risk, preventing the social transformation that Colombia needs. It is thus in light of this that the protests and state retaliation should be understood.

How can the international community contribute?

The solidarity of the international community is key for placing pressure on the Colombian government to stop using violence against protesters and to prevent impunity. Raising awareness through sharing this or other articles is a key starting point in getting the message out there. There are multiple ways in which you could contribute:

  • By promoting the creation of a public statement of solidarity at the organisation where you work
  • By sending a message to your government asking them to urge the Colombian state to respect the rights of protesters
  • By signing this petition from citizens worldwide addressed to OAS, OEA, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and President Joe Biden to conduct a thorough investigation of the human rights violations during the recent protest in Colombia
  • By signing this Open Letter to the Colombian Government and the International Community from professionals of public international law
  • By signing this letter from Colombian academics and students calling for an inclusive dialogue to end the recent violence in Colombia
  • By donating to independent organisations reporting the current situation such as Temblores, Cuestión Pública and Mutante 
  • By simply following reliable sources of news and sharing the information with the hashtag #SOSColombia on social media.

Footnotes

[1] According to Temblores and Indepaz, 47 people have been killed since 28 April 2021. Of these cases of homicidal violence, it has been possible to determine that 39 of them were due to police violence.

[2] Among the most controversial points were extending the income tax to people earning more than 684 USD per month, charging VAT tax on public and funerary services, and eliminating tax exemptions on essential goods and products such as eggs, milk, tampons, sanitary towels, and menstrual cups.

[3] Founded in 1984, INDEPAZ is part of the national network of peacebuilding organisations in Colombia. Its work is focused on researching and spreading information about the conflict, and it contributes to the peace process through the promotion of dialogue and non-violence.

Opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the ISS or members of the Bliss team.

About the authors:

Ana María Arbeláez Trujillo

Ana María Arbeláez Trujillo is a lawyer, specialist in Environmental Law, and holds an Erasmus Mundus Master in Public Policy. She works as an environmental consultant on climate change policies and forest governance. Her research interests include the political economy of extractivist industries, environmental conflicts, and rural development.

Diego Hernández Morales is a Colombian lawyer with 25 years of experience in various fields.  In Colombia, he was a professor of Democracy Theory at the Universidad Libre of Bogotá, and a professor of Politics and International Relations at the Universidad Santo Tomás.  He has a Master’s degree in Development Studies from the ISS, conducting a research paper on the media representation in the Netherlands of the Colombian conflict.  At this moment he is in the process of publishing a book on his testimonies and his appreciations related to the events in Colombia in the last half-century.

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Resistance and persecution: fighting the politics of control by Salena Tramel

Social justice movements from around the world are pushing back against a shift toward nationalism, extraction and environmental destruction. Those who resist increasingly do so at risk of great personal harm, arrest and indefinite jailing as political prisoners, or the criminalisation of their movements as a whole. Even so, the resistance not only remains steadfast, but is also steadily gaining strength.


Introduction

The rise of destructive and reactionary political power impacts people and ecosystems across many global settings. These shifts in control, characterised by a resurgence of racist and nationalistic rhetoric and policies, a redoubling of environmental exploitation and even climate change denial, and a renewed expansion into and pillaging of indigenous territory, represent urgent challenges for social movements and activists. Although these contemporary pressing issues have some distinctive new features, they are rooted in past forms of injustice, whether that be borrowing from the colonial playbook or amplifying the privatisation schemes of the more recent neoliberalism, such as free trade and deregulation.

At the same time, these are precisely the dynamics that cultivate resistance. Social justice movements from around the world are pushing back against this shift toward nationalism, extraction and environmental destruction. Those who resist increasingly do so at risk of great personal harm, arrest and indefinite jailing as political prisoners, or the criminalisation of their movements as a whole. Even so, the resistance not only remains steadfast, but is also gaining strength, in places as diverse as Brazil, Honduras, and Palestine—countries featuring violent, conservative, reactionary and acquisitive governments.

Power grabs in Brazil

Gaining political control starts with power grabbing—a concept to which the sprawling country of Brazil is no stranger. Power grabbing in the form of smashing intricate peasant leagues occurred during the military dictatorship, and it continues to this day. Most recently, the parliamentary coup that ousted a democratically elected president and relegated authority to an unelected and corrupt right wing was the ultimate seizure of power.

Under such corruption and disregard for democratic processes, social movements suffer even more intense criminalisation. This has often included the pre-emptive imprisonment and even assassination of peasant and indigenous leaders, most notably those connected to the Landless Workers Movement (MST) that is arguably the largest and most important state-level peoples’ movement in the Americas.

Nearly twenty-two years ago in April 1996, 19 activists from the MST were killed by the Brazilian military police in what would come to be known as the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre. Now, more than two decades after the massacre, the Brazilian government tends to treat activism—especially that which takes place in the countryside—as a criminal activity. Mining in Brazil, much like logging, is strongly opposed by peasant and indigenous movements as one of the greatest threats to the world’s largest rainforest while championed by the powerful nexus of state, business, and lobbies.

These massive power grabs contextualised within a definitive push for right-wing exclusionary populism have spelled trouble for seekers of social justice. The MST as a whole is increasingly criminalised and its members imprisoned. This is due in large part to the peasant movement’s relentless efforts towards agrarian reform, for which its activists can be arrested without evidence.

Resource grabs in Honduras

Power grabbing is indeed oftentimes connected to resource grabbing, yet another piece of the overall political dynamics of control. Although resource grabbing, in the form of taking away peoples’ rights to water and land, have been fixtures of injustice for centuries, this phenomenon has recently taken new shapes under globalisation. More specifically, powerful states and their militaries tend to prey on the weak points of former colonies for their own financial and political gains. As the case of Honduras warns us, when intertwined with power grabs, resource grabs become even more deadly—especially for those who resist.

Honduras, however, has vast alliances—peasant, environmental, feminist, LGBTQ, indigenous, Garífuna (Afro-indigenous), and labour struggles that engage in multiple forms of resistance, from land occupations to human rights documentation to interfacing with the state. The criminalisation of these movements and imprisonment of activists is routine.

In Garífuna communities along Central America’s Caribbean coast, the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) has been at the forefront of resistance to what has become an attack on their ancestral resources and cultural identity from all sides: sea, water, land, and forest. OFRANEH uses organizing tactics from community radio broadcasts to land occupations, all of which the government has noted and responded to with violence. The group’s leaders face threats or instances of imprisonment on falsified charges on a daily basis. OFRANEH’s vice president Alfredo López spent six years in prison before finally being released for ‘lack of evidence’ and intense international pressure in 2015.

Control grabs in Palestine

In Palestine, power grabs and resource grabs have resulted in the ultimate manifestation of enclosure—control grabbing. First by British Empire, and then by Israeli occupation, Palestinians have been continually squeezed out of their homeland, and those who remain are subject to various forms of violence and discrimination.

The current hard-line political climate in Israel has increased the Israeli government’s stronghold on Palestinian lands. This amounts to territorial restructuring in the forms of illegal settlement expansion and transfer of Israeli citizens into occupied Palestinian territory, in the case of the West Bank, and increasing restricted access zones and militarised attacks, in the case of the Gaza Strip. These and other forms of control perpetrated by the Israeli occupation are likewise made possible and maintained through outside military and financial support.

Palestinian human rights defenders and social movements pose one of the biggest threats to maintaining and proliferating the occupation, a fact that has not been lost on the Israeli government. The result has been a trend of mass incarceration, including administrative detention, where people are held in prison for months or even years without charge or trial, supposedly because of ‘secret evidence.’ The Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association in Palestine, Addameer found that as of July 2017, 449 Palestinians were being held without trial or even charge.

One such political prisoner held without charge is Abdul-Razeq Farraj, a leader in the Union of Agricultural Works Committees (UAWC). Farraj has spent more than 16 combined years in Israeli prisons, most of them under administrative detention. Most recently, he was wrested from his home and family at midnight on May 24, 2017, and has been held without cause ever since. Abdul-Razeq’s work with UAWC has been focused on improving the lives of Palestinian farmers, whose suffering is in large part due to confiscation of land and water resources and repression under Israeli occupation.

Grabbing back

The struggles in Brazil, Honduras, and Palestine are indicative of politics of control—and resistance—that are happening all over the world. In Brazil, the coup government has chosen corporate-driven economic growth, privatisation, and corrupt politics through power grabbing rather than respect for democratic processes and the well-being of its low-income populations, particularly peasants and indigenous peoples. Honduras, a fragile state in the wake of a coup, bears the scars of external influence, and these wounds are most pronounced in the form of unchecked natural resource grabbing.

And in occupied Palestine, one of the world’s few remaining colonial projects continues with no end in sight; in the absence of statehood or any meaningful form of political sovereignty, the Israeli occupation has become the extreme expression of control grabbing. In each of these cases, oppressive states and business interests use a variety of tools of repression, from criminalisation and the creation of political prisoners, to physical threats and assassinations.

Winning back sovereignty and achieving justice are the political tasks at hand in these and other cases around the world, and ones that movements and activists take seriously—no matter how high the stakes. From Brazilian mass movement building to pinpoint alternatives and retain the countryside, to Honduran reclamation of natural resources through food sovereignty, agroecology, and climate justice, to relentless Palestinian efforts of upholding international law and defending human rights, people are challenging destructive political orders. Doing so is a collective act of resilience and resistance, ‘grabbing back’ in order to move forward in uncertain times.

What you can do

Grassroots International, a U.S.-based non-profit, supports small farmers and producers, Indigenous Peoples and women working around the world to win resource rights: the human rights to land, water and food. Grassroots works through grant-making, education, and advocacy. The Landless Workers Movement (MST), Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), and Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) are among its global network of partners.


The unabridged article originally appeared in Huffington Post and can be read here


picture_2Salena Tramel is a PhD researcher at the ISS, where her work is centered on the intersections of resource grabs and climate change mitigation, and the intertwining of (trans)national agrarian/social justice movements. In addition to her research at ISS, Salena draws on her global experience with social movements and grassroots organisations to inform her work as a policy and communications consultant and freelance journalist. Prior to joining the academic community at ISS, Salena served as the program coordinator for the Middle East and Haiti at Grassroots International, where she oversaw two key geographical areas while developing pro-poor advocacy strategies at the US/UN levels.