Nonviolent Social Empowerment

To start this article I want to describe an empowerment-situation in order to give an example:

Dora Rosenzweig tells about an empowerment experience in her own history: "The workshop was one block of houses long. There were two rooms, a small one and a big one. I preferred working in the smaller room, where there were working thirty to forty people. They chose me to read aloud for them.

"I had produced fifty cigars an hour. That was my piece work limit. When I read for one hour, the others brought me fifty cigars. For two hours, they gave me a hundred. I sat on my chair, reading, while they were working. I read aloud for them about the latest events, a book or a piece. I chose the books. Anybody has heared about a twelve-year-old girl reading Flaubert's `Salambo`? I read to the others all that impressed me. Tolstoy, everything."

This is not an example of extensive social empowerment. But it is an example where the workers organize themselves to improve their work situation. Also of giving mutually. The girl reads for them and they give her the cigars. Most empowerment processes start in small situations like this one. The reading can be a kind of education which helps the people getting out of being dominated by others.

Most people accept their 'fate'. Even if they feel alienated or abused, people who feel disempowered obey, acquiesce, or conform for a long time.

Empowerment processes normally start out of a crisis, a situation where there is a break in daily life that is emotionally experienced. In these situations people realise that something has to change.

Social Empowerment is a process in which people find back to their own power, the power to shape their own lives and to influence the course of events around them. They start to practice this power against oppression and exclusion, for participation, peace and human rights. The power referred to is not „power-over", domination, but the power to be and to do, „power with" others in order to change an oppressive or disempowering life situation. This power stands against political repression, repression of institutions and also patterns that pervade society and diminish peoples lives. Empowerment means to get more self-determination and control over the own life and the life context. People liberate themselves together with others out of a position of powerlessness. The structurally unbalanced distribution of power and influence in society has to be changed. In empowerment processes people develop a critical consciousness about societal structures of unequal distribution of goods and life chances and an analytical knowledge that and how the social reality can be changed.

Another important factor of empowerment is about finding own ressources and available other ressources and learning to use them. Ressources can be: - physical ressources: land, water, forest...

• human ressources: the body, capacity for work, skills....
• intellectual ressources: knowledge, information, ideas...
• financial ressources: money, credits...
• psycological ressources: self-confidence, creativity...

In a variety of contexts, there then follows a process, operating at the personal, the group and ultimately the social level.

Social empowerment is not simply awakening people to a sense of their capacities, but of sustaining participation in the shaping of one's own life and society. We want to examine three levels at which the process of social empowerment works in a variety of situations:

• the personal - power-within
• the collective/group - power-with
• the social - power-in-relation-to-certain-ends, and power-against-certain-social-forces

How do the levels connect? What helps a personal move away from fatalism and resignation grow into group activity or even a movement for social change? How do groups expand the limits of what people feel is possible?

How do movements inspire people to see what difference they personally can make?

The levels are not discrete:

Personal power often derives from a sense of connectedness, or membership of a group with like-minded people.

Such a group itself has to make decisions not just on its own style of operations but on what basis it forms of joins coalitions, which alliances it makes with which sources of power in society, and in what ways these should function to establish a more enduring empowerment at the base. These networks between groups, institutions and people are a very essential part of social empowerment. Empowerment comes from exchange, mutual support and common actions.

Where the need is for 'victims' of violence and domination to interrupt the cycle of victim behaviour,

• the personal level entails people finding the strength to step out of the patterns of oppression and denial in order live their own life.
• The group level can be a process of mutual support where people come together to take action against the causes of violence.
• The social level can mean contesting the kind of obsessive sense of grievance that fuels exclusivist identities - for instance, the kind of ultra-nationalism that leads to war - and offers a permanent self-justification for action against the Other.

In the context of a campaign to change social policy, the personal level involves finding the motivation to act upon what one senses is wrong.

• The group level involves joining with others.
• The social level involves adopting strategies that will have an impact on certain social decisions. Together, the whole process is one of changing social culture and enhancing citizens empowerment (people and groups learning of their own power-to-be/power-to do).

Phases of empowerment processes

There are different phases of empowerment processes.

The first phase can be seen as mobilisation. People experience a sudden change in their life context, a crisis. That event makes them loose confidence in politicians and decisionmaking persons. They start to look for their own posibilities to influence the situation.

In the second phase they are looking for and finding social support, other people who have similar problems or interests. They find out their own abilities and make first public actions.

In the third phase people have reached a better knowledge about societal connections. They have gathered experience in making actions and also start getting conflicts in the rols they have in the group, but also in the family and among friends.

The fourth phase is a phase of conviction and „burning patience". Peoples skills and ability in handling conflicts have developped, they are understanding that there is a link between conflict and growth and have come to the conviction that they can influence societal context and change it partially. This attitude helps them go on in slow and difficult processes and also in supporting other people who start in similar processes.

These phases cannot be seen as following one another as described. They can also go together, jump ahead or fall back into another one.

The dynamic of social empowerment has to be considered in every phase of a movement's life cycle, including the phase of 'success'. Many movements have not been capable of recognising their achievements, and others have been unprepared for 'success' and found that there is nothing more divisive.

Goals of empowerment processes:

Precise goals depend on the context, and range from the micro-level of personal life to the macro-level of social change. Social empowerment is a goal itself and a process.

For the beleaguered peace groups of former Yugoslavia, surrounded by hostility, their goals for social empowerment have often been limited to maintaining a core of people in society willing to speak out in the name of values under siege, or finding the strength to introduce ideas that go against the tide - such as nonviolent conflict resolution or human rights.

For women working in the villages of India (such as the those in Swadhina, the conference hosts), the goal might be to take a first step out of dependency - through employment generation, appropriate technology or literacy projects, for instance - so that they have more control over their own lives.

In these two very different situations, the work of empowerment has to be validated in its own right - at the micro-level, rather than in terms of a 'macro-goal' such as 'the bottom-up restructuring of society'.

Nevertheless there has to be continuity between micro-changes and the macro-changes, what is immediately possible and what we ultimately would like to achieve. Small steps can be the beginning of the construction of a counter-power to that of the enormous social forces acting upon the situation: the nationalist drive towards war in places such as the Balkans, and the transnational pursuit of profit that blights Third World countries.

In 'stable', 'developed', 'liberal democracies', similar processes can be involved in contesting embedded structures at the root of many problems.

One analysis of the anti-militarism in Spain highlights the effectiveness of insumisión (the personal stand of groups of people objecting to compulsory military and substitute service) as being that it united immediate action to obstruct military recruitment with the utopian proposal to demilitarise society.

The role of nonviolence in Social Empowerment

Nonviolence contributes to social empowerment, that the process of shaping ones life context happens in a way that respects the rights and the person of all.

Nonviolence seeks to challenge existing power relations without exacerbating enmity or distorting images - rather it seeks to strengthen elements of the social fabric such as respect for diversity, mutual understanding, participatory forms of organisations and the practice of voluntary cooperation.

Nonviolence offers a particular approach to empowerment. The WRI Statement of Principles presents nonviolence as an approach that "can combine active resistance, including civil disobedience, with a dialoge; it can combine non-cooperation - withdrawal of support from a system of oppression - with constructive work to build alternatives. As a way of engaging in conflict, sometimes nonviolence attempts to bring reconciliation with it: strengthening the social fabric, empowering those at the bottom, and including people from different sides in seeking solution. Even when such aims cannot immediatly be achived, our nonviolence holds us firm in our determination not to destroy our people." Many nonviolent campaigns or movements are examples for empowerment processes.

Contribution of Empowerment to nonviolent movements

The study of nonviolent action has tended to concentrate on its role in bringing down dictators or resisting occupation, its use in campaigns for goals ranging from independence from colonial role to changing government or corporate policy, or its philosophy. However, its impact on those taking the action, or on social culture - including the infectious spread of types of nonviolent action to other spheres - tend to be treated as a side-effect.

Many campaigns or social movements define their goals in terms of their specific demands on a particular issue, and assess their effectiveness solely in terms of those goals. This narrow view of effectiveness can lead to an 'achievement-oriented', 'instrumentalist' pattern of work, and a high rate of burn-out for social activists. Moreover, this narrow view disregards an underlying motivation shared by many activists: to campaign on a specific problem in a way that will facilitate wider change, to enhance people's ability to shape their own lives, 'to make a difference'.

Unless groups are clear about their goals and strategy, actions are chosen more according to what 'feels good' than to their considered impact. Groups who experience empowerment in the sense of reaching their goals have certain features and strategies like defining longterm goals and also short time goals which are part of the first. They have knowledge about how to gather information and facts to support their position, they work on themes that are of social interest, but also of interest for their members and they develop a feeling for social conflicts and possible solutions.

The Empowerment perspective can contribute to nonviolent social movements and actions to have a inner view on the processes that happen in the persons and groups involved in the movement or the action, or social cultures that rise from these movements. This means not only look at the goals achived by the action, but also the personal growth and the learning of the group. This can help to prevent burn out symptoms. In studies about empowerment processes there was found out, that groups whose members are empowered have certain characteristics. These groups have non hierarchical structures, decisions are made by all, there is a common goal and common actions are made. For the people in these groups it is important to bring in their skills, develop them and give them on to others. Also that there are social and not only working links between them.

This description of nonviolent social empowerment is from a North European/ United States viewpoint. It will be interesting to find out what differences there are in other contexts.

Each movement, and indeed each group, has its own life cycle. The course of that, however, is not pre-ordained. For this international project, a factor of particular importance is the way that ideas from one context can inspire action in another, or that connections across geographical boundaries enhance the power (and the determination) of social groups.

 

working with Patchwork in Oldenburg, Germany, doing coordination work for the WRI nonviolence and social empowerment project.