A new approach to human rights - and a new approach to tourism

There has been much debate about whether tourism can contribute to economic and social development, but very little about how travel might contribute to human rights. Gabriel Tobias (DEP 2011-12) has an answer, with a new initiative called Justice Travel. Gabriel explains how the idea came about:

As founder of Justice Travel, there's a question I get a lot:  "Why are you doing this?"

A question with many answers.

A few months ago I was pressed to answer the 'Why' question in 500 words, and here's what I wrote:

My passion for this project is born of deep frustration and eternal optimism. Recognition that inspiring and tireless local activists were the driving force behind every victory I had ever seen - and yet their names, their contributions, were often only recognized if they were killed in the course of their work. Disappointment with an international ‘community’ increasingly unwilling or unable to tackle human rights abusers, including governments and multinational corporations. Yet more importantly: elation on meeting people who come back from travel changed - eyes open, Facebook chats open, newly celebrating the common humanity that stretches over politics, over skin color, gender, and sexuality, that stretches far beyond borders. The more I thought about this concept, the deeper down the rabbit hole I went, the more my passion and commitment grew.

These things are all true, and my passion and commitment have only continued to grow since I wrote those words. But these ideas did not emerge spontaneously, nor have they grown from seed in just six months. Reflecting on where Justice Travel truly began, I have to go back to a small shanty in the Kroo Bay neighborhood in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

I had never seen a place so poor, so overrun with disease and hunger and filth. Pictures can convey the visual but not the smell - the stench - that launched itself full force through your nostrils and grabbed hold of your stomach. There was a waterway which divided the neighborhood in two, stained dark brown with runoff pollution and garbage of all kinds and literal pig shit. And this was eight months before the 2014 Ebola outbreak which would kill four thousand and decimate all public services and economic activities in the country. On that day in Kroo Bay I was meant to conduct a small group discussion, on behalf of the international NGO Oxfam, with some local activists about the provision of water and sanitation services. I was prepared for the worst. 

One of the activists had found a home we could use, a dusty wooden structure near the high edge of the neighborhood. To have some privacy we closed all the doors, which meant the only light coming in was through the slender cracks between wooden planks. A group of mostly women filed in without saying a word, and we all sat in a circle, some on the floor and some on assorted plastic chairs and crates. Most of the women had brought their children with them, the older ones playing quietly in the dust near the back of the room. We started to talk and at first they seemed timid, perhaps - understandably - unsure about how much to share with an unknown foreigner. Awkward silences punctuated by quiet comments from the few men in attendance. 

And then I asked a question about the city government. A groan from one of the women, and from another what I assume was a Krio curse. The floodgates opened. They had been petitioning the city for years to improve sanitation. They had self-organized the entire neighborhood, collecting signatures on a series of petitions from nearly every household. One woman quoted back municipal codes and national laws, demonstrated point by point where the government had let them down. And the kicker - now the government, with support from the European Union, was trying to get the whole neighborhood declared 'unsafe', and force the residents into shanty villages far from the city, far from the small shops and street markets where all the residents earned their livelihoods. The government had a 'development plan' to upgrade the coastal zones, building housing far too expensive for the current Kroo Bay residents. These quiet women won no prizes, received no recognition. In their quest to improve their community - for even the most basic of services - they were completely alone. And yet they persevered, studying the laws, organizing their neighborhood, meeting with any politician or NGO would who hear them. After we finished, one of the more vocal woman pulled me aside and told me that they knew I couldn't change all this - that all they asked is that I told the story of Kroo Bay in their words, tried to see it through their eyes.

I finished my report for Oxfam and on my last weekend in the country drove to a beach two hours south of the city. One of the most spectacularly beautiful beaches I have ever seen in my life. A colleague started talking about how wonderful a vacation destination this would be, an unspoiled paradise. I had visions of luxury lodges and infinity pools. It seemed unfathomable that these two worlds were only a short drive apart. And then I remembered one of the Kroo Bay women talking about how beautiful her birthplace was, further down the coast. This wasn't a different world, just one that I felt like I needed different eyes to see.

Kroo Bay is desperately poor and its poverty inspires sympathy, and it is much more comfortable to live in a world where the Kroo Bay women are subjects of both poverty and sympathy. We are able to look at their plight - and we should look - and find it "in our hearts" to donate some money to them. And this makes us feel good. But there is a wicked question at the heart of that formulation: why do we need there to be an 'us' and a 'them'? And if we can agree that there should not be a division, how can we engage with poverty, with violence, with injustice in a world where everyone is an actor and not a subject? I cannot claim to have a very good answer, but I left Sierra Leone sure that this question needed to be asked. And I thought about that beautiful beach and my promise to the woman in Kroo Bay. When tourism comes to Sierra Leone, can it be a version of tourism which engages with the women of Kroo Bay as actors, not as subjects? What would it mean to see the country - the tepid slum and the sandy paradise - through their eyes? 

And there the seed was planted which became Justice Travel. 

This is cross-posted from Justice Travel, where you can find details of 2018 tours. [Full disclosure: I am a Global Adviser to Justice Travel.]

Work in Progress seminars - all welcome

This coming semester will see a new series of Work in Progress seminars at CENDEP, held at 4.30 every Thursday afternoon. We initiated the seminars last semester to provide a showcase for new research from CENDEP, as well as from our friends and collaborators. As the name implies, these are not necessarily completed research projects, but may be work that is still being developed, where the to-and-fro of an informal seminar discussion may be of help in taking it forwards.

The schedule is below – and includes a couple of films shown in collaboration with the Oxford Brookes Documentary Club and the Human Rights Festival. More news on the festival in coming weeks.

Scholars and activists unite against torture

Richard Carver writes:

We spend a lot of our time at CENDEP thinking about the relationship between academic scholarship and practice. We are academic researchers and the centre is dedicated to development and emergency practice. What that means for us as scholars is inevitably a matter for endless debate – and one for which there can be no definitive answer.  Very early in the history of this blog, Cathrine Brun offered an interesting approach to the collaboration of architects and social scientists, while Charles Parrack has made several contributions on the collaboration between practitioners and scholars in the shelter sector.

The Torture Prohibition Network meets in London

The approach Lisa Handley and I took in our book on torture prevention was distinct from any of these. Our research was indeed commissioned by a practitioner organization (the Association for the Prevention of Torture). Many such collaborations are aimed at helping practitioners to do the things that they do more effectively. Our research question, by contrast, was to ask whether practitioners are doing the right things – not how they could do potentially wrong things better. In fact, we found that one of the four main strands of torture prevention work was ineffective. We were delighted recently with a very positive review of our book by Olivier Chow in the International Review of the Red Cross, not least because it understood precisely what our intention was:

This book is important because it is the first evidence-based feedback on the many efforts of national and international actors in the field of torture prevention. The findings of the research can provide concrete and actionable material for those who work in the field of torture prevention, enabling them to focus on and invest in what works rather than only going along with a formatted response – which sadly is often the norm.

However, this is not the only model of the relationship of scholarship and practice, even within the narrow field of torture prevention. In November, I was invited to take part in and address the founding meeting of the UK Network on the Prohibition of Torture, held at London University. This meeting gathered participants from three distinct sectors: academia, civil society activists, and statutory bodies with responsibility for protection against torture. The focus is on combatting torture and other ill-treatment both within the United Kingdom and internationally. There were two distinct strands present within the meeting: prevention of torture, which was the subject of my remarks, and the rights of victims of torture, introduced by Carla Ferstman, the director of REDRESS.

The meeting was held under Chatham House rules, which means that I cannot report and attribute remarks made in the meeting. I strongly recommend reading this excellent summary of the proceedings. What was interesting to me was the many potential modes of collaboration between academics and activists. To give one example: in my presentation I referred to one of the conclusions from our book, namely the very poor quality of available data on torture and ill-treatment. We recommended that reporting be standardized in order that data be comparable across both time and space. Of course, what we primarily had in mind was less developed countries where all recording of official data is underreported. It was surprising to be told by representatives of UK statutory bodies that they faced precisely these problems – and appealed to scholars for help in compiling better statistics. Here is a simple area for collaboration – at least in principle. We share a common interest in accurate, consistently recorded data, whether to aid our research or to enable us to fulfil our protective role. This was one of a number of potential common interests that the meeting identified.

Anyone interested in participating in the network can either contact the Global Governance Institute at UCL, following the embedded links above, comment on this article, or email me: rcarver@brookes.ac.uk. There is some more information on our research here.

Invisible people - photographs of modern slavery

Rory Carnegie is an award-winning photographer who came to study at CENDEP a few years ago after producing an outstanding book documenting the lives of refugees in Oxford. His latest work is part of a new exhibition, Invisible People, that is currently touring the country to draw attention to the issue of modern slavery. An article about the exhibition is here. And these are tour dates and venues:

London – Southbank - 6/7 January

Bristol – Centre Promenade, Broad Quay, 13/14 January

Manchester – Market Street - 20/21 January

Belfast – Writer’s Square. 27/28 January

Coventry – Lady Godiva statue - 3/4 February

Plymouth – Piazza. 10/11 February

Lincoln – Cornhill - 17/18 February

Cardiff – Churchill Way. 24/25 February.

Glasgow – George Square. 3/4 March

London – 10/11 March: Westminster Abbey

Update: The Guardian has this feature with a number of photographs from the exhibition.