What were you doing daddy, when the sh*t was going down?
I can relate to this. It is a personal fear that I carry with me as I wrestle with my own positionality and contribution to a more just future. It’s an important question: What am I doing to resist and create positive change in the world?
Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Invisible Man, and Hercules don’t scare me. The FBI, the anti-American committee, J. Edgar Hoover, President Nixon, President Johnson, Martha Mitchell and her husband, or her man or her woman, Ethel Kennedy, all the Kennedys, Bank of America, Chase-Manhattan, Rockefeller, none of these people scare me. What scares me is that one day my son will ask me, ‘What did you do, daddy, when the sh*t was going down?’
~ Richard Pryor
We live in a complex time. The current socio political, economic and environmental context is marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – what is sometimes referred to as a polycrisis. Alongside issues such as climate change AND denialism and growing nationalism, society must contend with fading global solidarity and a tendency for all of us to isolate and look inwards driven by a narrowing sense of who and what our communities are. All of this is fuelled, it seems, by growing, co-ordinated right-wing campaigns to drive polarisation and undermine human and civil rights and freedoms.
But despite a sense of crisis and a seeming erosion of decades of human rights gains, resistance to these conservative trends and calls for change can be seen everywhere – from the radical political shifts in European election outcomes to the West African coups and recent uprisings against tax laws in Kenya. While this chaotic moment in history is stressful, it also offers opportunity for practice to shift, for reform to happen and perhaps even for systems that no longer serve a purpose to be replaced. This is a tremendous chance to reinvent and rebuild institutions and practices better aligned with our values and principles and anchored in people’s experience.
And so we arrive at a question: What role does/should civil society play in these uncertain times? This is especially important given that, in the examples quoted above and in the space of change more generally, formal civil society is conspicuously absent when tipping points are reached and people come together and confront power directly.
Before we can approach this question though, we have to make a fundamental admission – that we make up civil society, and that for too long we have wanted to act to confront and change the system without acknowledging that we are embedded in it and bound to it. Perhaps, even more confronting is to accept that civil society itself is a product of the very system we seek to change, and in many instances reinforces and upholds it. We are part of the system. We curate and maintain it in order to protect the privilege that it accords to us. These times provide an acute challenge for those of us working in the development/civil society sector to examine our own power, position and complicity in maintaining a system whose outcomes, we can all agree, leave a lot to be desired.
Civil society itself continues to reinforce negative forms of power, built on narratives that give us – the activist, the development practitioner the ‘thinkers’- the power to ‘solve’ problems, through processes far removed from the experience of those who live with these problems. Despite radical rhetoric, pre-packaged, ahistorical and ‘saviourist’ development has become the norm. It seems that we are called upon to re-remember that people as individuals have power and agency, and when connected to others, can create radical change with or without civil society’s assistance. We need to learn from the actions that are happening all around us and despite us. The demand on civil society is to be enmeshed within the struggles of others working to embrace a more radical solidarity. Civil society must, in these chaotic times, slow down, commune, counter the need to have ready answers, be guided by principles of justice and be willing to be informed by experience and worldviews of others.
This radical, and more human, solidarity is multipolar, not located in the binaries which bind our imagination: north to south; the haves and have nots; or the powerful and the powerless. Rather this radical solidarity is one in which we all find community and support. This solidarity is practiced through the processes of building community – contesting, agreeing and disagreeing, respecting and drawing strength from each other. And beyond this, holding ourselves and each to account to a commitment to a particular politic and values.
And so, fundamentally this piece asks us to reflect on the personal before we engage the systemic: How does the system manifest in what I do? How willing am I to disrupt the very system that provides me with a sense of purpose, validation of my ‘goodness’ and livelihood? What contribution can I making to a practice that is liberatory, that contributes to human dignity and fundamentally transforms normative notions of power? What are the small acts of resistance within my control that will enable a more fundamental shift in the system?
