decolonizing solidarity

building connection with stories

2012-02-08T18:03:00.000-08:00

Tony Macias over at Witness for Peace has done up a beautiful video (below) with testimony and photos of Inocencio Hernandez, a Oaxacan farmworker, talking about why he went to the US to work, and why he went back. It's well worth watching. But what struck me is that on the page where he introduces the video he starts with one of these calls to build empathy by relating it to your own experience that I've posted about before. He writes

"One of life's big truths is that most things don't matter until they happen to us. From the momentous (say, loss of a loved one) to the trifling (hair loss), we just don't focus in on realities until they become personal to us. The phenomenon of migration is global, historical, and complex, and it's inconsequential to people who aren't forced into it.

But that's not really true, is it? Maybe we're all migrants: In 2006, 50 million US Americans changed homes and 8 million of those changed states when they did. Ok, moving across town involves absolutely zero danger and loss when you compare it to what undocumented migrants struggle through each year (Read here, here, and here if you don't believe me). But what remains true is that we know something about uprooting ourselves, and we do it for similar reasons (economic motivation, for instance). This doesn't make us all the same, but it's a chance for us to relate better to one another."

Now this is a comparison I think works to build solidarity more than appropriate - because it also highlights how the experiences are different, and because of that magic last line.

welfare empathy experiment

2012-02-01T19:29:00.000-08:00

I regularly post here about the pros and cons of stimulating empathy to inspire solidarity. Here is another take.

This article ran under the headline "Welfare experiment brings tears to Surrey MLA’s eyes"

[For those not from Canada, an MLA is a member of the Assembly of the Province, in this case of British Columbia. It's like being a Representative in the State Legislature in the US. MLA Brar represents a Vancouver suburb and has gotten a ton of media attention in the Vancouver area for spending the month of January trying to get by on what as single adult gets if they are on welfare.]

"Five days into his Welfare Challenge, Surrey Fleetwood NDP MLA Jagrup Brar is looking tired.

He admitted to being in tears earlier this week.

On Thursday, he showed off where he is living and the food he has bought as he tries to live on the $610 a month a single adult receives while on social assistance.

“Living in poverty is hard and demoralizing. Looking for food makes your body tired,” said Brar, who undertook the experiment in response to a challenge by Raise the Rates, a coalition of social groups that wants the B.C. government to raise welfare payments.

On Wednesday, he was out looking for a place to stay aided by a worker from Hyland House, a Surrey-based organization that runs a homeless shelter.

Brar had put together a list of possible rooms he could rent for the $375 government housing allowance, but was shocked at what he found.

“The first house had four little rooms and was a dirty and filthy looking old house,” said Brar.

He said the room available for rent had no laundry facilities and the landlord wanted $450 a month “for a place no one would want to stay for one day.”

The next home he visited was similar.

This landlord then showed Brar another room on the side of the house.

“That was heartbreaking, shocking for me. This was a room like a closet. It was three feet wide, seven feet long with a single bed in it occupying the whole space,” he said.

“You could barely step in and go straight to your bed. There was no window. The landlord told me the person who was going to occupy that room was a patient coming from hospital after an operation.

“It was unimaginable for me to hear that people have to chose to live in those kinds of places, tears started falling out of my eyes,” he said.

This room rented for $300 a month.

“The person who showed me that closet-like room owns 50 rooms. She is making $20,000 a month on the backs of the poor of B.C. with the help of the ministry. It’s unacceptable and immoral,” he said.

Brar settled for staying in an illegal rooming house on 136A St. that is clean and well-kept and has seven other tenants. The spacious room rents for $400 a month, but he will only pay for the part of the month he will stay there.

“This is like a seven-star hotel compared to the other places,” said Brar.

On Wednesday, he went shopping for food, spending $32.87 for a variety of packaged foods, some milk, vegetables, fruit, bread and peanut butter.

Brar said he would stay in the Surrey rooming house for 16 days and then look for a place to live in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.

After other expenses, he figures he has about $67 left for food for the rest of the month.

“It’s hard for me to realize that we have 137,000 children living in poverty in this province,” he said."

- I have such mixed feelings about this. Of course he can never really "know" what it is like, and he's much more able to cope than most who are getting by on $610. For starters, he got a worker to go out and look for housing with him?! How often does that happen? And he's not recovering from illness or trauma or whatever might have pushed him on to welfare. But gripes about the dangers of appropriative empathy aside, I have been appreciating how this stunt is getting the media to pay more attention to the realities and struggles of the poor and have some real hope that it could lead to change - raising the rates for a start.

"Solidarity is a complex concept – more so in practice than in theory."

2012-01-25T19:42:00.000-08:00

thanks to my friend Heather over at the Community Alliance for Global Justice who pointed me to the following bit in an article in Pambazuka news: Pan-African voices for Freedom and Justice. The article by Yash Tandon is about the end of the 'aid industry' - it's a fantastic in between the lines analysis of what was said at the last forum on aid effectiveness. Clinton was so blunt it didn't take much translation. The whole article is worth reading but the last paragraph in particular touches on solidarity. It reads:

"Finally, a word on those in the north who work with their ‘partners’ in the south on the basis of solidarity – based not on ‘aid’ or charity but on shared values of equity and justice. Solidarity is a complex concept – more so in practice than in theory. There are those who define it as action based on a ‘universal social protection system’, or as an essential component of the ‘common good of humanity’. However, they need to revisit these concepts, because they could easily lend themselves to manipulation by the Big Powers of the North (such as those in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) to bomb innocent civilians in the name of ‘humanity’, ‘social protection’, ‘democracy’, ‘good governance’, ‘fighting corruption’ and the like."

full article here

why there should be more tv shows about people of color

2012-01-18T22:00:00.000-08:00

I watched Treme last night and realized it had been a long time since I watched a tv show in English with a majority people of color. This matters in all sorts of ways, but here's a description of a creepy study about how brain research shows white people people lack empathy for brown people. It was research from the University of Toronto-Scarborough and it shows that white people’s mirror-neuron-system fires much less, if at all, when they watch people of colour performing motor tasks.

There is nothing about this that is hardwired. It is just a matter of what people are used to that then shapes their brain's mirror neurons. As this article about the study argues, "When we watch movies and TV shows and read books featuring white protagonists, we have to put ourselves into white people’s shoes to understand the stories and feel the emotions of sadness, laughter, and pride. But people of colour are rarely the protagonists in the media that white people watch, so they rarely or never have to imagine themselves as us."

So as banal as the show All-American Muslim seems, it may be changing not just hearts but literally minds (if you've missed this reality tv phenomena, check out the clip below. I love the nasal Michigan accent. I don't have it, but for the record, my family is from Michigan.) Yes, yes, it's highly problematic that they have to constantly prove that they really are Americans. It will be great when we have shows in the US and Canada about Muslim families where they don't have to prove anything.

The story of Ingrid, Terry and Lahe - international solidarity activists killed in Colombia

2012-01-10T21:46:00.000-08:00

Three US citizens were killed in Colombia on March 4, 1999 while doing international solidarity work. Though they were not accompaniers, their work was related, and I was surprised that their story was unknown by most of the accompaniers I talked to in Colombia, so I want to share it here. The three were kidnapped by the FARC on February 25^th, 1999. Their bodies were found one week later, blind-folded, bound, tortured, and shot in the face. They were found just over the Venezuelan border.

The three had visited the U’Wa people to help them establish a school for their children in their own language that would support the continuation of their traditional ways. Ingrid, 41, specialized in this. She was a member of the Menominee nation and rising leader in the struggle for indigenous peoples’ rights, at the US and UN level. She was the director of the Fund for the Four Directions in New York City, founded by Anne Rockefeller, which promoted the revitalization of indigenous languages and cultures. She studied at the University of Havana, and had done work in Guatemala with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú. Lahe'ena'e Gay, 39, was a member of the Kanaka Maoli Nation of Hawai`i. Lahe was the founder and director of Pacific Cultural Conservancy International, which works to preserve cultural as well biological diversity.[1] Terence Freitas was only 24 but had been working with U’Wa for several years, after serving as an official observer at a Los Angeles meeting between Occidental Petroleum and U'wa leader Roberto Cobaría in May 1997. He co-created and coordinated the U'wa Defense Working Group. Terry was close to my age at the time, as was his girlfriend, Abby Reyes, who I met at the vigil to close the School of the Americas shortly after he was killed. His story has continued to grip me because he was so like me. I can so easily imagine me being him – which is precisely what helps accompaniers build networks of solidarity.

Terry had been to the U’Wa territory several times in the two years before they were killed. The U’Wa territory extends into Arauca, near the Venezuelan border, where Occidental petroleum owns the large Caño-Limon oilfield, which is said to have huge reserves.[2] They also co-own the pipeline that takes the oil out to sea for shipping. That pipeline has been repeatedly bombed by the ELN guerillas, so Oxy spent nearly $4 million lobbying the US Congress to expand military funding.[3] In return they got hundreds of millions of dollars worth of pipeline protection, since much of the US military aid and training was earmarked for the region around the pipeline, despite the 18th brigade in the region being notorious for attacking civilians.

Both Occidental and Shell were carrying out aggressive exploration for more oil in the area, in traditional U’Wa territory. The U’Wa consider this a sacrilege, for they see oil as the life blood of mother earth. During the Spanish conquest a great number of U’Wa committed mass suicide by walking off a 1,400-foot cliff in the Andes mountains rather than be enslaved. The 5,000 member U’Wa Nation has threatened to do so again if the oil companies move in. They have received a good deal of international support for their struggle, in part because of Terence’s initial organizing which helped them to connect to other groups. One of their most dramatic efforts was an intense prayer and fast retreat in which they asked Mother Earth to move the oil. Exploratory drilling had initially found signs of a huge reserve, but after the prayers, they found no oil (though they did find gas). Shell and Occidental Petroleum pulled out and rights were transferred to the Colombian national oil company Ecopetrol, which has recently been partially privatized. Ecopetrol continued exploratory drilling in U’Wa territory, and found oil in other sacred sites. The U’Wa continue their nonviolent resistance with actions like occupying drilling platforms, speaking tours, and actions at shareholder meetings.[4] They held a 6-month roadblock with 10 to 20 thousand people, including U’was, campesinos, and unionists, to block the oil machinery from going in to drill, which was broken up by the military in 2001.[5]

The U’Wa did and do not collaborate with any of the armed actors. As such they did and do not have an easy relationship with the FARC. The FARC had publicly said that internationals were not welcome in the area, but Terry had actually met with them prior to bringing down Ingrid and Lahe, explained the reason for their trip, and had gotten word from the commander that they would not be harmed.[6] Ingrid and Lahe were not working on the U’Wa campaign to stop oil exploration, but it certainly shaped what happened to them. The FARC in that area were allegedly on friendly terms with Occidental,[7] who had repeatedly threatened U’Wa leaders.

The FARC claimed both the kidnapping and killings were a mistake made by a commander acting without approval and issued an apology.[8] Those who stopped the car at a roadblock and kidnapped the three did not fit the profile of the local FARC at all.[9] They were much younger, not dressed in fatigues, and had their faces covered - which has led some to wonder if they were a rogue group that was perhaps put up to it by a faction opposed to the peace accords, either within or outside of the FARC.

When the killings happened the first major peace talks between the FARC and the Colombian government had just been suspended, but were scheduled to start up again in April. They never did get taken up again, and there have been no further peace negotiations since. The New York Times argued at the time that the FARC had nothing to gain from killing US citizens, since they had been seeking the support of foreign governments for the negotiation process itself.[10]

The Menominee Nation and various other US indigenous rights groups accused the US State Department of destabilizing their own negotiations with the FARC for the release of the three, which they had believed was imminent.[11] During those negotiations the State Department released $230 million dollars in military support for the Colombian army, which then killed 70 members of the FARC in an attack. The three were killed immediately after, perhaps in retaliation.[12]

All of the indigenous peoples of Colombia (which has 84 First Nations) have suffered greatly in the war, from both sides. They insist on neutrality and control of their own territory – and all of the armed actors challenge them on it. They often live in remote areas that the different armed groups want to use as drug trafficking routes. The department (province) of Arauca, where the U’Wa territory is, has long been one of the hottest areas of the war – because of the oil, the flood of guns, and its border with Venezuela. It has been hotly disputed – even the two guerilla groups (FARC and ELN) have fought each other there. It also has a heavy paramilitary presence. It is local organizers for peace and justice that suffer the most violence, from all of the armed actors.

[1] Mathew Yeomans, “Chaos in Colombia,” Salon.com Newsreal, March 1999, http://www.salon.com/news/1999/03/19newsb.html.

[2] At the time the three were killed Al Gore was vice-president (he served from ’93 to ‘2001, under Clinton). U’Wa supporters targeted Gore because of his close ties and large stake in Occidental, where his father was on the board for three decades. Terry was present at a meeting between Al Gore and U’Wa leader Roberto Cobaria. Gore did not, however, publicly pressure Occidental. Only long after his own 2000 presidential campaign did he take a stand on Colombia and refuse to take the stage with President Uribe because of his war crimes.

[3] “Witness for Peace : Colombia”, n.d., http://www.witnessforpeace.org/section.php?id=95.

[4] The U’Wa Defense Working Group is now part of Amazon Watch. For more on the current U’Wa struggle see http://amazonwatch.org/work/defend-uwa-life-and-territory

[5] Sandra Alvarez, personal communication.

[6] Ana Arana, “Murder in Colombia,” Salon.com, December 14, 1999, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/12/14/colombia.

[7] Abby Reyes, “Letter to Al Gore from Abby Reyes, Terence Freitas’ girlfriend,” Colombia Support Network, n.d., http://www.colombiasupport.net/200003/areyes-letter-0310.html.

[8] Arana, “Murder in Colombia.”

[9] Andrew Jacobs, “3 Kidnapped Americans Killed; Colombian Rebels Are Suspected,” New York Times, March 6, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/06/world/3-kidnapped-americans-killed-colombian-rebels-are-suspected.html?pagewanted=1.

[10] Ibid.

[11] They had received an email saying that they would be released. Not long before this incident three US birdwatchers were released after being held by the FARC for a month.

[12] “A Tribute to Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa”, n.d., http://www.aics.org/aimva/ingrid.html.

what is 'peace culture'?

2012-01-03T14:45:00.001-08:00

Peace Studies scholars debate not only the meaning of, but what causes, peace. One increasingly important argument is that changing public and elite attitudes, which increasingly see war as an illegitimate, have much to do with it[1]. Along these lines, the UN has worked to promote a ‘culture of peace’ – declaring 2000 the international year of it – and then going on to name the entire first decade of the millennium as the decade of peace [2]. This idea of 'peace culture' was first discussed at the 1989 UNESCO congress, which inspired Boulding to write a book on it that has been influential in these discussions[3]. Several definitions for a ‘culture of peace’ have been used in various UN resolutions, but these were simplified into key points in the manifesto for a culture of peace which was signed by over 75 million people during 2000. The key points are: respect life, reject violence, share with others, listen to understand, preserve the planet, and rediscover solidarity[4]. UNESCO has taken the lead in promoting this work, though thousands of grassroots groups around the world have also used this framework in their work. The idea of a culture of peace is that having these values makes it difficult to start or maintain a war. The eight points are described in table form, and contrasted to their opposites, by David Adams[5], one of the original designers of the UNESCO program for a culture of peace, as:

CULTURE OF WAR AND VIOLENCE	CULTURE OF PEACE AND NON-VIOLENCE
Belief in power that is based on force	Education for a culture of peace
Having an enemy	Understanding, tolerance and solidarity
Authoritarian governance	Democratic participation
Secrecy and propaganda	Free flow of information
Armament	Disarmament
Exploitation of people	Human rights
Exploitation of nature	Sustainable development
Male domination	Equality of women and men

In one of the culture of peace promotional booklets published by UNESCO the projects described could easily be considered ‘human development’ efforts, pointing to the slippage between these terms[1][6]. As the Handbook on Building Cultures of Peace puts it, in a culture of peace people behave in ways that promote mutual caring and wellbeing[2][7]. The editor, Rivera, goes on to say that one of the most controversial aspects of this work in the UN has been the contrasting of a culture of peace to a culture of war. The most powerful nations insisted that all references to the latter be removed, which he argues is tied to their assertion that their military power is aimed at ‘preserving peace’ rather than domination. He argues that [3][8], it might make more sense to talk of building cultures of peacemaking rather than the UN’s campaign for a culture of peace. It's a bit less catchy though. The UN campaign may be a bit cheesy, but I appreciate the impulse to present peace as something we make and make again, together, and every day.

[1] Human Security Report Project, Human Security Report 2009/2010 (Simon Fraser University, December 2, 2010), http://www.hsrgroup.org/human-security-reports/20092010/overview.aspx.

[2] “World Report on Culture of Peace”, n.d., http://decade-culture-of-peace.org/.

[3] Elise Boulding, Cultures of peace: the hidden side of history (Syracuse University Press, 2000).

[4] “Manifesto 2000 for a culture of peace”, n.d., http://www3.unesco.org/iycp/uk/uk_sum_monde.htm.

[5] “Definition of Culture of Peace”, n.d., http://www.culture-of-peace.info/copoj/definition.html.

[6] “Booklet - Human Security for All” (UN Human Security Unit, 2006), http://ochaonline.un.org/Reports/BookletHumanSecurityforAll/tabid/2187/language/en-US/Default.aspx.

[7] Joseph De Rivera and ebrary Inc, Handbook on building cultures of peace (New York: Springer, 2008), 1.

[8] Ibid., 4.

privilege as dehumanizing

2011-12-26T20:30:00.000-08:00

“The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege
which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic
pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions
and no longer are; they merely have”
- Paulo Freire

but is all privilege dehumanizing?
how can privilege be used in ways that make us all more human?

what is privilege?

2011-12-17T11:12:00.001-08:00

I recommend the article over at Left Turn entitled

Occupy Opportunities for Collective Liberation - Catalyst Project’s Anti-Racist Organizing Strategy

by Chris Crass. To give you a small taste of it:

"“White” is not a category of who I am as an individual person. Rather, white is an historically developed social position I was born into within this country.My relationship to the state and the economy shapes what I have access to, how society interacts with me, and how I understand myself in relationship to others.This is not just a relationship between myself as an individual white person and the state and economy. It is the accumulated experience of hundreds of years of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.In short, white supremacy is internalized within me and has profound impacts on how I relate to the world around me.This internalized white supremacy is based on the material reality of political, economic, and social privilege I and other white people, experience every day as a white citizen of this nation.

It is important to make a distinction here between privilege and power.Most white people in the United States experience economic, political, and/or cultural oppression based on class, gender, sexuality, and ability, as well as race-based privilege.Privilege generally refers to rights, norms, standards, and attitudes that should apply to everyone, but that many people are denied.For example, for most of the history of the U.S., people of color were denied access to most jobs, legal protections, social services, civic participation, and neighborhoods (except to work in them).Additionally, violence against people of color has been social and in many cases de facto legally sanctioned. ..."

read on here

image by Melanie Cervantes, this and many other fab posters available at dignidad rebelde

mining, displacement, and accompaniment

2011-12-12T16:36:00.001-08:00

check out this great media work by Moira over at PBI that gets to the heart of what accompaniment does - the following article ran in colombia reports:

Colombia's mining boom overshadowed by human rights violations: NGO

Monday, 12 December 2011 14:15 Adriaan Alsema

The apparent success of Colombia's mining boom is being overshadowed by human rights violations and mass displacement from mining areas, international human right organization Peace Brigades International (PBI) said Monday.

"80% of the human rights violations that have occurred in Colombia in the last ten years were committed in mining and energy-producing regions, and 87% of Colombia’s displaced population originate from these places," a report by the organization published last week said.

According to PBI spokesperson Moira Birss, mining activities are frequently accompanied by a disregard of the constitutional rights of minorities and threats and attacks on leaders of these communities.

"Community leaders who oppose mining projects, or the organizations that accompany those leaders and communities, have at times been targeted with threats and even attacks in what would appear to be a result of their opposition, as was the case with the priest who was killed in Marmato," said Birss, referring to an area where mining company Gran Colombia Gold and the local community are at odds over who has the rights to mine for gold.

Birss also expressed concern over suspicions that "companies may take advantage of, or potentially even pariticipate in, incidents of forced displacement in order to exploit that newly-available land."

"After its most recent visit to Colombia, the mission of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues stated that indigenous peoples are often subject to forced displacement as a strategy to impose megaprojects on their lands without having to undergo the process of prior consultation," Birss told Colombia Reports.

PBI did not look at whether Colombia's judicial authorities are investigating the possible role of multinational mining companies in human rights violations, but according to Birss, "the conflict has always been about control of resources."

"The case of Curbarado and Jiguamiando is the quintessential exmple of this: communities were forcibily displaced, then palm companies came in and set up shop. And thanks to the tireless work of the communities and those who accompany them, direct links are being proven between the displacement and the economic projects; several palm company owners have recently been condemned, and others are under investigation.

"Many experts, like the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, have alerted that there is every reason to believe that the pattern is or will be repeating itself in the mining sector," said Birss.

privilege and accompaniment

2011-12-06T11:27:00.001-08:00

I have been reviewing again the very little that is posted online by organizations about how the international accompaniment work they do uses privilege. One of my favorites is a 2008 post by Liza Smith, who works with FOR.

The full post is here and well worth reading, but here is a snippet:

… Our first day in Colombia we began a conversation about the reality of international solidarity work. A number of people in the circle had (and continue to have) serious concerns about the nature of this work — why is that so many white, upper-middle class activists turn towards the romanticized struggles of the third world to “help” when we have our own atrocious situations to deal with at home? How can we justify solidarity work in Colombia when we have a prison population of African American men that equals the number of un-free African American men at the height of slavery? How can we go to a far away place to accompany threatened human rights leaders when 120 veterans commit suicide every week in the United States? How can we think about inequality elsewhere when young people in our own country have to offer themselves as cannon fodder in Iraq in order to get money for college? These issues merit our attention, hard work and passion.
…
Theoretically, we all know that our struggles to overcome oppression are deeply interconnected and that we must learn from one another’s struggles to make each stronger. This delegation felt like bringing theory to practice. We were not approaching Colombia as the problem and arriving as gringos with the helping hand. We were exchanging experiences of problems that are fundamentally linked and which manifest differently in our different contexts. … I can hardly claim that our delegation resolved any of the questions about international solidarity and I know I’m not off the hook as a white activist doing solidarity work with Colombia. But we did attempt to explore a different kind of model of transnational community building that deconstructs a traditional set up which assumes solidarity goes in one direction. Because our solidarity work there and here is to support each other in our collective development as activists, leaders and human beings. Because our work here and there is to build a stronger global movement to end war …”

Read the whole thing here.

Liza is also a great singer songwriter, check her out singing at the vigil to close the SOA in the video below.

international solidarity activists unwittingly support USAID in Bolivia

2011-11-28T12:54:00.001-08:00

This article was published on Green Left and is reproduced in its entirety here - I'm particularly intrigued by the argument that it was by falling into romanticized notions of indigeneity that activists fell into this.

By Federico Fuentes

Bolivia's first indigenous president celebrates winning a recall referendum in August 2008.

The recent march in Bolivia by some indigenous organisations against the government’s proposed highway through the Isiboro Secure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) has raised much debate among international solidarity activists.

Such debates have occurred since the election of Bolivia's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, in 2005 on the back of mass uprisings.

Overwhelmingly, solidarity activists uncritically supported the anti-highway march. Many argued that only social movements — not governments — can guarantee the success of the process of change.

However, such a viewpoint is not only simplistic; it can leave solidarity activists on the wrong side.

Kevin Young’s October 1 piece on Znet, “Bolivia Dilemmas: Turmoil, Transformation, and Solidarity”, tries to grapple with this issue by saying that “our first priority [as solidarity activists] must be to stop our governments, corporations and banks from seeking to control Bolivia’s destiny”.

Yet, as was the case with most articles written by solidarity activists, Young downplays the role of United States imperialism and argues the government was disingenuous in linking the protesters to it.

Others went further, denying any connection between the protesters and US imperialism.

The Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of the Bolivian East (CIDOB), the main organisation behind the march, has no such qualms. It boasted on its website that it received training programs from the US government aid agency USAID.

On the site, CIDOB president Adolfo Chavez, thanks the “information and training acquired via different programs financed by external collaborators, in this case USAID”.

Ignoring or denying clear evidence of US funding to such organisations is problematic. Attacking the Bolivian government for exposing this, as some did, disarms solidarity activists in their fight against imperialist intervention.

But biggest failure of the solidarity movement has been its silence on US and corporate responsibility for the conflict.

The TIPNIS dispute was not some romanticised, Avatar-like battle between indigenous defenders of Mother Earth and a money-hungry government intent on destroying the environment.

Underpinning the conflict was the difficult question of how Bolivia can overcome centuries of colonialism and underdevelopment to provide its people with access to basic services while trying to respect the environment. The main culprits are not Bolivian; they are imperialist governments and their corporations.

We must demand they pay their ecological debt and transfer the necessary technology for sustainable development to countries such as Bolivia (demands that almost no solidarity activists raised). Until this occurs, activists in rich nations have no right to tell Bolivians what they can and cannot do to satisfy the basic needs of their people.

Otherwise, telling Bolivian people that they have no right to a highway or to extract gas to fund social programs (as some NGOs demanded), means telling Bolivians they have no right to develop their economy or fight poverty.

Imperialism aims to keep Third World nations subordinate to the interests of rich nations. This is one reason foreign NGOs and USAID are trying to undermine the Morales government's leading international role in opposing the grossly anti-environmental policies, such as Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD).

REDD uses poor nations for carbon offsets so corporations in rich countries can continue polluting. Support for REDD was one of the demands of the protest march.

Young says “our solidarity should be with grassroots revolutionaries, anti-imperialists and defenders of human rights, not with governments or parties”.

But, as the TIPNIS case shows, when governments are trying to grapple with lifting their country out of underdevelopment, the demands of social movements with competing sectoral interests may clash.

In fact, some of the most strident supporters of the highway were also the very same social movements that solidarity activists have supported in their struggles against neoliberal governments during the last decade.

In such scenarios, you can only choose between supporting some social movement demands by dismissing legitimate demands of others, as many did with the TIPNIS case.

Lasting change can only come about when social movements begin to take power into their own hands when social movements become governments.

It is this objective that Bolivia's social movements set. They forged their own political instrument through struggle ― commonly known as the Movement Towards Socialism ― and won a government they see as their own.

Having gone from a position of “struggle from below” to taking government from the traditional elites as an instrument to achieve their goal of state power, these social movements have begun winning control over natural resources and enacted a new constitution.

Converting the constitution’s ideals into a new state power remains a task for the Bolivian revolution.

But its success depends on the ability of “grassroots revolutionaries, anti-imperialists and defenders of human rights” ― operating within and without the existing state ― to struggle in a united way.

Our solidarity must be based on the existing revolutionary struggle in Bolivia, not a romanticised one we would prefer.

A permanent state of protests may be attractive for solidarity activists, but ultimately can only translate into a permanent state of demoralisation unless social movements can go beyond opposing capitalist governments and create their own state power.

Refusing to support the struggles as they exist illustrates a lack of confidence in the Bolivian masses to determine their own destiny. It also displays an arrogance on the part of those who, having failed to hold back imperialist governments at home, believe they know better than the Bolivians how to develop their process of change.

Mistakes are made in any struggle. But such mistakes should not be used to try and pit one side against another. We should have confidence that these internal conflicts can be resolved by the social movements themselves.

[Federico Fuentes edits Bolivia Rising.]

great video by PBI about the U'Wa's struggle for land in Colombia

2011-11-17T10:42:00.000-08:00

An important part of accompaniment is using various sorts of privilege to magnify the voices and struggles of those less likely to be heard. Videos like this one by Peace Brigades are a great way to do that.

accompaniment in the Guardian

2011-11-12T08:58:00.001-08:00

the Guardian ran an article last week hailing Peace Brigades as "An NGO fit for the future"

Kudos to PBI for this great coverage! Here's a taste of it:

"In his latest book, Steven Pinker argues that there are strong reasons to believe that we live in a more peaceful age than ever before. But, he warns, that clouds on the horizon to do with resource scarcity could undermine this apparent progress. I agree. The future challenge for international NGOs will be to discern the new threats to the interests of the poorest and most marginalised that emanate from an increasingly unequal, volatile and resource-scarce world.There will be a need for a strong and principled global civil society if this is indeed what the future holds, and while some engage in the perennial tension between closeness to power and co-option by it, many others will be needed simply to stand alongside the poorest. Which is exactly what PBI do."

another empathy gadget

2011-11-03T12:47:00.001-07:00

first the empathy belly to feel what it's like to be pregnant

now AGNES (see photo), to feel what it's like to be old.

I admit to being a gadget geek. I'm both fascinated by and a bit dubious about empathy gadgets. As I've written before, there is some danger after using them that you will think that now you've actually walked in their shoes and really "know" what it's like - i.e. appropriative empathy. But of course all you have is a tiny taste of it. Does it really take all this expensive gear to have a little imaginative empathy of what it's like to live in an older body?

the term 'decolonization' as I use it in this blog is a metaphor

2011-10-23T18:48:00.001-07:00

"In historico-geographical terms, colonization involves the conquest, inhabitation, possession and control of a territory by an external power. It is predicated on the deliberate, physical, cultural and symbolic appropriation of space. ..... Metaphors of colonization rescript this territorial incursion as an invasion and insidious habitation of the social and psychic space of oppressed groups, while decolonization becomes a metaphor for the process of recognizing and dislodging dominant ideas, assumptions and ideologies as externally imposed - literally of making a cultural and psychic place of one's own" - Katz and Smith, page 70-71

N. Smith and C. Katz, “Grounding metaphor: Towards a spatialized politics,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile, 1993, 66-83.

I would argue that those of us who are on the more privileged end of various systems of oppression also have an 'insidious habitation' of our 'social and psychic space' and that if we are truly going to work in meaningful solidarity across divides of power then decolonization is just as important on this end, inside the belly of the beast.

liberatory occupation?

2011-10-16T21:25:00.000-07:00

There have been great articles on colonial patterns cropping up in the occupy movement and how to avoid them. Dissertation is looming so I'll just point to two:

a good short analysis of this screwy stereotyped Indian image being used to argue against using the term 'occupy' is here. Talk about needing to decolonize our minds!
a good overall analysis of the issues by Harsha is here.

If it were my home

2011-10-10T21:23:00.001-07:00

Mamie and Richard, two accompaniers serving with the Presbyterian Church in Colombia, recently blogged about a fascinating tool called If it were my home which has me thinking again about how often these sorts of comparisons get made by solidarity activists.

As Richard puts it in his post, reposted here,

"So maybe it is our recent trip to the US, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the differences between living in Colombia and the United States. Of course there are lots of differences, and lots of them completely unquantifiable, but what can you quantify about living in another culture?

I came across a really interesting tool a while back which is a great help in thinking about this. It is called If It Were My Home and it uses demographic, health and economic data to compare lifestyles in different countries.

First – size. Finally, a wonderful size comparison of Colombia’s land size to the lower 48. Again, Colombia is not a small country! It is twice the size of Texas.

Second – the stats. What is fun about these is that after being here for a couple of years, I can actually check these out a bit more…

1) Have 2.7x higher risk of dying in infancy. It may be debatable, but I think I’m safe in escaping infancy unscathed.

2) Use 93% less electricity. Great! We can check this one. I looked back at our electrical use in the US and here. We averaged 470 kwh/month in the US; we average 291 khw/month here. That’s 38% lower. For reference, electricity here costs about 33% more, so that may account for some of it. But the facts shows that we end up using a lot less electricity here in Colombia, which is a good step for environmental sustainability!

3) Use 90% less oil. My guess is this one is pretty accurate. Without a car, using buses, taxis, and motorcycles as our primary transport, yeah, we probably use 90% less oil.

4) Make 80% less money. Hmm, we do make less money here in Colombia. I hesitate to put a % on it, but 80% is not out of the ballpark…

5) Spend 93% less on health care. Probably accurate… (e.g. I saw a blog post about the average hospital delivery in the US is $40,000. Ours here – about $2,500)

6) See a 30% more of a class divide. My impressions of this would be that the divide here is higher, but I think you are much more aware of class divides in cultures that are not your own.

7) Would be 29% more unemployed. Well, we did come here with a job, and have managed to keep it so far…

8) Have 28.42% more babies. Ahh! We can be concrete on this one! We have had exactly 100% more babies here in Colombia.

9) Will die 3.93 years sooner here in Colombia. We are hoping not to test this one out…"

putting hands together

2011-09-29T17:09:00.001-07:00

I love this image - it's a great idea that could easily be repeated. Translation: no to sexual abuse - it's on the cover of the Amnesty report on sexual violence in Colombia, described briefly in this BBC article.

beautiful expression of solidarity

2011-09-28T14:54:00.000-07:00

incredibly moving. well worth watching if you understand Spanish, my apologies to those who don't.

another take on the dangers of using empathy for solidarity

2011-09-24T10:30:00.000-07:00

This is a segment of a longer post by Sahar Driver on the FOR site:

"Another job for a nonviolent ideological warrior is to honor the sanctity of difference. In my eagerness to meet the other of another history, culture, faith, place, gender, sexual orientation, class—. In my eagerness to look into the face of this other and extend my hand, I may look for similarities to which I can relate. This attempt at relating is of course a beautiful thing, but it too easily becomes dangerous when I make the assumption of sameness where it may not exist— or when I prioritize what is the same over what is different in ways that shut difference down, cap or suffocate it so that it can no longer breathe. What would it take for me to look into the face of another and accept the impossible difference it holds? What feeds a hubris so acute as to allow me to assume I could possibly know Other, the histories that shaped it, the legacies it inherited, the values it lives that have no words?

Not too long ago, I was chatting with a friend and shared a story with him about an encounter with a man who had physically restrained me in a way that shook me up quite a bit. He listened intently to me, and my explanation of what had been going on for me during that experience. I explained what I had learned and what the experience meant to me in the context of my life as a woman grappling with the very real physical and mental insecurities and threats to my safety that mediate every decision I make daily, what paths I will walk on my way home at night, whether or not I make eye contact with the man ahead of me in line, how often I ask a male acquaintance about his wife and kids to remind him of his place. To my frustration and surprise, my friend began to reinterpret my story for me, explain better what I had meant to say, and feed it back to me in the context of his own experience with women.

He wanted me to understand that my story was not about my experience as a woman but was very much like a series of other experiences he too was familiar with that had nothing to do with gender at all. He proceeded to describe some of those experiences to me. In fact, none of those stories resonated with me at all and not a single one even touched what I had been trying to explain to him about the struggles I face as a woman every day. The very real threat of rape and sexual violation that I must negotiate on a daily basis. I walked away frustrated, not because he didn’t understand, how could I expect him to? He is not a woman. How could he possibly know what it is like to be a woman in this world? I was frustrated and angry at his sense of entitlement, his arrogant assumption that he could understand, and his attempt to take my story and make it his own, to rewrite my story and project it outward as a representation of some universal human experience applicable to anyone anywhere regardless of the specifics of gender that I knew had mediated my experience.

And this happens so often. I know I fall into this trap sometimes, maybe we all do— and when I do it is because I was not thinking. So I am asking that we think. When we exoticize, naturalize or romanticize the Other, what we are doing is inflating or foregrounding certain aspects that are most interesting or appealing to us (such as religious or spiritual traditions) and thereby making less visible if not invisible other aspects. Suddenly rich traditions are disassembled, flattened, taken out of context or interpreted in ways that are at the very least unfair misrepresentations and at worst, the grounds for policies that violate their very being. In looking for what I wish to see or am capable of understanding, the world becomes a prism of the familiar. In so doing, I not only rob the other of his/her voice and space to exist, I do violence to myself, my possibility for imagination, for inspiration, discovery, creativity, surprise and beauty. To work hard to see difference and allow it room to breath; to work hard to allow room for the discomfort of not-knowing; to work hard to respect what I do not understand is the work of nonviolence. Would not a humble acceptance of the mystery of the other, and the limits of my understanding, be a beautiful act of generosity? Of nonviolence? Of alliance?

In my work as a social and cultural anthropologist, one of the things that has repeatedly come up in my research is the danger of universalizing certain Western values and assuming their relevance the world over. In many cases, the effects are relatively benign. But in other cases, they can be quite horrifying. A very simple and well-known example is article 17 of the universal declaration of human rights: the right to property. Of course on the surface of it this sounds good right? But would the first Native American nations or Hawaiian people have agreed that this is a universal right? These people found the notion of ownership of property absurd and signed away their lands thinking the white colonizer a fool. But decades later would witness the mass genocide of the indigenous people of the Americas, oftentimes under an assumption of property rights and a certain “manifest destiny,” a god-given right, that not all peoples impacted by it would be asked to weigh in on.

I am suggesting that the assumption of shared values is an assumption that a nonviolent activist should take very seriously and be very careful about. We cannot assume that what is good for us, is good for everyone— especially when so often, as in the case of the Congo, what is good for us has come at the expense of the Other."

[see the full post by Sahar Driver on the FOR site]

"We are not worth more, they are not worth less"

2011-09-17T09:10:00.001-07:00

[this post was written by by Ken Butigan and is entirely reposted from the great blog Waging Nonviolence]

Twenty-four years ago this morning—September 1, 1987—Vietnam veteran Brian Willson joined a handful of peacemakers on the railroad tracks at Concord Naval Weapons Stations to begin what they envisioned as a forty-day fast and vigil to protest arms shipments from this Northern California military base to US-backed forces in Central America.

Instead, a 900-ton munitions train, traveling at three times the legal speed limit, plowed into Brian and dragged him under. Standing a few feet away, I saw him turn over and over again like a rag doll and then (as the never-slowing train rumbled on toward a nearby security gate) sprawling in the track bed, a huddled mass of blood.

Miraculously, Brian survived (thanks, largely, to the tourniquets applied by his then-wife Holly Rauen, a professional nurse), though both legs were sheared off and his skull was fractured.

Now, over two decades later, he has published Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson, a new autobiography available from PM Press. This book does not simply recount a horrifying event from long ago. It offers, more importantly, a vivid example of a still-unfolding pilgrimage for peace that turns on a burning question: “What is my responsibility to make peace and challenge murderous violence in a direct and meaningful way?”

At a critical turning point in his life, Brian allowed this question in and everything changed. Of course, this question is not Brian’s alone. It is meant for each of us in the midst of the storm of horrific violence that continually bears down on our planet and its inhabitants.

Brian’s memoir recounts his journey from childhood in upstate New York (born on the Fourth of July, he enthusiastically shared his family’s pro-military and anti-communist convictions), to his decision to go to law school, and then his being drafted and sent to Vietnam as an Air Force captain, where two incidents changed his life.

One was a rocket attack in which he was saved by a quick-thinking companion who pushed him to the ground and out of the way of the blast. Though they survived, another soldier was blown to bits a few feet away. The second event even more clearly seared his soul. He had been sent out to do damage assessment of US bombing raids on villages and found a blackened mess that used to be huts, littered with bodies:

My first thought was that I was witnessing an egregious, horrendous mistake. The “target” was no more than a small fishing and rice farming community. The “village” was smaller than a baseball playing field. The Mekong Delta region is completely flat, and the modest houses in its hamlets are built on small mounds among rice paddies. As with most settlements, this one was undefended—we saw no anti-aircraft guns, no visible small arms, no defenders of any kind. The pilots who bombed this small hamlet flew low-flying planes, probably the A-37Bs, and were able to get close to the ground without fear of being shot down, thus increasing the accuracy of their strafing and bombing. They certainly would have been able to see the inhabitants, mostly women with children taking care of various farming and domestic chores … The buildings were virtually flattened by explosions or destroyed by fire. I didn’t see any inhabitant on his or her feet. Most were ripped apart from bomb shrapnel and Gatling machine gun wounds, blackened from napalm burns, many not discernible as to gender, and the majority were obviously children.

I began sobbing and gagging. I couldn’t fathom what I was seeing, smelling, thinking. I took a few faltering steps to my left, only to find my way blocked by the body of a young woman lying at my feet. She had been clutching three small, partially blackened children when she apparently collapsed. I bent down for a closer look and stared, aghast, at the woman’s open eyes. The children were motionless, blackened blood drying on their bullet and shrapnel-riddled bodies. Napalm had melted much of the woman’s face, including her eyelids, but as I was focused on her face, it seemed to me that her eyes were staring at me.

She was not alive. But her eyes and my eyes met for one moment that shot like a lightning bolt through my entire being. Over the years I have thought of her so much I have given her the name, “Mai Ly.”

I was startled when Bao, who was several feet to my right, asked why I was crying. I remember struggling to answer. The words that came out astonished me. “She is my family,” I said, or something to that effect. I don’t know where those words came from. I wasn’t thinking rationally. But I felt, in my body, that she and I were one. Bao just smirked, and said something about how satisfied he was with the bombing “success” in killing “communists.” I did not reply. I had nothing to say. From that moment on, nothing would ever be the same for me.

Thus began a deep transformation, which led him in the 1980s to notice with deep alarm the connection between what he had experienced in Vietnam and the Reagan administration’s war in Central America. He traveled to the region and saw a vivid parallel between the two conflicts, especially the wanton attack on civilians, and became convinced that he had to take action.

“We are not worth more, they are not worth less,” he declared, and joined the Veterans Fast for Life on the steps of the US Capitol in 1986, where he and three other former members of the US military fasted for 47 days. One year later, he and others formed Nuremberg Actions—named after the principles of international law enunciated in the wake of the Nuremberg tribunal following World War II that defined crimes against humanity and the responsibility and complicity in such crimes—and organized a 40-day fast at Concord in which he and others planned to block weapons trains. A Freedom of Information Act request had yielded concrete evidence that ships leaving this base were carrying 500-pound bombs, white phosphorus, and millions of rounds of ammunition, and Brian wanted to stop such shipments in their tracks.

He expected the train to stop, at which point he would be removed and arrested—in effect compelling the military to demonstrate the kind of care that should also be accorded to those at the other end of the line in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Instead, the government ran the train (in spite of the clear communication with the Navy over the prior ten days), thus dramatizing with palpable clarity what those at the end of the line faced every day.

We are not worth more. They are not worth less.

Brian’s autobiography details the aftermath of the Concord attack, including his activism, his own inner and outer growth, his comprehensive and embodied choices to live simply (on this recent book tour, for example, he traveled by pedaling a special bicycle that uses his hands instead of his feet), and his thoroughgoing critique of the American Way of Life (AWOL). (Less than three months after being run down by the train, Brian testified in Congress about this event. You can read his engrossing testimony here.)

What can we learn, after all these years, from Brian’s journey?

One lesson is the importance of “finding your own tracks and taking a stand there,” as he has often said. A catchphrase we used at the time held that “Stopping the war starts here”—stopping it at a weapons base, but also in many, many other places. Brian did so by taking this action “in person”: using the most powerful symbol at his disposal, his vulnerable, resilient, determined, and spirited body.

We can do this, too. This is not to say that we are all called to sit on train tracks (such action requires much discernment and training). But there are many places to stand nonviolently, withdrawing our consent and pointing our communities, our societies, and even ourselves in a new direction.

The world begins to change when we find this place.

surprising quote about empathy

2011-09-11T18:10:00.000-07:00

bell hooks,in “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” in Displacing whiteness: essays in social and cultural criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Duke University Press, 1997), 164-179 quotes Spivak as saying:

"what we are asking for is that the hegemonic discourses, the holders of hegemonic discourse should de-hegemonize their position and themselves learn how to occupy the subject position of the other." (in the post-colonial critic, no page number given)

Finally! A solution for structural violence and poverty in Honduras

2011-08-31T15:10:00.000-07:00

[this post is copied in its entirety from quotha.net - see also my previous posts on TOMS shoes]

Thank Goodness for NGOs, once again making the difference.

Or, as a friend who wishes to remain anonymous puts it:

SORRY WE OVERTHREW YOUR GOVERNMENT...HERE ARE SOME SHOES
(WITH NO ARCH SUPPORT)

Said friend, something of a shoe connoisseur herself, has a few pairs of the brand in question and notes that they are particularly quick to develop unpleasant odors and mold. I would never know these important ethnographic details on my own. She adds:

they are NOT conducive to walking from your soon-to-be-privatized elementary school through open sewage and maquila run-off to your house where your structural-violence-poor parents will not be able to throw them in the nonexistent clothes dryer

great coverage of the student movement in Chile

2011-08-28T13:39:00.001-07:00

Roof Dancing from sitioquiltro on Vimeo.

I love teaching. One of the best parts for me is learning from and being inspired by my students. A former student of mine, Joe Hinchcliffe, has been in Chile for the last year and his blog is full of fantastic reports on the student movement, full of lots of fun short clips like this one.

If you haven't been following it, to quote Joe "its really exciting stuff. For the last few months students have taken to the streets to demand free and quality education. Hundreds of thousands of students. Many schools and universities have shut down and no one really knows what will happen next. Recently this movement has grown to include unions and many other protest groups. The movement enjoys the support of over 80% of the population and its fast becoming something much bigger, maybe the beginning of a new economic and political order for the country."

Want some inspiration? Read on!

resources on gender and accompaniment

2011-08-19T18:54:00.001-07:00

One long:
Engendering Peace: Incorporating a Gender Perspective in Civilian Peace Teams
was published this year by the International Fellowship of Reconciliation's Women Peacemakers Program. It focuses on PBI's Indonesia team.

One short: (one pithy page)
What women in CPT want men in CPT to know
from the Christian Peacemaker Teams women

study argues stimulating empathy reduces racism

2011-08-13T07:32:00.001-07:00

from the Greater Good blog comes this report

In the study, published in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers showed participants a five-minute video depicting a black man named Glen and a white man named John. Both shopped in a department store, tried to buy a car, and interacted with police, but Glen clearly experienced discrimination.

Some participants were then asked to imagine Glen’s perspective—what he might be thinking, feeling, and experiencing. Others were asked to imagine what thoughts and feelings they would have if they were in Glen’s situation. A third group was supposed to remain objective; they weren’t told to consider Glen’s thoughts or emotions.

Then the researchers gave the participants’ a sophisticated test that measures unconscious biases.

The results show that participants in both perspective-taking conditions were less biased than participants who were asked to be objective. What’s more, it didn’t seem to matter how the participants went about taking Glen’s perspective: Participants who imagined Glen’s thoughts and feelings showed the same reduction in unconscious bias as those who imagined how they would feel if they were Glen.

In a variation on this experiment, the researchers found that participants showed less automatic bias even when they were simply shown a picture of a black man and asked to imagine his thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Another experiment in the study showed that perspective taking did not lead participants to ignore racial inequality, as previous studies have suggested.

and it goes on

Three strikes against the Empire

2011-08-05T13:54:00.000-07:00

Joint Solidarity Statement by the October2011 Movement, the National Catholic Worker Gathering and SOA Watch South Florida/ SouthCom Watch (reposted from SOA Watch)

Grassroots resistance actions are being coordinated around the country [the US] in early October. Three efforts in particular share common cause:

The October2011 Movement in Washington, DC to decry the start of the eleventh year of war on the people of Afghanistan and the onset of the federal austerity budget, and to stand up to corporate rule and militarism;
The National Catholic Worker Movement and Nevada Desert Experience to demonstrate at Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nevada where armed drone aircraft are headquartered and controlled on their "hunter-killer" missions around the world, and at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS, formerly the Nevada Test Site) where various experiments are conducted which perpetuate the US nuclear arsenal;
School of the Americas Watch South Florida / SouthCom Watch to march to the new headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom) outside of Miami, Florida, which is responsible for all U.S. military operations throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Our struggles are interconnected and we organize in solidarity with each other.

The nonviolent resistance actions in Washington, DC will start on October 6, 2011, on the 10-year anniversary of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Thousands of people have pledged to gather on that day, to nonviolently resist the corporate machine by occupying Freedom Plaza to demand that America's resources are invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation. Nonviolent direct actions at the NNSS and at Creech AFB are going to take place on October 9 at the culmination of the 3 day Catholic Worker gathering, also being coordinated with the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space's annual Keep Space for Peace Week, October 1 to 8. The march on the U.S. Southern Command, with the intention to close it down and to reclaim the sacred land for the peoples of the Americas, will also take place on October 9, 2011.

These actions are united in the effort to build a world in which the values of justice, cooperation, and respect for the earth are upheld. We believe that people power and grassroots organizing are essential for achieving lasting socio-political change.

October2011 Movement, october2011.org

National Catholic Worker Gathering, www.lvcw.org

SOA Watch South Florida / SouthCom Watch, SOAW.org/southcom

don't send shoes

2011-07-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

I recently posted about how problematic the TOMS shoe giving/wearing is.

Thanks to my friend Sarah for pointing me to the great counter-campaign: A Day Without Dignity.

Check out their counter video:

false empathy

2011-07-18T10:15:00.001-07:00

In the fabulous article

Richard Delgado, “Rodrigo’s Eleventh Chronicle: Empathy and False Empathy,” California Law Review 84 (1996): 61.

(in a fictional conversation) Delgado describes false empathy this way:

"You've heard of Gramsci's concept of false consciousness?"29 "Of course," I said, a little sharply. (These impudent young pups sometimes think us old-timers haven't read anything!) "Gramsci coined the term to mean the kind of identification with the aggressor that a subjugated people can easily develop. They internalize the perspectives, values, and points of view of the very people who conquer and oppress them, thus becoming unconscious agents in their own subordination."30 "And so false consciousness is a danger for blacks, at least if we aren't careful.31 But have you ever wondered, Professor, if there is anything comparable for whites?"

"Comparable to false consciousness, you mean?" I wasn't sure what Rodrigo was driving at. "I think there is, and it's empathy. Or rather, what I call false empa- thy, in which a white believes he or she is identifying with a person of color, but in fact is doing so only in a slight, superficial way." "It is a kind of parallel," I said. "But I think I could use an example or two." "Sure," Rodrigo replied. "Consider the early Settlement House move- ment.32 The upper-class ladies who worked there professed to be highly concerned over the plight of the immigrants who lived in the houses. But their sympathies did not extend to learning their languages or ways. Instead, they taught them personal hygiene, housekeeping, English-how to be American.33 Lawyers make this mistake, too, even public interest ones. Maybe especially public interest ones."
....

"Someone who is in the grip of false empathy has a shallow identification with the other," I added. "He or she walks on the surface, uses the wrong metaphors and comparisons.47 It's a little bit like false piety, like those folks who go to church on Sunday but don't allow themselves to be seized by real religion." "The most unsympathetic thing you can do is to think you have empathy with those of a radically different background. You can easily end up hurting them."

the article goes on - it's an easy and fascinating read. If you're interested and don't have academic access let me know and I can send it your way. (photo is of the "empathy belly" - another 'let me play you for a day and then I'll know your reality' exercise)

solidarity based on .... ?

2011-07-11T23:06:00.000-07:00

in the book 'People Power' Howard Clark argues (p. 153) that

some solidarity is based on a sense of common identity (eg gender, race)

some is based on common interests (he gives the example of workers and small farmers)

and some on common moral or political beliefs (he gives pacifism and socialism)

and some on religious faith.

I had never heard it put quite that way. But what about solidarity around similar visions of a better world, of equality, dignity, justice, respect for life - even if you disagree on exactly how to get there?

going silent for a day

2011-06-29T13:57:00.000-07:00

Rather than go barefoot for a day (see previous post) I just got a facebook fundraising appeal from a friend asking me to sponsor him to go silent for a day (well, as he put it, to shut up) to raise money for Videa, a Canadian organization doing development work in Africa.

Certainly better than the TOMS barefoot day, but it makes me queasy that one of their tag lines is "What does it feel like to be silenced"? Doubt that my friend will know after his quiet day. And it doesn't seem like his being silent is making much space for those who are silenced - none of whose stories appear on the site.

speaking of shoes

2011-06-19T17:52:00.000-07:00

talk about walking in another persons shoes. TOMS literally suggests that you do so. one for one. you buy a pair, they give a pair a way.

the TOMS shoe for a shoe thing feels more like charity than solidarity to me, as much as they attempt to get folks to feel a sense of connection with others.

can we think about why folks don't have shoes? and maybe, um, support their local shoe making instead of flooding them with these weird shoes they wouldn't normally wear?

this article makes many of those arguments. My favorite line:
“TOMS Shoes is a good marketing tool, but it’s not good aid.” She has a long list of reasons, including: “It’s quintessential Whites in Shining Armor. It’s doing things ‘for’ people, not ‘with’ people.”
Amen!

the weirdest TOMS phenomena is the barefoot solidarity thing. maybe you haven't been exposed to it, but once a year they urge folks to go barefoot for a day in solidarity with folks who can't afford shoes. commercialization of solidarity just maybe? but hell, they had 1,000 events in 25 countries. wow.

www.onedaywithoutshoes.com

am I being a curmudgeon? comments?

in whose shoes?

2011-06-13T08:16:00.001-07:00

"Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, you'll be a mile from them, and you'll have their shoes." - Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts (via my friend Christy)

the current version of the last paragraph of chapter four of the dissertation, on why international accompaniment is a form of solidarity, and not 'non-partisan':

Walking side by side is such a clear embodiment of solidarity that it seems odd to have to argue for it. Perhaps the issue is different understandings of what solidarity means. Rather than engage in that broader theoretical debate here I have focused on the ‘doings’ of accompaniment and how these are and are not understood as solidarity by accompaniers. Yet I will end with a play on this image of walking together that the term acompañamiento conjures in Spanish. Solidarity does not mean walking in lockstep. It certainly does not mean walking ‘in their shoes’ (a phrase often used to describe empathy) – for then there would be no room in the shoes of the accompanied for their own feet. It does not mean the accompanier walking on top of the shoes of the accompanied, nor having the feet of the person accompanied ride on top of the feet of the accompanier - but rather simply walking alongside each other. Solidarity means walking together towards a broad vision of a different world that is possible, and accompaniment is a powerful way of doing that. To deny this and attempt to distance accompaniment from its social movement origins is to weaken a powerful solidarity strategy.

support the brave and inspiring folks in the peace community of San Jose with a quick signature

2011-06-09T09:01:00.001-07:00

This is the community that I've posted about several times before. They could really use your support right now.

empathy and counter-topographies for solidarity

2011-06-03T20:53:00.000-07:00

I keep coming back, again and again, to the question of empathy. Here is a paragraph from this article of mine. If you don't have academic access email me for the full pdf.

"Pratt and Yeoh (2003) argue for the power of “imagination” and “partial identification” in drawing counter-topographies. In a separate article, however, Pratt (2005) problematizes empathy and warns of the simplification of thinking, “oh that woman is really just like me” in a way that evades the specificity of their lives and their vulnerability to violence. I do believe there can be empathy that is not appropriative, but will we ever be able to imagine what it is like to be tortured? To have our child dismembered in front of us? Would we want to imagine it? Would those who suffered such a fate want us to imagine it? We do not need to move into another person's skin to draw lines of connection. We do not need to try to move them into our family, our homes (to imagine what it would be like if that were happening here). As Pratt argues, to try to move homo sacer back into citizen through seeing sameness does nothing to change the ongoing process of abandonment. It is enough to be moved by the stories. Rather than move homo sacer, it is we who move as we draw these lines of connection. We are transformed by witnessing, by mourning."

Oddly in that article I don't really define what counter-topographies are, other than to call them lines of connection. It's actually one of my favorite geographical terms. It was first used by the inimitable Cindi Katz (see photo) in “On the Grounds of Globalization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement,” Signs 26, no. 4 (2001): 1213-1234. She defines it more clearly in “Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction,” Antipode 33, no. 4 (2001): 709-728. It's well worth reading the whole thing. As she puts it in the abstract, "The paper develops the notion of “topography” as a means of examining the intersecting effects and material consequences of globalized capitalist production. “Topography” offers a political logic that both recognizes the materiality of cultural and social difference and can help mobilize transnational and internationalist solidarities to counter the imperatives of globalization."

US media coverage of accompaniment

2011-05-28T18:26:00.001-07:00

09 Mar 2011 18:19

Source: alertnet // Jon Stibbs
COdisplacedbuilding510

One of the Afro-Colombian community's buildings in Curbarado, which has fallen into disrepair amid the uncertainty surrounding their lives. PHOTO/PBI

BOGOTA (AlertNet) - Armed with little more than T-shirts, brave international volunteers are protecting Colombian human rights activists under threat because of their efforts to help people uprooted by the country's long-running internal conflict return home.

"You have to be constantly alert and remember if you weren't there, the person you are accompanying could be killed," says Hendrine Rotthier, a 28-year-old Belgian moral philosopher who is a member of Peace Brigades International (PBI), an organisation that provides security and moral support to individuals and groups whose human rights work puts their lives at risk.

The mere presence of unarmed PBI volunteers - a service known as accompaniment - can be enough to keep local human rights defenders alive. It shows they are supported by an international organisation with influence in the Colombian capital, Bogota, as well as in the United States and Europe.

Rotthier's own safety depends on being immediately recognisable as a PBI accompanier, thanks to her foreign appearance, white logo-printed T-shirt and car.

She works in the sweltering heat of the Curbarado river basin's thick rainforest, an area in the impoverished western department of Choco. It has been greatly affected in recent years by the conflict between government troops, leftist rebels, cocaine smugglers and far-right paramilitary militias in the South American nation, which has lasted for more than four decades.

The Afro-Colombian community in Curbarado endure some of the world's highest annual rates of rainfall, building their basic wooden huts on stilts to avoid flooding.

They were among 20,000 vulnerable people displaced from their homes in 1996-7 by fierce fighting and intimidation by right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing guerrillas and the army, fleeing to safer parts of the country.

Hundreds returned between 2006 and 2008, but found their highly fertile land was being farmed by agricultural businesses.

CORPORATE THREAT

Last year, the public prosecutor began investigating 24 palm-oil growers for their connections to the paramilitary groups that had displaced the community. And the Constitutional Court, Colombia's highest legal body, ruled in 2010 that the lives and land of the Curbarado people must be protected.

But they face ongoing threats of violence from the paramilitaries supporting the banana, palm-oil and cattle-farming firms that want to evict them and take over their land permanently. They have also suffered intimidation from left-wing guerrillas who have been fighting an insurgency against the government for decades.

Rotthier and her PBI colleagues are there to accompany members of the Inter-church Commission for Justice and Peace (ICJP), a high-profile group of human rights defenders with six young Colombians operating in Curbarado.

In its efforts to provide agricultural, social, psychological and legal support to the returned Afro-Colombians, ICJP finds itself pitted against the violent groups trying to stop them reclaiming their land.

It is dangerous work. One ICJP employee recently had to leave the area after a plan to kill him was uncovered. Amid such threats, the accompaniment offered by PBI allows ICJP staff to carry out their work in relative safety.

ICJP's Father Alberto Franco says PBI's "political impact and physical presence provides protection and strengthens the communities and human rights defenders".

NEW 'INVADERS'

In mid-December, the returned community faced a new threat when hundreds of unknown displaced people began to move in. "Weeks later, they are still coming, cutting down trees and dividing the land into plots," says Rotthier.

The identity and motivation of this new group of displaced people is unclear. But it is thought their unannounced arrival is designed to dislodge the Afro-Colombian community.

"Behind the invaders are the industrialists and people interested in sabotaging the work of the Constitutional Court, those linked to the judicial process ... (together) with the collaboration of the paramilitaries," says Father Alberto.

Despite the court order to protect the Afro-Colombian community, ICJP accuses the police, army and authorities in general of inaction regarding the new arrivals. Meanwhile, the paramilitaries have made fresh threats to ICJP members and local people.

Rotthier says it is "permanently tense within Curbarado, but the tension has recently risen to a higher level".

The latest developments could be a precursor to more violence in Curbarado, where nine leaders of the displaced community were killed last year.

Confronting the armed groups responsible for forcing more than three million Colombians off their land in the past few decades is extremely dangerous. Last year, 40 human rights defenders and community leaders were murdered, reported verdadabierta.com, a Colombian website specialising in the conflict.

Colombia has one of the highest levels of internally displaced people in the world. Its remote and vulnerable communities of Afro-Colombians - the descendants of slaves brought over by the Spanish - and indigenous groups have borne the brunt.

The government has an ambitious plan to resolve the crisis with a far-reaching law to return land to communities that have been forced to leave. But the obstacles met by the Afro-Colombians of Curbarado in their struggle to reclaim their land - despite high-level support from ICJP, PBI and the justice system - suggest that implementing a land-restitution programme across the country will be a tough challenge.

"you can't eat money"

2011-05-21T10:17:00.001-07:00

I am so inspired by the peace communities and humanitarian zones in Colombia. I have heard about this one for years, was great to see images of it. PBI Colombia is doing a fanTAStic job of putting out vidoes these days! huge kudos!

great scenes of how to show solidarity and call out racial profiling

2011-05-14T13:01:00.001-07:00

Wishing I had been more aggressive with the Border Patrol that was racially profiling folks as they got on to the San Juan Island ferries in Washington - making them miss the last ferry of the night.

bibliography of academic work on solidarity

2011-05-07T14:20:00.001-07:00

For those geeky enough to use the fabulousness of zotero to manage their citations, please join me in adding readings to the collective 'solidarity' bibliography that I set up here. Inside zotero you can also sort and do all sorts of things with and to this list, but for those who don't use zotero you can see the list here. This is just an initial collection and missing all sorts of key readings - please help me add them.

I also set up other collective lists on Protective Accompaniment (one of the more dramatic strategies of international solidarity), and, given my fascination with whiteness in Latin America, one on Race and Space in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Zotero is a great tool for collaboration - please join me in adding to any of these lists! If you're wondering what zotero is, check out the short video below. I am now totally addicted to its ability to enter full bibliographic material with one click (thus these lists). I used to mostly click information in off of google scholar, but I find I get cleaner entries when using my university library.

Getting Stuff Into Zotero from zotero on Vimeo.

solidarity surprise

2011-05-02T11:25:00.001-07:00

Maybe the traditions of Christian solidarity and Labor solidarity aren't actually all that far apart. The slogan
"An injury to one is an injury to all" sounds an awful lot like
"If one part suffers, every part suffers with it" - I Corinthian 12:26

Our pain does not need to be the same pain

2011-04-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

“Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.” - Sara Ahmed

solidarity across sameness or difference?

2011-04-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been thinking about how international solidarity draws on both models of Christian and Labor solidarity. To super simplify it, it seems to me that Christian solidarity often talks about connection across difference, whereas labor solidarity emphasizes sameness, as do some other forms solidarity, like youth or black solidarity.

So how then do groups like School of the Americas Watch negotiate these different traditions? Thinking of our different takes on solidarity in this way sheds new light for me on the thinking I published in this article.

No quick answers yet, but for the record, my experience with folks who do Christian solidarity (eg CPT) is that it is not just about solidarity with Christians, and can be decidedly more radical than CSW. I'm looking forward to reading Jon Sobrino's work on Christian solidarity. All the more so now that the Vatican has officially said they don't like it!

International solidarity is “not an act of charity but an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objectives.” - Samora Machel

another accompanier killed in Palestine

2011-04-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

This is a video of Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian ISM accompanier murdered in Gaza on April 14 2011 by Palestinian militants.

the perils of privilege

2011-04-12T23:17:00.000-07:00

The fabulous Naomi Klein uses the great turn of phrase "perils of privilege" in this talk, below. Well worth listening to while you wash the dishes or what have you.

solidarity for the right to express solidarity

2011-04-06T21:21:00.000-07:00

so inspiring! thanks to my fabulous stepmom Helen Fox for this one. this video is the first in a series of clips that the Coalition of Women for Peace has produced as part of their campaign against the Prohibition of Boycott Bill, which is currently in the Israeli Knesset and would criminalize the nonviolent action of boycott (which Palestinians have widely called for as an act of solidarity)

Some Background (from the Coalition)

According to the original version of this bill, persons who initiate, promote, or publish material that might serve as grounds for imposing a boycott are committing a crime may be ordered to compensate parties economically affected by that boycott, including fixed reparations of 30,000 shekels, without an obligation of the plaintiffs to prove damages. If the felon is a foreign citizen, he may be banned from entering for a period of 10 years or from doing business in Israel; and if it is a foreign state, Israel may not repay the debts it owes that state, and use the money to compensate offended parties; that state may additionally be banned from conducting business affairs in Israel. The measures shall apply one year retroactively.

The narrow version which eventually passed the first reading does not include clauses pertaining to foreign citizens and states. It also does not include anyone who provided information but rather anyone who actively partakes in a boycott.

The Ministerial Committee on Legislation rejected the chapters pertaining to foreign citizens and states, probably out of consideration for Israel’s foreign relations, and also rejected the retroactive clause.

On March 7 2011 the bill passed its first reading in the plenum. Will be further discussed in the Constitution Committee and prepared for its second-third (final) vote in the plenum.

solidarity photos

2011-04-02T21:51:00.000-07:00

powerful. try to imagine a native person getting on TED and getting away with saying this. showing this. a great use of his access to this space. both spaces. very well done.

A Confession

2011-03-30T17:09:00.000-07:00

I stand between the shame and relief
I breathe............
The missiles missed this time
Truth is , they didin't miss entirely
Someone's house is destroyed
but not the house I know so well
Someone's family is grieving
but not the one whose name I carry
I linger between my shame and relief
I breathe
I.....breathe
I tell myself
"This flesh, torn and scattered,
is not flesh I have ever embraced,"
I soothe myself,
"nor are these small lifeless hands
the ones with a crayon I've traced".
I ...breathe...this time
the missiles missed
those whose names are engraved on my lips.
This time they didn't stop those hearts beating in my chest.
They live.....
I breathe.
But I must confess
Every time the bombs fall on Gaza
I search for answers
Where did they strike?
Which street did they blow up?
Which neighbourhood did they destroy?
Which lives did they steal?
Aware of my guilt I whisper a prayer
Dear God, please don't let it be the ones I love.
Ya Allah......
Ya Allah......
And when it's over
And when the less fortunate ones weep
I stand between shame and relief.
I breathe.....
I breathe.....
Thank God my loved ones....are spared
This time.
- Samah Sabawi

Poem published here by the Palestine Chronicle, a great resource. Thanks to Simon Dalby for pointing me to this poem and the book, "The Journey to Peace in Palestine" which Samah Sabawi co-authored, with Bill Baldwin. Samah was born in Gaza and lives as a refugee in Australia. Bill was in Palestine as an accompanier with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

solidarity fatigue

2011-03-26T14:45:00.000-07:00

I have posted before about empathy fatigue, and heard the term 'compassion fatigue'used regarding caregivers - but is there such a thing as 'solidarity fatigue'? This article using the term got widely picked up by other sites, particularly in the Catholic network. The article does not explain the term but says:

""For many, Colombia equals coffee and drugs", said Presbyterian theologian Milton Mejía. Those stereotypes are compounded by a decades-long internal armed conflict that "seems to be worsening constantly", Mejía added, the result being "a widespread loss of interest and fatigue".

According to Mejía, who coordinates the Observatory of Church and Society at the Reformed University of Barranquilla, this solidarity fatigue affects even international organizations towards which Colombians turn for support. As a consequence, Colombians face difficulties when trying to explain the extent and urgency of the humanitarian crisis in their country."

Is there a difference between solidarity fatigue and empathy fatigue? I don't know, to me solidarity fatigue makes me think more of activist burnout than what Milton is describing above. As in being tired of making a fist, of holding hands up high.

crazy map of new US military construction in Latin America

2011-03-19T18:04:00.001-07:00

Well, the map itself isn't crazy, it's quite smart. What's crazy is that the amount of military construction in Latin America planned by the Pentagon for this year has doubled since 2009. How often have you seen that mentioned in mainstream media coverage of Obama's trip? Kudos to FOR for developing an annotated map of current and planned U.S. military construction in Latin America based on publicly available information on federal contracts. Check out the map here or below. Looks like US Empire feels like it needs to retrench in its back yard.

View US military construction sites in Latin America, 2010-2011 in a larger map

Foucault on solidarity

2011-03-15T16:42:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Wes for pointing me to this, previously posted here.

We are just private individuals here, with no other grounds for speaking, or for speaking together, than a certain shared difficulty in enduring what is taking place.

Of course, we accept the obvious fact that there's not much that we can do about the reasons why some men and women would rather leave their country than live in it. The fact is beyond our reach.

Who appointed us, then? No one. And that is precisely what constitutes our right. It seems to me that we need to bear in mind three principles that, I believe, guide this initiative, and many others that have preceded it: the Ile-de-Lumiere, Cape Anamour, the Airplane for El Salvador, Terre des Hommes, Amnesty International.

1. There exists an international citizenship that has its rights and its duties, and that obliges one to speak out against every abuse of power, whoever its author, whoever its victims. After all, we are all members of the community of the governed, and thereby obliged to show mutual solidarity.

2. Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of this international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people's suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it's untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a silent residue of policy. It grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power.

3. We must reject the division of labor so often proposed to us: individuals can get indignant and talk; governments will reflect and act. It's true that good governments appreciate the holy indignation of the governed, provided it remains lyrical. I think we need to be aware that very often it is those who govern who talk, are capable only of talking, and want only to talk. Experience shows that one can and must refuse the theatrical role of pure and simple indignation that is proposed to us. Amnesty International, Terre des Hommes, and Medecins du monde and initiatives that have created this new right-- that of private individuals to effectively intervene in the sphere of international policy and strategy. The will of individuals must make a place for itself in a reality of which governments have attempted to reserve a monopoly for themselves, that monopoly which we need to wrest from them little by little and day by day.

-Michel Foucault (1984)
On the occassion of the announcement in Geneva of the creation of an International Committee against Piracy

great news and a beautiful solidarity campaign

2011-03-10T21:18:00.001-08:00

I have blogged several times here asking for your solidarity for my friend Martha Giraldo. Today the sergeant who killed her dad was found guilty, and they officially declared her dad not a guerilla. She will continue to press charges against the other 7 army men involved, but this is a great start. An important victory to celebrate in dark times. Thanks to all for helping me support her struggle, part of our greater struggle for truth and justice in this world.

And now for another moment of beauty. The organization Martha is involved in, the Movement of Victims of State Crimes in Colombia would like a photo of your feet please. Join them on their big march for justice in the streets this Saturday by sending photos of your feet around the world. Send a photo of your feet to m6vida@gmail.com by Saturday. There are some fabulous ones up already! See them at the slideshow below, or to see them with locations and comments look at them here.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

beyond fair bananas

2011-03-02T09:01:00.000-08:00

Sobirania Alimentaria "Comunidad de Paz San José de Apartadó" from Albert Farnos on Vimeo.

this beautiful video about the peace community of San Jose in Colombia shows all the steps it takes for bananas and chocolate to get to you. bananas start at minute 9:30 and chocolate at 14 - but the whole thing is mesmerizingly beautiful. it's all in spanish, but even if you don't understand it the images are stunning. it makes eating chocolate and bananas an entirely different experience. I would love to show this in a course about commodity chains. Why 'beyond fair'? Because selling these bananas at a fair price to their German solidarity buyers allows the peace community to not sell to the only other buyers in town, who are all connected to the paramilitaries. Wish I could eat these 'peace bananas' in Vancouver!

empathy is crucial for democracy

2011-02-22T13:46:00.000-08:00

I've posted many times about the relationship between empathy and solidarity, but was reminded of its importance to democracy by George Lakoff in an article analyzing what's behind the attack on workers, being so beautiful held off in Wisconsin. Here he argues

"In the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama accurately described the basis of American democracy: Empathy — citizens caring for each other, both social and personal responsibility—acting on that care, and an ethic of excellence. From these, our freedoms and our way of life follow, as does the role of government: to protect and empower everyone equally. Protection includes safety, health, the environment, pensions and empowerment starts with education and infrastructure. No one can be free without these, and without a commitment to care and act on that care by one’s fellow citizens. The conservative worldview rejects all of that.

Conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don’t think government should help its citizens. That is, they don’t think citizens should help each other. The part of government they want to cut is not the military (we have 174 bases around the world), not government subsidies to corporations, not the aspect of government that fits their worldview. They want to cut the part that helps people. Why? Because that violates individual responsibility.

But where does that view of individual responsibility alone come from? ..." read on

Latin American visions of solidarity

2011-02-16T15:27:00.000-08:00

CALL FOR PAPERS

Fourth Annual Empire and Solidarity in the Americas Conference

Latin American Visions of Solidarity

University of New Orleans

October 15-16, 2011

Conference Organizers: Aviva Chomsky and Steve Striffler

International solidarity between the United States and Latin America has sought to create partnerships between actors with vastly unequal access to power and resources. Solidarity activism has worked to change U.S. policy towards Latin America, to provide material aid to Latin Americans, and to educate the U.S. public about Latin American realities and the impacts of U.S. foreign policy. Most studies of U.S.-Latin America solidarity have focused on U.S.-based organizations and their activities.

This conference seeks to explore Latin American visions of solidarity from two perspectives: First, how have Latin Americans seen, understood, and engaged with U.S. solidarity movements? Second, how have Latin Americans conceptualized and created their own visions of solidarity? In both cases, we also look to understand the ways in which Latin American actions and visions been received and understood in U.S. solidarity circles.

Paper proposals should include a 100-200 word abstract and a 1-page cv, and be submitted to striffler@hotmail.com and achomsky@salemstate.edu by April 1, 2011.

The Empire and Solidarity in the Americas Conference is a working conference. Attendees are expected to read all conference papers (about 8) and participate in intensive discussion of each paper. If your paper is chosen, you will be an invited guest with conference expenses paid by the University of New Orleans.

we are all connected

2011-02-12T13:08:00.000-08:00

should they have ended the video by cutting one line and letting it all tumble?

WWF - We Are All Connected from Troublemakers.tv on Vimeo.

The Geopolitics of Colombia's Territorial Conquest

2011-02-07T20:15:00.000-08:00

Today I read an article that rocked my world. It is one of the best analyses of Colombian reality I've read (and I've read probably too many). If you do any work that has anything to do with Colombia I recommend it highly, despite the odd pretitle:

Iron Maiden Landscapes: The Geopolitics of Colombia's Territorial Conquest
by Margarita Serje

It's available here.

She's an anthropology professor at Los Andes. By iron maiden she means "a device for collective abuse." Was 'iron maiden' a name for some old torture gadget? Is this just a weird translation? It just makes me think of the band I'm afraid. Anyways, the article is well worth reading, and I'm looking forward to getting her book.

political empathy

2011-01-31T17:25:00.001-08:00

Inspired by the Egyptians and the Tunisians to hit the streets for some justice? Maybe what you're feeling is not solidarity but - political empathy? As in, we too have corrupt leaders who take all the money? Hmm. Very interesting argument made by Gaston Gordillo in this great blog post, where he also talks about the concept of resonance. I'm still chewing on how they relate to solidarity, but I'm intrigued. See algo his great review of the geography of the uprisings of the multitude across the globe in the last ten years here.

(Photo is of a women's protest held today in Cairo against killings of protesters. The women in black strategy continues to travel, photo by Miguel Medina)

beautiful video of testimony from the peace community of San Jose in Colombia

2011-01-26T21:48:00.000-08:00

Testimonios "Comunidad de San José de Apartadó" from Albert Farnos on Vimeo.

My apologies for those that don't speak Spanish - no translation as of yet, though there are subtitles in Spanish if those help you with the accents. Beautifully done. I have great affection and respect and admiration for Brigida, whose testimony comes last. She spoke at the vigil to close the School of the Americas several years ago. It was an honor to get to stay with her when I visited the community.

using ads to inspire solidarity in action

2011-01-14T15:36:00.000-08:00

from South Africa. another great ad campaign to inspire solidarity, blogged by Osocio.

Peace Brigades video

2011-01-06T21:09:00.000-08:00

English: 15 years accompanying human rights defenders in Colombia from Peace Brigades International on Vimeo.

I posted some of the short videos Peace Brigades made about the partners that they work with in Colombia. This hour long video incorporates some of those. If I'm not mistaken it also includes shots that aren't in the shorter blurbs about each organization. I like that the short video they made about what PBI actually does comes at the end, after the stories of the Colombian organizations themselves. It's all beautifully done, inspiring, and well worth watching.

the pinky show

2010-12-30T19:00:00.001-08:00

I just discovered the pinky show. There are a bunch of these, but this one cracked me up. It takes some patience to listen to the slow pace, and a certain sense of humour, but there are some profound and deeply funny insights about decolonizing solidarity in here!

changing the world with one foot in the academy

2010-12-24T14:04:00.000-08:00

This interview with Derek Gregory is well worth reading. It's great to get to have him as my adviser and get to talk about doing this kind of work.

The citation for the interview is:

Keith P. Feldman, Anoop Mirpuri, Georgia M. Roberts, 2009. Affect, Ethics, and the Imaginative Geographies of Permanent War: An Interview with Derek Gregory. Theory & Event 12.

If you have academic access read the pretty version, but if not, I put it up here
Interview with Derek Gregory

it's so damn hot!

2010-12-15T11:17:00.000-08:00

Yes, it is HOT in Barrancabermeja, Colombia, where Christian Peacemaker Teams does protective accompaniment. So hot that when I visited the team I ended up soaking my feet in pails of cool water because they were so swollen. Or better yet, a cold stream - like this picture taken on a CPT delegation. That's me on the left, with Sylvia, the CPT anti-racism coordinator. How fantastic is it that CPT has a position like that? But still a long ways to go.

I should have taken aspirin for a few days before getting there, apparently. Didn't help that I had been living in high high altitude Bogota. It *does* actually take my body a while to get used to humid heat - but this is no excuse for the racist environmental determinism that believes that people that live in cooler areas are just, well, better. Or that people with, say, African heritage can handle the heat better. Sylvia got heat stroke and it was no joke. You might think that these old racist beliefs are long gone, but this is such a deply ingrained colonial pattern that it keeps cropping up.

One of the geographers who has written a great deal about this is David Livingstone. He recently did a great series on the BBC of five short shows called the Empire of Climate. If you listen to only one, listen to this one on climate and race.

Arrested

2010-12-07T17:04:00.001-08:00

Tami's story of her arrest, and resistance, at the recent vigil to close the School of the Americas gets to the heart of the need to decolonize solidarity. THIS is why it is different for brown folks to go to the SOA vigil, and to get arrested. Twenty six people were arrested at the vigil. Many of them, like Tami, had no intention of being arrested and were doing nothing illegal. Four did purposefully cross on to the base and are facing six months in federal prison. One of the two who began serving time immediately, David Omondi, is a younger black man. I shudder to think at how he is being treated in prison. I am in awe of his strength in choosing, in protest, to willingly go into the prison industrial complex that works to eat alive so many men like him.

For a great full account of the protest and the arrests read this post by Clare.

we don't need no more activist tourism

2010-12-02T20:48:00.000-08:00

MECHA students say it like it is at the recent vigil to close the School of the Americas

WATCH this one!

seeing the invisibles

2010-11-29T19:08:00.001-08:00

here is a gorgeous example of the tactic I've blogged about recently - of how famous people can use their voice to open space for the voices of those less likely to be heard. In this case the gorgeous Gael Garcia Bernal talks to 'invisibles' - watch it to see who they are. It's a short film in four beautiful and hearwrenching parts, this is just the first, the others are here. It's well worth watching until the end just to see the train.

protection manual

2010-11-19T20:37:00.001-08:00

Protection International has a new online Protection Manual for Human Rights Defenders (3rd Edition)

Research and text by Enrique Eguren Fernández and Marie Caraj, 2009, 213 pages

chapters include (for live links to these and more PDF's go their site)

CH 1.5 - PREVENTING AND REACTING TO AGGRESSION - download: PDF

* Assessing the likelihood of different kinds of aggression taking place..
* Preventing possible direct aggression against defenders..
* Carrying out counter - surveillance..

CH 1.8 - IMPROVING SECURITY AT WORK AND HOME - download: PDF

* Assessing security at work or at home.
* Planning, improving and checking security in offices and homes.

CH 1.9 - SECURITY FOR WOMEN HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS - download: PDF

* Looking at security from the perspective of women human rights defenders.
* Providing both women and men human rights defenders with additional security/protection knowledge and tools.

CH 2.2 - MAKING SURE SECURITY RULES AND PROCEDURES ARE FOLLOWED” - download: PDF

* To think about what makes members and organisations unable or unwilling to follow security plans and procedures, and find appropriate solutions.

CH 3.2 - DETENTION, ARREST, ABDUCTION AND KIDNAPPING OF A DEFENDER” - download: PDF

CH 3.4 - SECURITY AND FREE TIME - download: PDF

they have lots of other great publications here

EAPPI: Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel

2010-11-12T10:41:00.000-08:00

EAPPI has a one of the best "who we are" pages of any accompaniment group, here, with this photo (love the candles) and short bios of each of their current 36th group serving, made up of 26 accompaniers from eleven countries (Australia, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and the US). One of the Swiss accompaniers is originally from Colombia. His bio reads:

Jorge

Originally from Colombia, Jorge has been living in Switzerland for the last 5 years. He has a BA in Psychology, a MA in Psychosocial Research and is about to finish his PhD in Neuroscience. He has researched stress, emotions and the psychobiological mechanisms related coping with chronic stress. Now he is interested on going from the lab to the field and as a EA he wishes to focus his efforts on the area of mental health in the conflict. As a Colombian, he is constantly mistaken for an Arab or Israeli, so decided to come and look for his roots!

Several of the EAPPI accompaniers have blogs, listed here with their bios. One recent intriguing entry is titled, Give young people a space - not a place - but sadly the rest of the entry is in Swedish!

"In the Company of Fear"

2010-11-08T20:47:00.001-08:00

I *finally* got my hands on this documentary about accompaniment in Colombia made in 1999 by Velcrow Ripper (yes, yes, get past the odd name), with funding from the fabulous National Film Board of Canada. I'm afraid there is no trailer online to embed here, so I hope you will take my word for it - it's worth watching! Even eleven years later it is still timely, true, and well done. It includes some truly amazing footage. I wish it were more easily available! I've encouraged Velcrow to put it online and you can too. He's easy to find on facebook!

la zona campesina

2010-10-31T21:21:00.000-07:00

another short video by PBI, this time about the zona campesina, a 'small farmer reserve zone'

charity stinks

2010-10-26T11:45:00.001-07:00

Here's another one of those fabulous animated big thinker videos - this time its Zizek going on about the dangers of charity, "and so on and so on". What he frustratingly fails to do then is talk about how solidarity is different. Still, fun to watch.

Our own settler reality

2010-10-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

I appreciated this post sent by Christian Peacemaker Teams so much I'm reposting it in its entirety. (For the record, cpt does do accompaniment in aboriginal territory in Canada (see picture). For more on their work see cpt.org)

27 September 2010
AT-TUWANI/ABORIGINAL JUSTICE REFLECTION: Seeking the peace of Palestine by engaging our own settler reality.

by Steve Heinrichs

A life-changing thought came to mind this past week while I was serving in the village of at-Tuwani. I was out with Palestinian shepherds, watching the Jewish settlers of Ma'on construct another large chicken barn on stolen Palestinian land. As I watched, all of a sudden, the armed Jewish settlers and their bulldozers vanished from sight, only to be replaced by other white settlers—persons of European origin, carrying Bibles, guns, and Christian civilization. Then the Palestinian shepherds next to me, a couple of young Muslim teenagers, also disappeared, and in their place stood two men of First Nations origin. And before I knew it, the desert land beneath my feet began to tremble, and thousands of huge Douglas Firs erupted from the hillsides, while a raging river full of salmon and steelhead burst forth from the rocky valley below.

There was no mistaking it. I was in my “home and native land,” my country of Canada, my province of British Columbia. And as I looked around, I perceived the disturbing truth of the dream.

Historian Norman Finkelstein thinks what happened to the indigenous of Turtle Island (North America) is the best analogy one can draw on to understand current events in Palestine—the ethnic cleansing, the theft of lands, the racist policies. But I'm pressing beyond illuminating parallels. Could it be that the oppressions of these two peoples are connected in some deeper way? And could it be that we North Americans who seek justice in Palestine cannot actually do this work with efficacy, let alone integrity, unless we are seeking the same justice for the host peoples in our countries?

We see (or read about) the Israeli colonialists grabbing more and more land, and getting rid of more and more natives. We see and we cry out; we rage and resist. But where is the similar protest on behalf of the peoples who have suffered the largest holocaust the world has ever known? Conservative estimates assert that there were at least 10 million Native persons living on Turtle Island when Columbus came. By 1900, only 250,000 were left.

Where is our rage? And where is our repentance as inheritors and benefactors of the North American settler movement? If we condemn today's Israeli settlers for stealing Canaan from the Palestinians, what will we do about the Promised Land our settler forefathers wrested from indigenous people, land that we've inherited, land that we live on (and land, of course, symbolizing all our stolen wealth, power, privilege, culture, etc.) Is that simply all in the past?

We North Americans who are seeking justice and peace for the people of Palestine need some new priorities: to get to know the “Palestinians” back home, to hear their stories, and seek justice in solidarity with them. If we did, greater integrity would certainly come our way, but also something much more important. For in a cosmos in which Creator has made everything interrelated, the fight for justice in both places (abroad and at home) might mean that both peoples will experience some kind of just peace sooner.

The distinguished Palestinian poet Mahmoud believed and proclaimed that Palestinian and Native suffering were profoundly connected. In his poem, “The Speech of the Red Indian,” he tells settlers of all stripes—be they Jewish or North American like us —the posture that we need to adopt in order to heal our one human body. It is not a comfortable posture for us settlers. But it is the right and necessary one, and so deserves the last word:

There are dead who light up the night 

of butterflies,

and the dead who come at dawn

 to drink your tea 

as peaceful as on the day your 

guns mowed them down.

O you who are guests in this place,

 leave a few chairs empty

for your hosts to read out 

the conditions for peace

 in a treaty with the dead.

Empire and Solidarity conference

2010-10-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

I wish I were going to the third annual Empire and Solidarity in the Americas Conference in New Orleans this coming weekend. If you live nearby, go for me! The theme this year is Legacies of Central American Solidarity. The good news is that many of the papers are online here. Check it out!

accompanying the accompaniers

2010-10-08T12:09:00.000-07:00

Just as I was complaining about the underuse of online video by accompaniers, PBI Colombia has taken off and gone gangbusters with a whole series of them. This one shows them accompanying the accompaniers - which happens quite often. In this case PBI is accompanying Colombian human rights workers as they travel out to accompany the Wiwa indigenous community.

(In other news, I'm having a great time at the Latin American Studies conference where yesterday I went to a session on solidarity at which Aviva Chomsky yet again wowed me. I hope to post both her paper and the others here soon)

speaking of the space provided by accompaniment

2010-09-29T11:40:00.001-07:00

This is my favorite of the recent short videos by PBI Colombia, because this one so clearly opens a space for the voice of one of the people that they accompany. What is odd is that he seems to say that he also has armed bodyguards - which is against PBI policy I thought. So maybe PBI just accompanies the organization that he works with (CREDHOS) as a whole, not him. It's not quite clear here. What IS clear here is that when he says PBI gives CREDHOS more space, he means not just political space but very literally that with PBI along they can go further out into more dangerous countryside to do their work.

bringing attention to unheard voices

2010-09-20T01:46:00.001-07:00

The theme of famous people bringing attention to otherwise ignored people and places continues - this video is by Greenpeace of a trip the actress Marion Cotillard did to an area of the Congo being devastated by logging. Rather than fetishizing the people of the jungle like the Cameron piece, in this one they're real people that can talk and tell their story - more so in the latter episodes than in this first one. Great explanation at the end of the traceability principle. These videos would be a great tool to foster discussion in class about commodity chains.

a message from Pandora

2010-09-12T21:39:00.001-07:00

I continue to be in awe of the organizers of Amazon Watch's good work of getting James Cameron, the director of Avatar, down to the Amazon to meet with real live people facing environmental destruction of their lands in real live "Pandora". This little video above is him telling of his trip, and I'm sure it will get the story of the destruction of the Amazon out to far more people than would otherwise have heard of it. Not so surprisingly, it suffers from the same white man saviour syndrome that the original movie did. sigh.

using privilege to pee

2010-09-02T14:06:00.001-07:00

If you wanted to use a nice clean bathroom and knew you could walk into a fancy restaraunt and use theirs without being hassled because of your race/class/passport privilege - would you do it?

Would you do it if you were with a friend who would NOT be let in?

Or would you try to walk in with her?

If you were the one who would normally be hassled, would you walk in with your friend?

These simpler questions might be a good way to start a conversation about how, when, and why accompaniment uses privilege. One way to make these exercises more interactive and kinesthetic is to do a sociogram with them. Rather than have people stand along a line of just a yes/no response, you can ask them to position themselves around the room in ways (sitting, standing, facing away, close to the facilitator in the center or far) that reflect the various aspects of their position.

does accompaniment do jiu-jitsu?

2010-08-31T13:39:00.000-07:00

The book People Power: Unarmed Resistance and Global Solidarity (London: Pluto Press, 2009) has several articles on accompaniment, including "Making Accompaniment Effective", by Brian Martin, which is also available online, here.

This short article argues against understanding accompaniment as working through the 'jiu-jitsu effect' and for instead using a 'backfire framework'.

Protecting space for peace

2010-08-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

That's the name of this new short video by PBI about the zona campesina, check it out. I'm thrilled that accompaniers are finally doing more online video!

circle of solidarity, circle of life

2010-08-20T18:44:00.001-07:00

Mulatos Peace Village, June 2010 from Fellowship of Reconciliation on Vimeo.

This short video is a "video letter" from the FOR accompaniers with the peace community of San José de Apartadó. It shows the new buildings at the hamlet (vereda) of Mulatos that is part of the peace community. Mulatos is where Luis Eduardo Guerra, a leader of the community, was murdered, along with his family and another family. I went to Mulatos with the community in March of 2008 on the third anniversary of that massacre. On that trip a few brave families were returning to live in Mulatos. When I was there the only buildings were the abandoned health post and a simple roof only chapel they had built to commemorate the massacre site. It was great to see in this video how much more they have built and how many more families have moved back!

The peace community is an important example of how to resist nonviolently, engage in collective civil disobedience in the middle of a war, and make space for peace and life. It is an honor to be part of their circle of solidarity.

accompaniers support community in pressuring the body shop

2010-08-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

In this video by the Colombian Christian Peacemaker Team they open space for the voices of a community they have been accompanying. The community has been displaced by a palm oil plantation that sells their palm oil to, of all places, the Body Shop.

solidarity is sexy

2010-07-30T10:42:00.001-07:00

Vancouver status of women used this as the title for "a night of connection poetry and music to build VSW's volunteer base and raise support for Haiti"that they held last February.

I think solidarity IS sexy, but we don't often acknowledge that, or talk about it in those terms. It's certainly rare to recruit turnout with a slogan like that! I love that it was a feminist group that used it.

What does it mean that solidarity is sexy? There are the loaded relationships between Latin Americans (usually men) and North Americans (usually women) that come out of solidarity work. But I'm not just thinking about that, though certainly some more open talk about that would be useful for solidarity organizing.

It's not just the people that do solidarity work that are sexy, but something about the very idea itself. Making connections across difference to be more powerful in our organizing for a better world - it's hot!

Hearing the silences in the stories

2010-07-20T15:16:00.000-07:00

It's important to remember that we can't hear it all or really 'know' another's experience when we listen to their personal stories. I've posted before about using fade outs. (Wim Wenders had women from the DRC telling their rape stories and their images fading in and out while they were telling them. It works to remind you that you can't fully see them.) The video above uses a strange black and white cut in that seems to serve as a similar reminder.

the Warsaw ghetto says free the Gaza ghetto

2010-07-14T19:56:00.001-07:00

this "liberate all ghettos" graffiti in hebrew was painted on the walls of the old Warsaw jewish ghetto. great solidarity action!

Yonatan Shapira, former Israeli Air Force captain and now refusenik and BDS activist, said:

‘Most of my family came from Poland and many of my relatives were killed in the death camps during the Holocaust. When I walk in what was left from the Warsaw Ghetto I can’t stop thinking about the people of Gaza who are not only locked in an open air prison but are also being bombarded by fighter jets, attack helicopters and drones, flown by people whom I used to serve with before my refusal in 2003.

I am also thinking about the delegations of young Israelis that are coming to see the history of our people but also are subjected to militaristic and nationalistic brainwashing on a daily basis. Maybe if they see what we wrote here today they will remember that oppression is oppression, occupation is occupation, and crimes against humanity are crimes against humanity, whether they have been committed here in Warsaw or in Gaza’.

thanks to the people's geography site for this one.

yet another post about empathy

2010-07-08T15:13:00.000-07:00

I'm in love with the guy who does these animations. Ok, I haven't met him, but I have spent way too long watching all of the RSA animation videos. They're fantastic! This one is about empathy, and there is another one of David Harvey, the best known living geographer, explaining the economic crisis.

solidarity with the dead

2010-07-01T14:42:00.000-07:00

Powerful video from a campaign in Spain against impunity for the crimes of the Franco regime. Here's one case where I'm perfectly ok with trying to "be the one you're with".

building connections

2010-06-20T16:32:00.001-07:00

My review of the book Feminisms in Geography: Rethinking Space, Place, and Knowledges, edited by Pamela Moss and Karen Falconer Al-Hindi just came out in thirdspace. The review is entitled Mutilingual, multifeminisms, and is online here.

I would be honored if you read the whole review, but here are two key paragraphs:

"... These issues are also addressed in Geraldine Pratt’s absolutely fantastic short chapter (if you read only one chapter, read this one) entitled “Complexity and Connection”. It takes her earlier piece (also included, and entitled “Reflections on poststructuralism and feminist empirics, theory and practice”), and carries it beyond a US context. She argues, again, for the central role that geographers can play in working through differences between women. Rather than spouting tired universalizing generalizations, geographers can actually do the hard work of translating across contexts, material differences and, as she puts it, “competing, situated universal norms and claims” (70), rather than simply translating ideas into the language of the dominant framework, or absorbing them into a generalization. As a translator, I couldn’t agree more. Although I have been arguing here for prioritizing and funding more translation into English, I envision this as only one part of an engaged back and forth building of more connections between (as the book calls us, though I do not love the term) “Anglo-American” and other feminist geographers. Gerry Pratt is absolutely right that as geographers we have an important role to play in building a transnational feminism by drawing, as Cindi Katz (2001) calls them, counter-topographical contour lines that show how the same processes affects us in different ways. Doing so can help us articulate struggles across different places. These lines, as Pratt puts it, open possibilities for political connection (71) and meaningful alliances. We are not pure victims or oppressors, and we can forge connections “across our many shifting complicities as well as oppressions” (73).

Kath Browne’s chapter was useful to me in thinking through how to do this work as geographers. In it she points to how power and privilege work even in feminist geographies. I very much appreciate that she asks how relations of power between feminist geographers re-produce experts and expertise, and that she looks in particular at the practices of power that continually re-create spaces of speaking and writing. This book as a whole works to interrogate, as Kath Browne puts it, how we do our feminism, and work to open those practices. Holding a review panel at the AAGs like the one these review essays come out of, with more ‘junior’ scholars, continues this work. But it is not just a matter of, again in Browne’s words, including more silenced voices, but actually sensitively and constructively engaging with one another in safe spaces. This book functions as one such safe space, the review panel was another, and I hope that this journal can continue to be one. .... continued here.

video of Finnish accompanier killed in Mexico

2010-06-14T16:40:00.001-07:00

I was particularly struck by what he says here about solidarity towards the end. Updates on this incident and the ongoing struggle of the San Juan Copala community in resistance on the angry white kid blog. For those who haven't been following it, the brief version is that he was on a caravan trying to get humanitarian supplies into the community, which is blockaded by paramilitaries. Those paramilitaries shot at the caravan and specifically targeted Betty, a high profile Mexican human rights leaders. Jyri lunged in fronted of Betty to protect her and they shot and killed both of them.

more online privacy tweaks for the (appropriately?) paranoid

2010-06-06T08:46:00.001-07:00

reposted from lifehacker

With all the talk lately about Facebook's flawed privacy systems, it's a good time to consider what you're making available elsewhere on the web and on your system. These 10 settings tweaks and setups make your web life a little less public.

Photo by Jorge Franganillo.

Note: The most basic means of boosting your privacy in any computer system is encrypting your data, but that's more of a system setup than a slight change to your usual setup. Still, it's worth looking into if you've got files for your eyes only.

10. Run a Background Check on Yourself to Know What's Out There

It takes only a few seconds to know what Google knows about you, but there are many, many other avenues into your past and present on the web. Want to know more about what a potential employer can know? Consumer action blog Consumerist has a nicely comprehensive list of background check tools to try out. You shouldn't try and run them all, but at least get a feel for what can be known about you with just a few clicks. Photo by omk_489. (Original post)

9. Skip Incognito/Private Browsing and Really Leave No Trace

Private browsing modes might prevent your coworkers or roommates from seeing where you wander on the web, but you still leave plenty of traces for someone who knows where to look. Take the How-To Geek's advice and really browse without leaving a trace. Wipe away Flash cookies, clean out DNS caches, and automate your system so every boot-up is a fresh start.

8. Pick Better Security Questions

Some security questions and password recovery schemes offered by webapps are so bad, anyone with your casual acquaintance and a small amount of Google savvy could poke into your email whenever they felt like it. To get around weak security questions, use blogger danah boyd's security question algorithm. Instead of straight-up providing your mother's maiden name, use a scheme, such as "[Snarky Bad Attitude Phrase] + [Core Noun Phrase] + [Unique Word]," so that your answer becomes "StupidQuestion MiddleName Booyah," substituting "MiddleName" for the actual answer. If you're lucky enough to be able to choose your own security questions, Lifehacker reader James has written about the best kinds of questions at his blog. (Original posts: memorable answers, good questions).

7. Set Up BitTorrent for Private Downloading

BitTorrent is a public commons of file sharing, and that means that all kinds of folks interested in, say, what your home IP address is, and what you're downloading, can dig into it. With both a proxy and settings in your favorite torrent app, you can protect your privacy when downloading. Nothing's foolproof, but a few checkboxes and a different downloading path can do a lot to give you great peace of mind.

6. Know Your Google Settings

If you're anything like us, or most of our readers, you've got a lot of your life floating around in Google's cloud-based apps. It pays, then, to know how to set what Google shares publicly about you, how much of your search history is being saved, and how to back up your data so you've always got your own copy. These are among the 10 Google settings you should know about that center on privacy and data retention, though it's always a good idea to know the parameters of the spaces you share your data in.

5. Know How to Travel Without Being Spied On

Just because some countries have widespread net access doesn't mean it's an open and private web. It's often meant to deter dissidents in strong-handed regimes, but why take the chance of letting your web data fall into the wrong hands? One Lifehacker reader, wishing to remain anonymous and in a non-specific region, crafted a survival guide for traveling where privacy isn't respected. Using secure Gmail, carrying two cloned USB sticks, relying on KeePass and TrueCrypt for passwords and encryption, and knowing how to send data over the web without having it looked at are all good skills to have, both for traveling and in general. Image a composite of photos by hemmob and nolifebeforecofee

4. Know Where You Stand With Facebook at a Glance

Facebook has promised "simplistic" privacy settings coming soon, but in the meantime, knowing exactly what you've offered to share or keep private is far from transparent. One very crafty hacker at ReclaimPrivacy has put together a settings-scanning bookmarklet that shows what you're sharing beyond your social circle, and offers links and automatic fixes for those settings. Another coder, Ka-Ping Yee, offers a site that shows what the public web can see on Facebook, some of which you can then remove. They're both excellent eye-openers, both for your own account and for friends who refuse to consider what's being shown out there. (Original posts: ReclaimPrivacy bookmarklet, Facebook public).

3. Run Your Browser Through a Proxy

It's not something you'll want to do all the time, but once in a while, you might want to hide your online tracks. To do so, you can use the go-to web randomization tool, TOR, which has tools available for nearly every OS and browser. For a DIY solution that can work from any browser, we've detailed installing the free PHProxy tool on your home computer or hosted web space to get around restrictions and slightly disguise your tracks. You could also run a proxy through Google's App Engine, and go the full-tilt geek route of encrypting your browsing with an SSH SOCKS proxy. Any way you choose, it's a smart skill to have handy for dodgy connections and restrictive networks.

2. Better Protect Your Mint.com or Other Financial Accounts

The thing that makes Mint.com such a convenient one-stop shop for financial data and budgeting also makes it a gold mine for anyone looking to learn more about you, or know which accounts they could try to jump into. Security professional Jason Owens provides some smart tips on better protecting your Mint.com account that can apply to any site where you manage your financials. Key among them—don't use your regular email address. Set up a new email address you don't tell anyone about as your login/password verification address. You can forward its mail to your main email, sure, but if someone compromises your email, don't make it too too easy for them to get a hold on your finances.

1. Stay Available on Facebook Without Really Being In It

You might have considered quitting Facebook, but stopped short because it's how a few far-flung friends and relatives stay in touch, or a place those without your email address can ping you. We can understand, and, luckily, have a halfway solution to recommend. Quit Facebook without really quitting, as Whitson did. Create a new account, linked to a different email, and set it up so that your old friends are still there, but Facebook, even at its most Draconian, can't really reveal all that much about you, and your friends can't really overshare without your permission.

Send an email to Kevin Purdy, the author of this post, at kevin@lifehacker.com.

great videos about the Colombian organizations that PBI accompanies

2010-05-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

this is the first of several, for the others see the youtube sidelinks

being safe online

2010-05-12T11:29:00.001-07:00

I keep reading about Colombian government surveillance of activists, so here is more self-defense from the paranoia front, in a great article entitled:

6 Ideas For Those Needing Defensive Technology to Protect Free Speech from Authoritarian Regimes and 4 Ways the Rest of Us Can Help

the quick and dirty take away lessons:

Is it safe to talk about your civil disobedience plan on skype? Probably.
You can offer bandwidth in solidarity through Tor - a very cool way to do online solidarity.

voluntours for jutice?

2010-05-05T11:47:00.001-07:00

This is a draft of a book review that I wrote for the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change

of the book
Journeys of Discovery in Volunteer Tourism
Edited by K.D. Lyons and S. Wearing, 2008

This is a collection of glowing accounts of case studies in volunteer tourism. What is volunteer tourism (voluntourism)? Well, the editors begin by saying that they do not want to settle on a limited definition, though they recognize that one of them, Wearing, had previously (2002) offered a definition that is widely cited by authors throughout the book. That definition is that volunteer tourists are those who “volunteer in an organized way to undertake holidays that may involve the aiding or alleviating the material poverty of some groups in society, the restoration of certain environments or research into aspects of society or environment” (given on p. 3 of this volume). As they point out, the problem with this definition is that it limits it to those experiences that happen in the context of holidays or vacation. Presumably this is as opposed to longer-term stays? This is not specified.

I was interested in this book because of my own research on international protective accompaniers. These are people, generally from the “West”, who go to conflict zones, generally in “developing” countries, and serve as volunteer ‘unarmed bodyguards’ for local peace workers under death threat. These accompaniers generally do not consider themselves tourists, but some of them do only stay for 2 month stints, so I thought it might be interesting to think about it in these terms. Accompaniment is not considered in this volume, but it would seem that a robust framework would encompass this sort of volunteering. Certainly Wearing’s 2002 definition does not, for accompaniers are volunteering to build peace and justice, rather than alleviate poverty, restore the environment, or research society. A broadening of the definition to other purposes of the volunteering would be useful. Unfortunately since the editors choose not to specify a definition, authors here tended to rely on the limited definition given by Wearing in 2002 (above).

Though a broader definition is not explicitly formulated, the last section of the book is indeed aimed at expanding the notion of what volunteer tourism is. The book is divided into three sections, each with an introductory chapter by the editors. Part one is “Journeys Beyond Otherness: Communities Culture and Power”. Part two is “Inward Journeys: Motivations, Needs and the Self”. Part three is “Journeys at the Edge: Overlaps and Ambiguities”. This final section includes a chapter on museum volunteers (tourists in their own home town), volunteer national tourists in Indigenous communities in New Zealand (visit the “third world” in your own country), the way that the lonely planet shapes tourism (yes, they now have a guide to volunteer tourism), and, most inspiringly, a chapter by Higgins-Desbiolles and Russell-Mundine on speaking tours in the global North by social justice activists from the global South, and political delegations from North to South (both called here Solidarity Tours). This chapter, entitled “Absences in the Volunteer Tourism Phenomenon: the Right to Travel, Solidarity Tours and Transformation Beyond the One-way” asks, can volunteer tourism contribute to global peace and solidarity? It does not offer much of an answer, but suggests that it is more likely to do so when exchanges are two way, and it is not only, as is generally the case, the privileged who travel.

That essay is as close as this book comes to being critical. I was surprised to find no discussion in this book of the colonial patterns that volunteer tourism can often fall into, or of how it uses, and reinforces, passport/economic/racial privilege (so hard to untangle). No connection is made to the literature critiquing humanitarianism, or even critical reflections on the connection to Mission work. Quite the opposite. The New Zealand pakeha (non-Maori) volunteers on the marae are described as providing positive role models by virtue of having conversations with Maori youth about not having babies outside of marriage.

The chapter by Pearce and Coghlan on dynamics of volunteer tourism does point to the fact that most volunteer tourists are from Europe and North America, and not Asia and the Middle East, where there are, as they put it, “parallel pockets of affluence” (132). Rather than point to how this might be linked to a history of colonialism and mission work, their answer for this is simply cultural difference. They do mention that perhaps volunteers are trying to ameliorate the historical exploitation and environmental mistakes on which their society has been built (Pearce and Coghlan, 132). Sadly this does not lead to any further discussion of the role of guilt or accountability in this work, which I would have found useful for my own work on how these shape solidarity travel and activism (Koopman 2008).

Spencer’s chapter reviewing NGO study tours of Cuba does mention that it “could” be argued that voluntours are attempting to overcome their ‘complicity’. Yet rather than engage in that discussion, he moves right on to say that as compared to mass tourists in the developing world, they are benevolent. So voluntours are not only becoming innocent, they are good! I do not mean to imply that they are bad and guilty, but rather that these dynamics of being seen as, or imagining oneself in this way, are fascinating ones. Barbara Heron (2007), based on discussions with white women who do development work in Africa, argues that being a good helper to those with less privilege has traditionally been the way white women have gained subjectivity and gotten out of the home. These sorts of engagements with the links to the intimate histories of empire would have enriched this book.

The chapter by Soderman and Snead on the motivation of volunteer tourists, does cite Simpson (2005) on the ‘geography of experimentation’ that began in the colonial era, where the colonies were a place to practice what could not be done at home. So too, Brits on their ‘gap year get to ‘practice’, say, construction and teaching, in ways they could not in the UK without qualification. The authors cite this argument, but fail to engage with it.

The most critical this book gets is of how the hegemonic forces of capitalism are trying to usurp, divert, and commodify volunteer tourism, as they have ecotourism. The editors warn in their introduction to the final section of the danger of volunteer tourism becoming a tranquilizer rather than awareness-raising, and of communities becoming ‘consumables’ (153).

I am all in favor of focusing on what works. I do ‘appreciate’ the chapter by Raymond, who used a method of ‘appreciative inquiry’ to discuss volunteer tourism with ‘sending organizations’. But I also think it is useful to look at what does not work, so that it does not sneak in to what does. It would also be more useful to look more carefully and what works and how. Some chapters paint in very broad strokes. Mathews’ chapter on the impact of volunteer tourism on the volunteers claims that these programs, “reinstate a sense of (at least symbolic) equality between self and other. By ‘giving something back’ a one-way process of knowledge consumption becomes a two-way process of knowledge-sharing and production, a mutual dialogue rather than a singular monologue” (108). This is a very idealistic vision. Often these programs are not premised on equality, but quite the opposite.

Some of the writing in this collection is quite stilted, for my taste, and constantly bows to the deity of objectivity (even to the point of seeming to apologize for doing ethnography). Most authors are based in Australia, as are the editors. There is a striking absence of authors based in the global South, particularly given the subject matter. Many of the chapters are quite dry. Lepp, for example, concludes that volunteers working with the community, and those working with wildlife, were similarly benefitted. Lepp goes on to argue that reflection is the key to benefitting from novel experiences (98). Yet neither Lepp nor the volunteers seem to be reflecting much on issues of power. Indeed, in the entire section of chapters on volunteers negotiating the self, this self is never discovered as privileged, raced, or gendered.

The chapter by McGehee and Andereck not only has the best title (pettin’ the critters), but does some of the most intriguing work. They are the only ones in the collection to turn to the “voluntoured”, yet do so based on very brief research. Clearly this is an area that needs far more attention. McGehee and Andereck look at two host communities in particular, in Appalachia and Tijuana. McDowell county, in West Virginia, started receiving VISTA volunteers in the 60s. Today most of the volunteers are, yes indeed, students on week long Christian mission trips. The missionary aspect and history is not engaged with. They do have a very brief section on the role of religion in voluntourism, but it does not go much further than to say that “if we were” to trace the roots of it, we would likely find mission and relief work of churches (20). There is no examination of how it follows those patterns today, and their impact. Instead there is a brief discussion of how the two host communities they studied do or don’t mind voluntours being associated with a church.

Tijuana, they go on to say, is a highly “voluntoured” city because of it’s proximity the US (17). A worker with a host organization there told them that voluntours frequently want to come and hand out used clothing, personally. Her term for it was that they wanted to “pet the critters”. The authors recognize that this points to how voluntours want to be thanked and feel good about what they have done, but do not engage critically with the unequal subject-making work happening here. Indeed, they go on to tell stories of volunteers surreptitiously giving away clothing, even though programs do not allow it, and romantically see this as something like a family exchange, a “joyous and equitable experience” (19). The authors do not speak Spanish and perhaps missed the power dynamics here in a country where used clothing is usually given to maids by the middle class. Yet at least these authors are engaging in the question of how othering happens in voluntourism, and how host organizations try to avoid it. For example, they report that one organization in Appalachia does not allow voluntours to meet the people who will receive the houses they are building (20).

The chapter by Higgins-Desbiolles and Russel-Mundine, which looks at two way solidarity tourism, examines volunteer tourism in terms of ‘justice tourism’. This book could have used much more evaluation like this of voluntourism’s impact on peace, justice and human rights. It could also use more creative thinking about how to overcome and rework colonial legacies of privilege that shape voluntourism. I very much appreciated the discussion by these two authors on the right to travel for all, and the long struggle for social tourism. These efforts are rarely put into conversation with voluntourism.

As I was write this, Gustavo Ulcue, a Colombian indigenous alternative media activist working with the ACIN, is driving with friends across Canada on a speaking tour. He is seeing the Rockies on his way to speak in Vancouver, but in helping to organize his visit I certainly never thought of him as a ‘voluntour’! Nor did I, in my own research, think of human rights accompaniers as ‘voluntours’. This book did left me wondering if it would be useful to do so. This collection does not make significant contribution to debates on colonialism in travel, the political geography of travel, nor to critical tourism studies.

Heron, B (2007) Desire for Development: Whiteness, Gender, and the Helping Imperative. Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Koopman, S (2008) Imperialism Within: Can the Master’s Tools Bring Down Empire? Acme: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies. 7(2):283–307

Simpson, K (2005) Broad Horizons? Geographies and Pedagogies of the Gap Year. PhD thesis. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

Wearing, S (2002) In: Dann, G.S. (ed.) Re-centring the self in volunteer tourism. The tourist as a metaphor of the social world. CAB International, Wallingford, UK. 237-262.

stand with Haitian women

2010-04-28T20:30:00.000-07:00

Haitian Women Testify from Adam Stofsky on Vimeo.

This is a powerful (disturbing) video of testimony about the crisis of rapes in Haitian refugee camps. I've written about the problem with rapes at the world social forum youth camp. I'm guessing rapes are an ongoing problem at camps around the world. It's strange - you would think having lots of people around would STOP sexual violence, not foster it! So the ask that comes with this video is a great quick click action from haitijustice.org. As they put it:

"There have been some efforts by Haitian officials and the international community to provide protection and post-rape services, but these efforts have fallen short. This is unacceptable. Numerous international standards [iii] and guidelines [iv] warn of heightened levels of gender-based violence in the wake of disaster and provide recommendations for ensuring women’s safety, care and legal recourse. Contrary to the recommendations, Haitian women have been systematically excluded [v] or underrepresented in earthquake response decisions. Women’s repeated requests [vi] for inclusion [vii] in the Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA [viii]) process and the UN Donor meetings [ix] on March 31 went unanswered. By leaving Haitian women themselves out of the discussion, so too were their needs.

On her visit to Haiti last weekend, UN Deputy Secretary-General Asha Rose Migiro listened to women’s fears [x] of being sexually assaulted or beaten. She also noted the critical conditions people are living in (see a video on conditions in the camps and sign a petition demanding improved aid distribution[xi]). The UN Independent Expert on Human Rights in Haiti, Michel Forst is in Haiti this week [xii] where he too will reportedly listen to women and other vulnerable populations.

The UN has taken the first step by listening to women. Action must follow. To call on the UN, and more specifically the Security Council, MINUSTAH, UN Member states and the Government of Haiti, to take the next step, sign the petition by clicking here.

easy way to make a short animated clip for your campaign

2010-04-24T15:12:00.001-07:00

As a grad student, I find this animation (found thanks to Jon at posthegemony) hilarious - if you're not an academic, it will probably seem bizarre - but I'm posting it here for the software it was made with. Xtranormal is a site that for making free simple animations like this one. I have yet to see anyone use it for solidarity organizing, but it seems like it would be super easy. If you try it out send it to me and I'll post it!

animation for solidarity

2010-04-06T13:48:00.000-07:00

I haven't yet found kinetic typography being used to build solidarity - but I did find this animation that is a sort of visualization of Burma solidarity. Sadly I couldn't embed it (bad organizing on their part it would seem).The other great solidarity animation that comes to mind is Colombia clean by AI, the video above. Older, but sadly, still all too true. Any others animations around solidarity that folks know of?

arrest yourself in solidarity

2010-03-26T22:00:00.000-07:00

This is a cute video for a very creative campaign in solidarity with the people of Burma and their elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Other solidarity campaigns, take note! It does come back to the issue I keep chewing on as to whether we have to 'feel other people's pain' to be in struggle with them. Of course no one is going to think that by putting themselves under house arrest for one day they will have any idea what it is like to be under it for 16 years - but maybe it helps us to get to begin to imagine it, enough to spur us, and our friends, into more action. Which is not quite what I've been arguing in previous posts, so I guess I have mixed feelings because this campaign appeals to me! Thoughts?

decolonizing our use of photography

2010-03-22T13:06:00.000-07:00

Caption: Bududa, Eastern Uganda. A boy walks over the churned mud after heavy rains caused landslides on Mount Elgon on Tuesday. Three villages were engulfed, at least 80 people were killed and around 250 are missing. The Guardian, 6 March 2010, p. 23. Credit: James Akena/Reuters

Photography is a powerful way to inspire solidarity, and I wish international solidarity movements used more of it, but it is also VERY easy for photography to unintentionally fall into colonial patterns in ways we may not see right off. Before you read on, stop and think: what patterns might the above photograph be falling into?

As David Campbell, one of my favorite geographers, put it: "The choices that Akena made in taking the photograph, and The Guardian made in making it the largest picture in its ‘Eyewitnessed’ double page spread for the first week in March, are evident when compared to other pictures from the same event. On The New York Times Lens blog Stephen Wandera’s photograph for AP (see slide 2) shows a large crowd at the scene searching for survivors, while a Ugandan TV report also shows the community at large. These demonstrate that the photography of the lone boy is a specific choice with particular effects that tap into a long history of visual representation.

It is time for the photographic visualization of ‘Africa’ to offer something different. ..One significant project doing this is Joan Bardeletti’s “Middle Classes in Africa,”...

Caption: Un dimanche après midi en famille sur la plage près de Maputo. Joan Bardeletti/Picturetank

The picture above just cracks me up. It's the little dog that gets me. In the rest of his post, David goes on to argue that it's not a matter of some pictures being right or wrong, or just thinking of it in terms of positive or negative photos, but aiming to not perpetuate cliches, like "lack and absences in ‘Africa’" and that instead we should aim "for a more complex, self-aware, form of ‘positive’ photography". Not sure that this exhibit of African women leaders by Bono's One organization fits that bill.

why avatar is screwed up solidarity and ...

2010-03-14T13:14:00.001-07:00

A fantastic analysis of what is going on with white guilt in Avatar and many other sci fi movies, here. Utterly worth the read.

And, in the continuing effort to turn Avatar into some real solidarity, there was a campaign on to get James Cameron (the writer and director) to mention a real Avatar like struggle in Ecuador against Chevron at the Oscars. Who knows if he would have done it, because he lost to his ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow, who amazingly is the first woman to win best director. What year is this?

solidarity mourning

2010-03-08T21:17:00.001-08:00

I continue to be awed by the fabulous work done by Rachel Corrie's parents. Here is the latest, as the anniversary of her death approaches.

Call to action: Rachel Corrie trial in Israel and actions world wide

Rachel Corrie Foundation
10-24 March 2010

Friends,

Rachel nonviolently blocks Israeli bulldozers from destroying Palestinian homes along the Rafah/Egyptian boarder while volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement.

As many of you know, a civil lawsuit in the case of our daughter Rachel Corrie is scheduled for trial in the Haifa District Court beginning March 10, 2010. A human rights observer and activist, Rachel, 23, tried nonviolently to offer protection for a Palestinian family whose home was threatened with demolition by the Israeli military. On March 16, 2003, she was crushed to death by an Israel Defense Force (IDF) Caterpillar D9R bulldozer in Rafah, Gaza.

The lawsuit is one piece of our family’s seven-year effort to pursue justice for our daughter and sister. We hope this trial will illustrate the need for accountability for thousands of lives lost, or indelibly injured, by occupation—in a besieged and beleaguered Gaza and throughout Palestine/Israel; bring attention to the assault on nonviolent human rights activists (Palestinian, Israeli, and international); and underscore the fact that so many Palestinian families, harmed as deeply as ours, cannot access Israeli courts. In order to deliver these interconnected messages as effectively as possible, we are asking for large-scale participation in the trial itself as well as in the events surrounding it. We hope you will join us for all or some of the events listed below and help us to put the call out to others.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 10
9:00-16:00—Trial Begins in the Haifa District Court (12 Palyam St. Haifa)

A strong presence of human rights observers, legal observers, and others on the first day of the trial will send the message that this case is being closely monitored and that truth, accountability and justice matter to us all. Other trial dates are: March 14, 15, 17, 21, 22 and 24. Supportive presence at all court sessions is both welcome and needed!

FRIDAY, MARCH 12
13:00-15:00—Film Screening at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque (2 Shprinzak St. Tel Aviv)

Screening of the documentary film RACHEL followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Simone Bitton and the Corrie family. RACHEL is a cinematic inquiry into Rachel’s killing. It raises many of the questions that should be asked and addressed during the trial.

TUESDAY, MARCH 16
20:00-22:00—Memorial; Location TBA

March 16th marks the seven-year anniversary of Rachel’s killing. We hope to mark this day as a “Day of Conscience” with a large gathering that calls for truth, accountability and justice, in Rachel’s case and beyond. There will also be events in Gaza (at the Rachel Corrie Children and Youth Cultural Center in Rafah), possibly in the West Bank (TBA), and around the world. If you are not with us in Palestine/Israel, please think about how you and your group/community can be visible/audible on March 16.

Cindy and Craig Corrie

We expect this to be a challenging time, but we know the friendship we have felt from so many of you over the years will help us navigate the weeks ahead. Though the course and outcome of the trial are unknown, we welcome the opportunity to raise and highlight many of the critical issues to which Rachel’s case is linked. Thank you for your continuing support.

In solidarity and with much appreciation,

Cindy & Craig Corrie