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Amid a tumultuous present, it isn’t easy to imagine a peaceful future and international solidarity across borders. We are at a moment in time when international norms that civil society has worked so hard to establish are being eroded. Big powers seem to be focused solely on pursuing their national interest. These thoughts were expressed by Mandeep Singh Tiwana, the newly appointed Secretary General of CIVICUS, a global alliance and the largest network of civil society activism worldwide. In our conversation three weeks ago, he didn’t shy away from pointing out that there is a real paucity of visionary leadership on the international stage. Big military powers have led us to disastrous consequences in the past.
But nations do change course; civil society organizations and activists are essential to better fortunes. Every decade, the world has made significant advances, whether in terms of decolonization, the end of apartheid, the civil rights movement in the United States, or, more recently, the movements for gender equality and addressing the climate emergency. However, the current march of populism and authoritarianism threatens to reverse the hard-won gains.
The founders of CIVICUS understood that democracy must be sustained through citizen participation. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a group of civil society activists from around the world came together to create a network that would support civil society activism and lay the foundations for CIVICUS’s work. It was a time when there was hope that a peace dividend would flow from the end of the Cold War, enabling democracy and civic participation to flourish around the world, and norms could be strengthened to support our common humanity and advance human dignity.
For this reason, it pays to think carefully about where civic activism stands today — and Mandeep Singh Tiwana has some ideas on how to defend those norms from authoritarian and populist forces in the quest to create peaceful, just, equal, and sustainable societies.
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The decline in civic freedom is real, yet civil society activism remains alive and well. Every six months, CIVICUS publishes a Monitor Watchlist that highlights countries where the exercise of civic freedoms has been curtailed. The latest report raises serious concerns regarding the rapid decline in civic freedoms in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan, Serbia, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, this year, also in the United States. The Trump administration’s “the winner takes all” approach to governance threatens those who refuse to toe the party line and protest against government policies on domestic or international issues with persecution. In addition, the abrupt and arbitrary cutting off of international aid has hindered civil society organizations that work to expose high-level corruption and promote democracy, ensuring participation, accountability, and transparency in public life.
Moreover, in the digital era, repression has become much more sophisticated and insidious. Authoritarian states have been buying and sharing technology for surveillance, mainly since much activism for the realization of rights now occurs in the digital sphere. Even in physical protests, they’ve been using face recognition technology and so on to persecute and intimidate those who engage in legitimate forms of democratic dissent.
Not only authoritarian states but also countries with strong democratic traditions have been introducing laws that restrict the right to peaceful protest and impose excessive penalties on those who may engage in civil disobedience. Yet, people remain engaged to protect their rights.
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How to read acts of civil disobedience. Some people are growing increasingly disturbed by activists’ tactics to highlight governments’ refusal to act on climate or inequality, such as stopping traffic during rush hour or tinting the water of urban fountains. Also, clashes on the streets during protests have reopened an age-old debate about what drives protest-related disorder — and what can be done about it.
Acts of civil disobedience are often expressions of frustration among people because elected officials in powerful positions do not always act in the best interests of all the people or take into account the needs and aspirations of those who are excluded or disadvantaged. Acts of civil disobedience follow a time-worn pattern to bring about transformational change, albeit Mandeep Singh Tiwana adds a slight nuance.
In this century, the dominant economic discourse has been towards increased privatization of public goods, and governments have hived off parts of public infrastructure and public services to private actors. In almost every country around the world, there is a situation where people in parliament have extensive business interests, and businesspeople are moving into politics to be elected, both at the local and national levels. Therefore, a tight overlap between political and economic elites is happening, which has led to very high levels of inequality in most parts of the world.
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Increasingly, these economic elites who also own media and tech companies are influencing public discourse to advance their own interests. These businesses also know how to monetize people’s attention, prejudices, and frustration, thereby putting them in echo chambers that validate ethno-nationalist and patriarchal values. These spaces, for instance, in social media, promote more extreme kinds of behavior and extreme hatred and othering of people, particularly minorities. Populist politicians have cleverly picked up on how to game the system in connivance with oligarchs. Hence, there’s collusion between political and economic elites to fuel disinformation and create fear and hatred in societies, negatively impacting social cohesion.
They are trying to spread the idea that culture and nationhood are somehow frozen in time by stoking fear in communities that their culture, their language, and their ethnicity are under threat, leaving them longing for an imagined golden age. But culture or nationhood have never been static; they are fluid concepts and have continued to evolve. Humankind has always been on the move, and cultures have mingled through the ages.
It is also fair to say that social media has brought benefits to civil society activism in driving peace, justice, and equality, as people can quickly transmit information across borders about atrocities occurring in one place or about the impacts of climate change. It can help raise international condemnation of the issue or expose corruption very quickly. Even at the local level, it gives people a certain amount of agency. On the other side, governments have cleverly made use of social media to persecute and shut down people.
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Solidarity matters and this is CIVICUS’s essence: connecting civil society actors and creating a worldwide community of engaged, empowered citizens confronting the challenges facing humanity. Once community-based organizations and activists who seek to defend human rights and social justice values feel they are protected, their effort intensifies. They are further encouraged to follow their cause, knowing that others are fighting the same fight in different parts of the globe. As we witness the march of authoritarianism and anti-rights forces in many parts of the world, it is more relevant than ever to work together and strengthen the spirit of multilateralism and internationalism to protect and advance our shared humanity.
In addition, it is essential to narrow the disconnect between grassroots organizations working directly with communities and international bodies whose impacts extend beyond borders, building bridges of planetary solidarity to advance societal progress. Mandeep Singh Tiwana’s perspective has always been local. It began in his home province, Punjab, in India. As a trained lawyer, he worked with communities whose members were subjected to police atrocities during the 80s and the mid-90s when Punjab was going through a civil war-like situation. He listened to the testimonies of the victims to understand the nature of the violations. He simultaneously engaged with police officers to create case studies on establishing community police resource centers where the police and the community could build trust. He would later apply this experience to a policy level, creating national legislation on police reforms using a bottom-up approach.
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CIVICUS’s access to privileged decision-making spaces gives civil society activism a voice. CIVICUS’s emphasis remains on enabling national-level civil society representatives to speak for themselves, as they possess the lived experience and the testimonies of engaging directly with communities whose voices are sometimes not heard by international institutions. There are times when people don’t want to be visible because they may live in extremely repressed environments. In those instances, CIVICUS will represent their concerns.
It is crucial to have a bird’s-eye view of how civil society might be impeded from acting; a common tactic would be the use of NGO laws. New legislation is being passed around the world, where civil society organizations are prevented from obtaining international funding due to extra scrutiny on national security grounds by certain governments. At the same time, these same governments have no problem conducting military exercises, sharing sensitive intelligence information with foreign governments, or attending the World Economic Forum and advising private companies to purchase vast swathes of land or other infrastructure within their countries.
However, when civil society activism receives small amounts of money to promote constitutional values and internationally agreed-upon norms, autocratic governments often want to subject it to extra-national security concerns due to its work in uncovering corruption, seeking equality and social cohesion, or advancing the cause of justice to overcome human rights violations.
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Journalism and civil society activism share a common objective: to reveal the truth. It carries certain dangers for both; they can come equally under attack. The media’s exposure of serious violations is crucial for civil society to push for accountability of perpetrators and systemic change in society. Often, it’s civil society activism that exposes serious human rights violations, and it needs the media to build public opinion in support of change.
Therefore, the missions of fact-based journalism and civil society activism are intrinsically linked and have a mutually supportive relationship; both depend on each other to inform the public and fulfill their responsibilities in creating peaceful, just, equal, and sustainable societies to the fullest extent. These final words from Mandeep Singh Tiwana are music to my ears.
