Arguing about a revolution

Rosalind Eyben

Last week I was in Bolivia where I had lived ten years ago before joining IDS. When I last visited in 2008 the country fizzled with the excitement of the dramatic changes experience following the election of a social revolutionary government led by Evo Morales in 2005. It felt like being in Paris in 1789 or Petrograd in 1917. Most striking was the sight of indigenous women shopping, as of right, in the posh part of La Paz where previously the only indigenous women you saw were domestic employees or street sweepers.  It was clear then that even should the political revolution fail, there was irreversible radical social change. Four years on, this is visible everywhere. In a recent interview with the Bolivia Information Forum (recommended for keeping up to date with events in Bolivia), the General Manager of Bolivia’s principal domestic airline commented how in the past better-off indigenous people didn’t use to fly.  

‘It wasn’t a problem of purchasing power, of income, it was a problem of not feeling that it was for them. …..  All those people today take the plane. It’s very gratifying to see on a flight, any flight, people wearing traditional clothes without it being in any way unusual. A great diversity of people, reflecting this country’s make-up, is [now] flying.’

So now in 2013 I am enjoying dinner with old Bolivian friends, descendants of European settlers and ‘intellectuales’ (as you would say in Spanish). When still students in the 1970’s they were political exiles during the military dictatorship and on returning to Bolivia after the re-establishment of democracy had devoted themselves to the cause of social justice. In 2005, they had all voted for Evo Morales and the Movement for Socialism. But now most of them were angry and bitter about the Morales government, accusing it of clientelism, of authoritarianism, and incompetence. ‘Everything is in chaos’, says one of my friends. ‘It’s all a mess’. Just one person at the table seeks to present a more dispassionate, balanced analysis of both the positive changes and what is going wrong. She concurs with the messiness but wonders what else to expect when a country goes through such a major upheaval. She talks interestingly about the government’s struggles to implement a rights-based approach when its different political constituencies are struggling amongst each other for access to land and water. She notes the irony of the government’s socialist rhetoric and capitalist practice. She agrees that there is a lot of incompetence – but then what else would one expect when those now in power are having to learn how to govern after 500 years of oppression? Look at all the good that is also happening, she urges, citing the new social programmes to reduce poverty and inequality.

But the others don’t want to listen. For them, it has all gone wrong. I listen quietly but ask myself whether their sense of grievance comes from them no longer having a role in the process. Before 2005, they were the white middle class interlocutors with government for the socially excluded. Today, it is the representatives of these excluded who are running the country – and who are no longer taking my friends’ advice. Is this why they are disappointed with a new bunch of politicians who turn out not to be perfect? Is the dream of revolution more comfortable than the reality?

Participation, power and social change! It’s all happening today in Bolivia. And has left me wondering about us – the PPSC team at IDS. Not all white (though the majority of us are) but, otherwise, like my Bolivian friends, middle class progressive intellectuals and like them committed to social justice – in our case on a world, rather than a national stage. How will we feel when the people whose interests we argue for no longer want our advice and we have lost our role? Will we congratulate ourselves for the past contribution we have made? Or will we feel aggrieved that the tide of history has left us high and dry on the beach?

Rosalind Eyben is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and her Twitter account is: @rosalindeyben

Previous blog posts by Rosalind Eyben:

• The power of results and evidence artefacts
• What keeps unpaid care off development agendas?
• The 0.7% target debate should not distract us from considering the quality of aid
• Care work should be at the heart of a people-centred economy

What were the PPSC blog’s Top 10 posts of 2012?

Stephen Wood

On behalf of the IDS Participation, Power and Social Change research team, I’d like to welcome back our readers to what we hope proves to be a fascinating year for our blog. Reflecting the outputs from several research projects and a number of pressing global debates and issues we are engaged in, the PPSC research team have some really interesting pieces in the pipeline in the next few months.  I hope you’ll continue to read and engage with the debates and discussion that arise from our articles.

However, in case you missed some of our blogs last year, I thought you might like to look at our Top 10 most popular pieces, as well as some of our articles that you might have missed! Please do share these with your networks, add comments if you haven’t already and as always, encourage others to subscribe to the blog!

Top 10 blog posts of 2012:

1. “Just do women’s empowerment”  by Naomi Hossain
2. “On having Voice and Being Heard: Participation in the Post-2015 Policy Process”  by Elizabeth Mills
3. “Spring uprisings calling spring academics: #bring books out to the streets” by Maria-Josep Cascant Sempere
4. “Global development: the new buzzword?” by Maria-Josep Cascant Sempere and Alex Kelbert
5. “Eleven predictions for Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood (if they continue to remain in power” by Mariz Tadros
6. “Post 2015: What do policymakers know about poverty?” by Joanna Wheeler and Danny Burns
7. “No gong for Cameron’s Hunger Summit” by Naomi Hossain
8. “Challenging attempts to silence civil society in Uganda” by Stephen Wood
9. “Are we ready for an ‘academic spring’?” by Danny Burns
10. “Digital activism in post-revolution Egypt: How relevant is online dissidence in the marathon for democracy?” by Hani Morsi

Excellent blog posts you might have missed in 2012:

• “Participatory visual processes in Nairobi’s margins” by Thea Shakrokh
• “States of Exception, A Tragedy in Unceasing Acts: Development Encounters” by Patta Scott-Villiers
• “Putting pleasure into safer sex interventions” by Stephen Wood
• “Can the North hear?” by Tessa Lewin
• “What keeps unpaid care off development agendas?” by Rosalind Eyben

Stephen Wood is a researcher on the Sexuality and Development Programme within the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and can be found on Twitter as: StephenWood_UK

Read other recent blogs by Stephen Wood:

• The stark realities lying behind the Ugandan Anti-Homsexuality Bill
• Putting pleasure into safer sex interventions
• Diversifying our strategies for sexual equality
• Challenging attempts to silence civil society in Uganda

Participatory visual processes in Nairobi’s margins

Thea Shakrokh

I recently spent a week in Nairobi with community researchers from The Seed Institute and Spatial Collective (two of the research group members within Participate [www.ids.ac.uk/Participate]) who were learning about participatory video as an action and research strategy within their participatory research initiatives. Participatory visual processes provide creative possibilities for the very real issues affecting people’s lives to be captured. Jackie Shaw from Real Time facilitated a journey through which the researchers gained hands on experience of facilitating a participatory video process, and looked at how the approach could be used to amplify the voices of the most marginalised in their communities, and generate dialogue with decision-makers.

Community researchers in Kasarani, Kenya learning about facilitating participatory video processes.

The potential of participatory video to visually communicate the context specific issues, concerns and aspirations of community members resonated strongly with the community researchers. As participatory video is a creative process there is flexibility in its use. This meant that in learning about the approach researchers were able to think about ways to connect it to their own visions for action research; it was interesting for example to hear the nuances in the way that the purpose of participatory video was interpreted:

“Participatory video is a tool for highlighting issues on the ground that do not yet have a strong presence in public debate, for example disability issues.”

“It is a group process that enables issues to come out as people have conversations through working together.”

“Participatory video will enable more people in the community to be reached and in an interactive way which will provide community ownership over the issues generated.”

“Censoring of the narrative, which traditionally happens in survey work is removed, the story coming through is true to the detail of what the community members were sharing. Also the authenticity of the voices will remain, for example the language of the youth will be what is heard.”

What came across clearly in the conversations that took place over this week, was the importance the groups placed on the empowering nature of participatory video – in particular, the way that the exploration of community stories is placed at the centre of the process as opposed to starting with the external policy context which is so often the case. By creating a space for issues to be deliberated and communicated collectively, there was a feeling of increased power behind the message articulated.

For me what is really powerful about participatory video is that it provides a space for communities and policy-makers to make connections that are grounded in the reality people’s lives, and their physical spaces. Importantly, in the context of Participate, the digital nature of video makes the perspectives and voices of people living in poverty accessible at the local, national, and international levels; from cross-community dialogues to global policy debates, with strong possibilities of dialogue between the two.

Spatial Collective community researchers sharing the participatory video process with their peers in Mathare settlement, Kenya

The next steps in Nairobi will be to take participatory video to the communities that Spatial Collective and The Seed Institute work which they hope will bring a new dynamic to their work. The Seed Institute are planning to use participatory video to provide new opportunities for children with disabilities to participate in and lead the learning and action activities that they facilitate. The Spatial Collective moved very quickly to share the method across their team of youth leaders who coordinate community-led mapping in Mathare settlement. They are planning how to make their inquiries into community issues deeper by creating spaces for wider community interactions through forums and debates around the films that are made.

Participatory visual processes can reveal and communicate powerfully about experiences from the margins by providing contextualised examples of the complex and subjective aspects and consequences of development. It will be really interesting to see how the use of video develops in both organisations and across the initiative, and also how the various actors in this post-2015 debate respond to making a very real, very human connection with people living in poverty.

Thea Shahrokh is a Research Officer in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Read other recent blogs by Thea Shahrokh:

• Learning Partners: Participate and the High Level Panel
• You have 9 minutes to talk to the High Level Panel: what would you say?

Eleven predictions for Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood (if they continue to remain in power)

Mariz Tadros

Television viewers and newspaper readers following the political scene in Egypt may have been struck by the most recent spate of violence involving pro-President Morsi Muslim Brotherhood followers who launched a brutal attack on peaceful demonstrators which left five dead and hundreds injured.

What happened? What went wrong? The truth of the matter is that any reading of the recent political thinking from the Muslim Brotherhood (forget about the public relations interviews) suggests that this is just the beginning.  The worst is yet to come. In case some are wondering whether this is too gloomy, please note that all the evidence we have suggests some of the predictions below (number 4-9) are already coming to life.

Here are my predictions:

1: The Muslim Brotherhood, supported by other Islamist factions,  will secure the needed majority vote for passing the constitution-  even when all non-Islamist political forces boycott the referendum. We will see a repeat of the referendum on the proposed amendments to the constitution that we witnessed in March 2011, in which the Brothers (and other Islamists) mobilized a Muslim majority poor population to mark the green circle if they loved their religion (green being symbolic of Islam) and black if they wanted to follow the infidels and their religious leaders (Christian Orthodox priests in Egypt wear a black turban-like head gear).

2: The Brothers and the Salafis will win the parliamentary elections which will be neither free or fair, as religion will be used instrumentally to the maximum effect, propped up by welfare services and backed by direct vote purchasing. However, the parliamentary elections will meet the West’s satisfaction of being a milestone onto democracratization because the Islamists would have won via the ballot boxes.

3: The new parliament will issue legislation of a political nature that enables further monopolisation of power into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. It will also issue legislation of an ideological nature to deepen the Islamization of state and society by introducing new laws and revoking old ones, all under the banner of endorsing Shariah-compliance.

4. There will be a “cleansing” of the judiciary of all elements within it that are not friendly to the Muslim Brotherhood regime. This will be achieved through so-called constitutional and legal means. Instead, new graduates of Shariah school from Al-Azhar University (one of the Sunni world’s largest establishments) will be appointed as judges in their hundreds. Gradually, women judges will either be appointed to administrative non- judicial tasks or they will be “encouraged” to take up early retirement

5. The margin of separation between the executive, the judicial and the legislative will narrow increasingly, such that there will be a synchronization of agendas to endorse the Islamist state. Facilitating and catalyzing such a merger will be led by the new class of ulama (religious scholars) who will play a more behind-the-scenes role at first,  beginning but that will become increasingly open afterwards.

6. The opposition and its key leaders will be subject to intense vilification (and possibly tried) for being antagonistic towards the implementation of God’s laws and being disrespectful towards the Muslim ruler. Eventually the more confrontational leftist political parties will be dissolved under the premise that their normative framework is in defiance with the Shariah.

7. Women’s rights will shrink considerably. More young girls will be given in marriage before or in early puberty and in poor areas sex trafficking will increase. This will be covered under the mantra of marriage, which will in some instances increase polygamy. The percentage of women in leadership positions at all levels of governance will diminish and violence against women will increase under various guises.

8. Religious pluralism will be a thing of the past. More religious cleansing of the country’s ten percent Christian population will happen, through the expulsion of people from their villages and towns. Increasingly, the Islamists will mobilise people to “weed out” undesirables and present them for trial for insulting Islam and his prophet Mohamed.

9. Poverty will continue to grow, but Egypt will become an increasingly “sadaqa society”, to use Deniz Kandiyoti’s term. A sadaqa society is premised on the practice of Islamic charity where aid is distributed to the needy and faithful. The culture of the poor being the objects of religious-inspired benevolence rather than citizens with entitlements will become increasingly diffuse.

10. Independent media outlets (in particular satellite broadcasting) will be subject to increasing repression and some will be closed down. The freedom of the press will shrink considerably and in some instances, the government will not have to do anything about it – the Muslim Brotherhood militias will assume the responsibility of intimidating and threatening media professionals sufficiently such that they either quit or self-censor.

11 Finally – and this may possibly lead to a toppling of the regime – the Muslim Brotherhood will announce war with Israel. In order to do that, they could not (and would not) rely on the state of the Egyptian army. Resorting to other regional forces will be necessary and all kinds of military alliances will be made. This may seem unlikely now in view of Morsi’s brokering of the ceasefire in Gaza and his cosy relationship with the US government, but that will eventually change.

Mariz Tadros is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Read other recent blogs by Mariz Tadros:

• Fascism: the ugly face of unruly politics
• The Egyptian Revolution and the parable of the of man who occupies your house
• We, the women who revolt
• From unruly politics to ballot boxes: rethinking the terms of democratic engagement in Egypt

Post-2015 High Level Panel to prioritise the perspectives of voiceless people

Andrea Rigon

Yesterday afternoon during the Civil Society Pre-Meet to the HLP, Nelson Muffuh, the Outreach Coordinator of the HLP updated civil society representatives on the HLP process. Mr. Muffuh said that there is little time and there are many stakeholders. Therefore, the HLP will prioritise the perspectives of voiceless people. Yesterday evening at a press briefing, David Cameron, one of the three co-chairs of the High Level Panel (HLP) on the post-2015 development agenda stated that, “Above all we need to listen to those whose lives are blighted by poverty”.Mr. Muffah emphasised that his secretariat will help panel members to reach those who are normally excluded by such global processes and meetings. He added that the question of how to ensure that those living in poverty are heard is on the top of the HLP agenda and thus he welcomes the Participate initiative.

Participate hopes that this HLP’s commitment will lead to a deeper thinking on how it is possible to make global policy-making genuinely inclusive and participatory. As Elizabeth Mills outlined earlier this week, there is a difference between having voice, and being heard in these spaces. The participatory research driving the initiative illustrates the interconnectedness of different development issues and challenges established assumptions on the solutions to global development problems.

Today, Participate co-directors, Danny Burns and Joanna Wheeler from IDS and Amy Pollard from CAFOD, who is a co-chair of Beyond 2015 campaign, will present the initiative to the HLP  (the challenges of which Joanna Wheeler and Thea Shahrokh have outlined) and ask its members to engage with Participate and open themselves to the knowledge from the margins generated though participatory research. One of the avenues through which Participatewill facilitate this process of learning for the HLP members is to ask them to take part in immersions -living for a few days with a family living in poverty to experience first-hand their realities.

Andrea Rigon is a Participate, Policy and Advocacy Advisor and CAFOD COMPASS 2015 Research Coordinator.

Read other recent blog posts from Participate:

• You have 9 minutes to talk to the High Level Panel: what would you say?
• On having Voice and Being Heard: Participation in the Post-2015 Policy Process
• Post 2015: What do policymakers know about poverty?

You have 9 minutes to talk to the High Level Panel: what would you say?

Joanna Wheeler and Thea Shahrokh

At lunchtime tomorrow Participate has a space within the meeting of the High Level Panel (HLP) on the post-2015 development agenda to present the work of the initiative, and to make the case for why participatory research matters. In this space, we hope to provide a framing that will ensure that the HLP considers knowledge from the margins as they make their recommendations for a global development agenda post-2015. Ultimately we are asking the HLP members to take participatory research seriously both as a source of information, and as a process of engaging directly with the diverse perspectives of those most affected by poverty and injustice. Tomorrow, we will have 9 minutes to do this.

Over the last few weeks we have been planning, minute by minute, how to use this time. There are inevitable challenges and trade-offs.

Bringing the knowledge from the poorest and most marginalised into the global policy arena in a meaningful way is difficult, as Elizabeth Mills pointed out in her post yesterday. Whose voices are being heard, and why, and on what issues?  How do we ensure people’s perspectives are not taken out of context and used to legitimise agendas that are not their own?  What counts as ‘evidence’? Can we create the spaces for people to communicate the complexities of their own lives for themselves?  All of this requires us to make the case for what participatory research is and why it matters in the post-2015 process. We want to raise these questions and ask the HLP to reflect critically on how to engage in dialogue with the poorest and most marginalised; and ask what this means for the decisions that they make and how they will be accountable to the people their decisions will affect. Can we do this in 9 minutes?

A central message from Participate is that to reach the poorest and the most marginalised populations, a post-2015 framework must take into account the multiple, intersecting and dynamic social and structural inequalities that keep them poor and excluded. Participatory research opens up possibilities for understanding these complex processes by exploring what they mean in the reality of people’s lives. It can provide unexpected and fresh insights, and challenge long-standing assumptions about how change happens.  But how do we articulate this in a powerful way, in such a short time frame?  It is important for decision-makers and others to connect to participatory research in a personal way—relating to the messages and insights in terms of real people and real places.  But we have struggled with how to communicate these examples in our 9 minutes.  If you give broad, large-scale examples, you risk sounding so general that you only state the obvious.  If you delve into the detail of a story from a particular place and person, you risk being dismissed for being anecdotal.

How would you tackle this dilemma? What would you have done with 9 minutes? We’d like to open this conversation up.

We hope we have found a way to share Participate’s messages in a way that is engaging for the HLP members and that triggers their continued interest in the initiative. What has been critical to the way we have approached this challenge is to emphasise how participatory methodologies bring to the policy process both the complex and the rapidly changing realities of people living with poverty and injustice. A one-off engagement is not enough. Nine minutes every few months is not enough. We will be asking the High Level Panel to ‘participate’ themselves, and be connected to the current participatory research at the centre of this initiative in an on-going way that will provide opportunities for the poorest and most marginalised speak for themselves, but also to translate the collective findings into policy.

More from us tomorrow on how it all goes…

Joanna Wheeler is a Research Fellow and Thea Shahrokh is a Research Officer within the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Read other recent blog posts from Participate:

• On having Voice and Being Heard: Participation in the Post-2015 Policy Process
• Post 2015: What do policymakers know about poverty?