Forever Young: A Youthful Perspective on "Grown-Up" Human Rights Organizations

From standnow.org

As I  read my Introduction to International Politics assignment on human rights, I suddenly stumbled across this thought-provoking paragraph: 

But campaigning NGOs, as distinct from those with real development programs in the field, almost have to be radical. If they stop denouncing big organizations, nobody will send them cash or quote them in the newspapers. Partly for this reason, and partly out of a likeable conviction that the status quo is never good enough, most NGOs do not have an off switch. You can do everything possible to meet them halfway, but they will still demonstrate outside your building. Of course, there will be grown-up groups like Oxfam, World Vision, or the World Wildlife Fund that may accept your olive branch. But they will be the exceptions, and they may cooperate only cautiously (Sebastian Mallaby, NGO's: Fighting Poverty, Hurting the Poor).

 The rationale behind this conclusion was further developed as the article went on to note that although human rights activists have the best intentions in mind, oftentimes their attempts are misguided and are actually detrimental to the cause for which they are fighting.  For example, many human rights activists strongly supported the Conflict Free Minerals Campaign before examining all of the possible consequences of the campaign.  Many original supporters of the campaign have now turned their backs, proclaiming that conflict-free minerals are simply leading to Congo-Free minerals, which in turn further slows development in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  This may harm the very people that advocates of the Conflict Free Minerals Campaign were trying to help.  Although a provision on conflict free minerals has already been included in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, the majority of debate regarding the merits of the campaign only began after the bill was passed. Clearly, this is an important discussion which should have begun in earnest before the bill was passed.  As I continued grappling with the content of the sentence in the article, I wondered why I was initially surprised upon reading it.  Off the top of my head, I thought of countless more examples of instances where human rights activists and transnational advocacy networks had committed this unfortunate yet egregious error.  Why was I thrown off guard at the mention of a fairly common phenomenon in the world of transnational advocacy networks?

From standnow.org

After a few more minutes of contemplation, I realized that although this phenomenon of misguided activism may be prevalent in the human rights advocacy world as a whole, I have not encountered such an issue at STAND.  As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, I am the Advocacy Training Coordinator of STAND, a student anti-genocide constituency.  Although no organization is perfect, I believe STAND has taken great strides towards forming and supporting nuanced policy that purposely avoids the pitfalls of uninformed advocacy.  Perhaps it is because we are comprised solely of students and thus automatically perceived as an outsider of the “grown-up” class of human rights organizations that we are hyper aware of every action we take.  Although as a member of STAND I am most certainly biased in my opinion, I am not the only person who has noticed STAND’s high level of credibility.  Just this past week, STAND Student Director Daniel Solomon was invited to the White House to speak on a panel discussing the new Atrocities Prevention Board, which speaks highly of the credibility of STAND.  As I have become more involved with STAND and learned more about its inner workings, I have seen the high level of thoughtfulness and intention that is put into each and every action we take.  Thus, while STAND may be assumed to pursue misguided and uninformed activism because of our student-based composition, I believe that, perhaps as a result of these presumptions, we strive toward informed, nuanced activism.

Hannah Finnie is a Freshman at Emory University and is a work-study student for the Center for Ethics and the Ethics and Servant Leadership (EASL) Program.