Title: Building a Multi-Directional Transnational Solidarity Movement

Within this predominant relationship, the colonial mindset continues to influence our understanding of who needs help, who is responsible for the conditions of those in need, and who should help those in need overcome these conditions. Makau Mutua describes this relationship using the metaphor of “savages, victims, and saviors” (SVS). This relationship is a racialized one, as savages and their victims are generally located in the Global South—and thus generally non-white and non-Western—while the White saviors come to the rescue from locations in the West. A foundational element of SVS and the one-directional solidarity movements is the accompanying outward gaze: victims of oppression reside outside the Western world, and therefore those who reside in the West must speak for and act on behalf of those who do not.

Transnational solidarity is further complicated by the role of the West at the state level. In the form of “civilizing missions” and “humanitarian interventions,” the West has intervened in the Global South when they have something to gain in doing so. For example, as I discuss in The United States and Genocide: (Re)Defining the Relationship, the United States actively and materially supported Efraín Ríos Montt while his forces were committing genocide in Guatemala. The Reagan State Department claimed Ríos Montt was acting to restore “free world values to a people long crushed by exploitation and strife at the hands of an unwelcome and unwarranted insurgency.” In actuality, the United States perceived the leftist insurgency as a communist “threat” to US “interests,” elevating these concerns above the lives of Mayans living in Guatemala.

Such interventions, too, flow in one direction, often with catastrophic consequences for the populations being “saved.” One need only look to Libya post-2011 for a prime example. Nonetheless, the state is the primary external actor through which acts of solidarity in support of human rights activists endure, from the responsibility to protect (RtoP) to responsibility while protecting (RwP). The problems with RtoP have been well-documented. RwP, put forward by Brazil following the intervention in Libya, seeks to ameliorate many of the concerns associated with RtoP, but there is only so much that can be done for a norm that is irreparably flawed.

RtoP is a tool of the West that is selectively invoked and applied. The intervention in Libya was launched not merely to protect people in Benghazi, but rather to provide military support for rebels as they ultimately deposed (and executed) Muammar Gaddafi. If the goal of the intervention was truly the protection of Libyans, NATO would not have rejected numerous proposed ceasefires, including one put forward by the African Union that included delivery of humanitarian aid and the beginning of discussions on reforming Libya’s political system. Meanwhile, RtoP has been largely ignored throughout the Saudi-led coalition’s war crimes (which I argue amount to genocide) in Yemen, despite the associated humanitarian catastrophe.

Even the more recent development of the concept of the Right to Assist (RtoA) bears the hallmarks of a one-directional approach that can easily be funneled top-down from external state actors to foreign human rights activists. RtoA’s one-directional flow is evident in the following excerpt: “When a population rises up against an authoritarian regime, people in that population face the choice of whether to employ violent or nonviolent tactics.” “Authoritarian regime” is code for non-Western; not that all non-Western states are authoritarian, but rather all authoritarian states are located outside the commonly understood “West.” It also ignores oppression of people in the West and the possibility that they, too, might rise up. Thus, RtoA makes clear that it is meant to be invoked in the non-authoritarian West against the authoritarian others. In practice, RtoA may involve “some targeted forms of material support, efforts to prevent and reduce the impact of repression, and the exertion of nonviolent pressure on a movement’s adversary.” These are examples of acts that are primarily within the powers of external state actors.

As well-intended as RtoA is, the world does not need more one-directional top-down approaches. “Not exclusively state-centered” is not the same as people-centered. People have shared interests in their common humanity; states do not share these same interests. A multi-directional transnational solidarity movement must transcend the assumptions about the oppressed, the oppressors, and the liberators. Participants in such a movement can use their common humanity and appropriate the tools of globalization to break down the various barriers that separate them.

Importantly, civil society and activists must play a significant role in creating new, and expanding on existing, transnational solidarity movements that flow against the normal West-East and North-South tides. This expanded role will require more platforms for non-Western NGOs to contribute to the global human rights agenda. Arguably, the two most well-known international human rights organizations are Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Both of these have headquarters in the West, and both have been rightly criticized at times by activists for geographic biases and for their prioritization of civil and political rights at the expense of economic, social, and cultural rights.

This latter point relates to the broader debate in the human rights field about the place and importance of economic and social rights. We must continue to move beyond the model of human rights as primarily individual rights (civil/political) and the violators of human rights as individuals (and the states they represent), to a model that fully recognizes human rights as collective rights. This move will necessitate an increased focus on the various structures and institutions, with human rights violations embedded within them. Only then can the hierarchy of human rights that has been produced and reproduced by an inequitably built human rights project be dismantled.

Failure to upend the hierarchy of rights will contribute to the maintenance of the outward gaze from the United States and Western NGO sectors to the rest of the world. These sectors identify and assess human rights issues in other countries without permitting any space for reciprocation from non-Western NGOs to identify and assess human rights issues in the United States and the West. Though there has been increasing participation from US activists in United Nations mechanisms, such as in relation to the right to water, there is still a need for direct and active engagement between non-Western NGOs and the survivors of human rights violations in the West, as well as the activists taking up their causes. Ultimately, non-Western NGOs must be empowered to reciprocate, whether such reciprocation is welcomed or not.

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Jeff Bachman is a Professorial Lecturer in Human Rights at the American University School of International Service. His primary areas of interest are human rights, political violence, and genocide. Recent publications include The United States and Genocide: (Re)Defining the Relationship, “A ‘Synchronized Attack’ on Life: The Saudi-Led Coalition’s ‘Hidden and Holistic’ Genocide in Yemen and the Shared Responsibility of the US and UK,” “Lethal Sterility: Innovative Dehumanization in Legal Justifications of Obama’s Drone Policy,” and the edited volume Cultural Genocide: Law, Politics, and Global Manifestations.