What Right Do We Have to Advocate on Darfur - Part 1

This is the first part of a short series looking at some of the more controversial issues facing humanitarian advocacy.

I suggested a number of questions and posed them to Neha Erasmus.  Neha spent a number of years working for NGOs in Sudan, and now works for an advocacy and research institute in London .  For each topic, Neha wrote first, I responded, and then she had the last word.

For part 2, see here.  For her previous posts on humantiarian relief, please see here.

Question - Do we have a responsibility to act, or to respond?  Assuming we do so truthfully, and with dialogue, then what's wrong with bearing witness?  Or calling for actions to try and resolves the situation as best we understand?  Do I need to know what it's like to go hungry in order to act to try and ameliorate hunger?  Do I need to know what it's like to be displaced before I speak out about Darfur?

Neha - Most ethical systems include the principle of a responsibility to act in the face of wrong and personally I agree with it. However each ethical system is built on a separate set of rules for how to respond, rather than a single (universal) framework. In Small is Beautiful E. F. Schumacher explains that there is a big difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge on its own is useless, as it is mere facts; wisdom is the understanding of what to do with the facts. It is through the application of values and ideas to facts that wisdom is produced.

Let’s acknowledge that values vary from people to people. The application of Western values to knowledge therefore, will result in the production of Western (and not universally applicable) wisdom which may or may not be suitable or ‘wise’ in other contexts and this is where great care must be taken. Whilst you do not need to know what it’s like to be displaced to speak out about Darfur, having the wisdom of knowing what to do about Darfur is very different.

Michael - Tho this opens the door to complete relativism – values differ, but only to an extent. Certain basic principles, however, do seem constant across religions and cultures; the most obvious being some variation on “thou shall not kill”. Granted, every religion and culture spends a great deal of time carving out rather wide exceptions to the rule, but the fact is that the underlying value does not vary.

(Great Chesteron quote: “Men do not differ much about what things they call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”)

Therefore, I think the talk of “western values” or “western wisdom” only takes you so far; or, at worst, becomes an excuse for no-action. The question then becomes – how do you gain the necessary wisdom to know what to do?

Neha - While I agree that there are basic shared human principles or ‘truths’, I don’t think they have been captured in human rights discourse, which is the guiding foundation for ‘international’ activism. Human rights discourse is an essentially individualistic framework, whereas most cultures of the global South (or third world) are formed on a communitarian value system.

I always think of what the reaction would like in the States (for example) if a Kenyan NGO began to lead global action on US domestic policy? Western values are greatly shaped by the state of Western society (values of individualism, materialism, non-suffering etc.). I don’t think its an excuse for non-action, but a CAUTION and an urge to work closely with existing local/national movements.

[Photo from Wikimedia Commons]