Currently viewing the tag: "advocacy"

Laura Seay with Alex de Waal, From The Washington Post, July 17, 2015, Monkey Cage

In today’s hyper-connected world, it’s easier than ever for those who live thousands of miles away from a conflict area to learn about a crisis. When people of good will hear about a crisis, be it the plight of […]

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I would like to introduce you to Sylvain Mbiye (Mushiba) Saluseke. He is the husband of a friend of mine, and a Congolese civil society activist. I introduce you to him because he has been detained without charges by Congolese security services in Kinshasa since March 17. His plight is both personal and historic. It is, of course, deeply painful for his family and loved ones, and it is also a small thread in the unraveling political story in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The longer he is detained, the worse is the fate of the country’s future. This is true not because of anything that Saluseke himself might have done or might yet do; rather, it is true because his continued detention serves as warning of how the government will act as the elections of 2016 approach.

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From our colleagues at Tactical Technology Collective: “There are many around the world who use their creativity to resist, remain critical and ask difficult questions that fall outside of popular political and ideological narratives. We take this moment to recognise them show our respect and thanks.

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If it weren’t for the cruel stakes of the violence, U.S. policy in Iraq would form the perfect parody of the idea that militarized response to threats against civilians is a viable policy, let alone that this tactic could be mistaken for a strategy. After all, given the patterns of assaults against civilians in Iraq, the intervention should have come in 2006 – 2007, or even earlier, in March – April 2003, because these are the periods during which the spikes of violence against civilians reached their peak. Of course, the great irony is that no one, least of all anti-atrocity advocates, could have called for U.S. military intervention then. If anyone had wanted to suggest this policy – and no one did — there was one fatal logical flaw: the intervention had already occurred. The only time you can call for intervention is after the U.S. had left; but it would be folly to pretend that just because this little catch in the intervention logic had been resolved that the policy itself would have improved.

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In the ten days following September 23, Sudanese cities witnessed the largest anti-government protests in many years. Many of the protesters aimed to bring down the government; others sought a reversal of its recent decision to reduce fuel subsidies. The police and security services responded with lethal force, and according to Amnesty International, killed more […]

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Summary of Keynote Address at the conference, The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the frontiers of research and advocacy, University of Dayton, Ohio, October 4, 2013.

In this presentation I trace the genealogy of the practice of activism on civil and political rights, first of all in western nation-states, and then in […]

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