Clashing Activisms: International Human Rights Organizations and Unruly Politics

Introduction

On 21 February 2012, feminist punk rock band Pussy Riot performed a protest song in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Five women wearing colourful balaclavas climbed the altar, took up their guitars and made a strong statement against Russian president Vladimir Putin. Their ‘punk’ prayer was quickly interrupted by security guards. Three Pussy Riots members were arrested. Two of them, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, were eventually jailed for two years on a charge of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Their trial and subsequent imprisonment sparked a wave of international outrage. The prosecution of the activists was widely considered illustrative of the lack of freedom of expression in Russia and the authoritarianism of Putin's government. International human rights organizations (IHROs) emphasized the political character of the trial, and some designated Maria and Nadezhda as prisoners of conscience. Through their high-profile media campaigns and professional advocacy work, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch managed to generate global publicity for the rights of the imprisoned Pussy Riot members and the like.

However, it soon became clear that the strategies and agenda of these IHROs clashed with the unruly activism of the other band members. Two months after their release from prison on 23 December 2013, six other members of Pussy Riot published an open letter in The Guardian in which they stated that Maria and Nadezhda were no longer part of their band (Guardian 2014a). According to the authors, the two had now become ‘institutionalized advocates of prisoners’ rights' and had forgotten about the ‘aspirations and ideals of our group’, notably a ‘leftist anti-capitalist ideology’.

According to the authors the ‘institutionalized advocacy’ of human rights organizations was incompatible with the more radical, rebellious, anti-capitalist and feminist agenda of the punk band and the particular methods which go with it, including staging illegal performances. According to the disassociating band members, the approach of international human rights organizations, by making use of, for example, commercial branding campaigns, is complicit with the very societal structures that create injustice in the first place, and therefore ineffective in achieving substantial social change. In their words: ‘Institutionalized advocacy can hardly afford a critique of fundamental norms and rules that underlie modern patriarchal society. Being an institutional part of society, such advocacy cannot go beyond the rules set forth by this society …’ (Guardian 2014a).

This example of Pussy Riot serves to illustrate a wider trend of new forms of civic engagement that does not fit well with the institutionalized methods of IHROs. These new forms of civic engagement largely take place outside the formal structures of politics and traditional civil society organizations (NGOs, political parties and trade unions) and are characterized by horizontal, network-based and anti-authoritarian modes of organizing. They are often characterized by confrontational, disruptive, and sometimes illegal strategies with the aim of transforming political and economic structures that are perceived as flawed and unjust.

While Pussy Riot may not be an overall representative case to illustrate this type of civic engagement, its explicitly illegal and unruly tactics and the internal split within the group highlight a seemingly unbridgeable divide between efforts to ‘change the system from within’ and efforts to ‘fight the system from the outside’. In the case of Pussy Riot, IHROs' direct involvement helped to generate not only a wave of international solidarity, but also allegations of co-optation. This divide is also present in relation to other cases of unruly activism, albeit less visibly because IHROs usually maintain the position of impartial observers and tend to refrain from publicly interacting with key players of specifically law-transgressing activisms. In this article, we analyse certain core characteristics of ‘unruly’ activisms and describe some of the challenges they pose to the legitimacy and work of IHROs. Although other types of (environmental, development) NGOs are similarly confronted with the ‘unruly politics’ of modern protest movements and activist groups, we believe there are specific dilemmas related to their international human rights politics that make these trends particularly relevant and potentially worrisome for international human rights organizations.

We begin the article by outlining the new forms of civic engagement emerging in different cities across the world, situating these in a larger context of grievances related to economic needs and democracy. We then analyse these activisms through a lens of unruly politics, arguing that they denote a fundamental shift in the type of engagement we know from established IHROs, which we understand as institutionalized NGOs that operate in the system of sovereign states and that make use of methods which ultimately refer back to an understanding of human rights explicitly enumerated within specific legal documents and institutions. In the third part, we discuss how these new forms of activism constitute a challenge to the work of human rights organizations, situating these in the context of broader challenges faced by the human rights system. We end the paper by describing the implications of new forms of civic engagement for the work of IHROs, indicating possible directions how they can relate to the movements' unruly activisms and their calls for social justice and ‘real’ democracy.

We have chosen to limit our focus on the disconnect between large IHROs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and unruly politics, because these two are, despite their differences, both archetypical examples of institutionalized human rights organizations. Along the continuum of different approaches to social change, however, lies a myriad of global to local human rights organizations. The strategies, discourses and frameworks used by smaller human rights organizations connect and sometimes overlap with those of IHROs as well as with those of other social movements and social justice discourses, leading to something that can be understood as ‘a human rights ecosystem’ (Rodríguez-Garavito 2014). Within this human rights ecosystem, some organizations have closer connections than others to groups engaged in unruly activism and may resemble them more or less. Moreover, IHROs themselves are internally heterogeneous. Over time and within one organization, different contestations take place, different strategies are explored, and different approaches dominate. While recognizing the diversity of actors, strategies and topics that this ecosystem is made of, and the relationships and connections amongst them, we believe there are particular features of large IHROs that make them particularly susceptible to the challenges posed by unruly activisms.

Globalization of disaffection

In the past few years we have witnessed massive demonstrations, strikes, occupations, riots, rebellions and revolutions in different parts of the world. From the overthrow of governments in North Africa and the Middle East to the anti-austerity protests in southern Europe, and from the occupation of squares in the global Occupy movement to the riots on the streets in Brazil, Ukraine and Turkey, everywhere people have been rising up against the abuse of power by governments and corporations and the lack of real democracy. The leading magazine TIME even named the protester ‘person of the year’ 2011, in reaction to this global wave of dissent (see TIME 2011).

The events mentioned here were instigated by coalitions of different groups within a specific context, thus forming new and hybrid protest movements. These modern protest movements, also denoted ‘Activisms 2010+’ (Biekart and Fowler 2013)—or ‘citizen movements new style’ (Rood and Dinnissen 2013: 31, 106)—constitute a distinctive shift in traditional forms of civic engagement. While activist groups and protests explicitly targeting state authorities and resorting to informal means of organizing are no new phenomenon, these recent examples distinguish themselves in various ways from the organized political movements of the past and more traditional forms of civil disobedience. They are characterized by their use of new information and communication technologies to challenge existing configurations of power; their spontaneous, looser, non-hierarchical and often decentralized and open-ended network structures of (political) organizing; their palette of non-centralized, innovative, disruptive and sometimes violent forms of protest, often in public outdoor spaces (streets, camps, and squares); and the themes on which they focus. These vary from global public goods that have considerable local impact, such as climate change or financial instability, to a call for democracy, social justice and human dignity (Rood and Dinnissen 2013).

Despite their particularities, the protest movements and action groups share commonalities across local and national contexts. Apart from their characteristic forms of organizing, frames and action repertoires as described, they are all formed by an empowered generation that has grown up with modern information and communication technologies, which did not yet exist when the New Social Movements, such as the civil rights, feminist, and environmentalist movements, arose in the 1970s. These technologies have enabled enlarged access to global information streams and networks which, together with rising levels of education and the growth of urban middle classes, has given rise to a more autonomous and individualistic attitude. This enables people to be more critical and outspoken vis-à-vis the state while simultaneously being more interconnected with peers across the world holding similar aspirations and grievances (European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (EPSAS) 2012).

At the same time, however, this same generation is vulnerable to job insecurity, unemployment, poverty, and privatization of social services, a precariousness caused by the same globalization that has contributed to increased mobility, intensified communication and rapid flows of information. Economic globalization has led to the emergence of new global middle classes but has also increased the gap between the rich and poor. Even when countries have been through periods of sustained economic and employment growth, benefits of growth have not been evenly distributed and income inequalities have increased further, leaving the youth in particular at greater risk of income poverty (OECD 2014). This may explain why even middle-income countries like Brazil and Turkey and European countries like Greece and Spain have been confronted with waves of protest. The socio-economic precariousness of this generation has intensified as a result of recent economic crises and related austerity measures, with social services no longer being guaranteed by state governments that increasingly cut or privatize the provision of core public services.

The inability or unwillingness of governments to deliver public services and equitable improvement in standards of living generates an expectation gap among an empowered generation that becomes a source of conflict and social tension (Norris 2011). Many protests are thus sparked by the feeling that existing systems of governance no longer adequately represent the concerns of ordinary people (EPSAS 2012). Average citizens feel more and more voiceless within existing systems of electoral democracy that fail to represent their needs and interests, and start experimenting with more direct forms of decision-making (Graeber 2013). Some scholars speak of a ‘democratic deficit’ in politics (Mouffe 2005).

Biekart and Fowler (2013) view the global uprisings therefore as an expression of a globalization of disaffection: as acts of public dissent, disorder and disruption spurred by the anger of a generation confronted with the unequal growth and imbalance of economic globalization and the failure of the political system to control these developments. Research confirms that across different regions and different types of protests, actions, campaigns and initiatives since 2006 there was not only a concern with the economic crises, but also with the failures of democracy (Burke 2014; Ortiz et al. 2013). Protestors expressed frustrations with undemocratic and corrupt political elites and non-transparent policymaking procedures (Anheier et al. 2012; Glasius and Pleyers 2013; Kaldor and Selchow 2012). Large masses of in particular young people suspected elected politicians to be more concerned with their own position in power than with the just and fair distribution of economic resources and the protection of equal access to the political process. In their eyes, structures of representation seem to reconcile conflicting interests not on behalf of a diverse and global public, but on behalf of particular capitalist interests (Maeckelbergh 2014: 346).

This similarity in demands for social justice and ‘real’ democracy across protests in a variety of political systems is not to underestimate the specificities of or diversity within the global uprisings. In fact, ‘each angry demonstration is angry in its own way’ (Economist 2013).

Unruly politics

Expressions of dissent in this context of a globalization of disaffection can take very explicit confrontational and disruptive forms, and become expressions of unruly politics. The term ‘unruly politics’ can be used to describe the interventions of those who disrupt the framework of institutional power relations because they are in a position that makes it difficult for them to influence the organization of society in conventional ways. The political system is perceived as not representing their particular interests, needs and identities. People who have lost faith in more traditional tools of political participation, such as casting votes in elections, feel urged to directly display their indignation in unconventional and disruptive ways on the streets.

Many contemporary protest movements contain an element of unruly politics. Examples are the occupation of public squares in the Occupy movement, the riots around the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul (Göle 2013), and the demonstrations by anti-austerity and pro-democracy protest movements in southern Europe, North Africa and former Soviet countries (Anheier et al. 2012; Burke 2014; Glasius and Pleyers 2013; Ishkanian and Glasius 2013; Tadros 2014). Although these protest movements show some resemblance to more conventional social movements—they display a certain organizational structure and make use of confrontational, disruptive techniques—they appear to bring together a more diverse public of different groups with multiple concerns, identities and convictions than did the organized movements of the past, as we will explain further below.

These and other, less orderly, examples of unruly politics are often denounced as criminal and destructive, because they often involve unexpected direct action that can include the transgression or violation of existing rules, laws and norms, and sometimes even violent action. One can think of the urban riots around London in 2011, the anti-World Cup riots in Brazil in 2014, and more recently, in Ferguson and Baltimore in 2014 and 2015, the riots against police brutality in the United States, or the hacking of the websites of banks by cyberactivists like Anonymous and the torching of clothing factories by Bangladeshi garment industry workers. The Pussy Riot punk rock performance in the cathedral in Moscow can also be seen as an act of unruly politics, because of its explicit confrontational, scandalous and illegal model of political contestation and its concern with issues of social (in)justice.

Unruly politics is thus expressed in relationships of dissensus, struggle, denial or despair amongst or between people in society who are reluctant to become, or feel prevented from becoming, active in a more formal political setting. In the uncomfortable and confrontational act of street disturbances and rioting, it becomes apparent who is excluded from more institutionalized structures of politics, and who feels marginalized and stigmatized (Bertho 2009; Dikeç 2007). In the words of Akshay Khanna:

Unruly politics, as we define it, is political action by people who have been denied voice by the rules of the political game, and by the social rules that underpin this game. It draws its power from transgressing these rules—while at the same time upholding others, which may not be legally sanctioned but which have legitimacy, deeply rooted in people's own understandings of what is right and just. This preoccupation with social justice distinguishes these forms of political action from the banditry or gang violence with which threatened autocrats wilfully try to associate them. (Khanna et al. 2013: 14)

Unruly politics does not abide by the logic of representative politics, but rather enunciates a political meaning which is unmediated and relevant within a specific, singular situation. It does not let itself be represented or translated in another context, in another moment or for the benefit of other people. The unmediated character of unruly politics brings a plurality of voices and demands to the fore, which are often not coherent or coordinated. Many unruly protests have neither a central organization, mediating different positions, nor one clearly formulated goal, which makes it particularly challenging for institutionalized NGOs as well as for politicians to engage with such political expressions. Unruly politics demands ‘a new mode of political enquiry which spills outside of traditional notions of politics, and in which the relevance of acts and events is not reduced to the effect they have on formal structures of the political establishment’ (Khanna et al. 2013: 11).

Some expressions of unruly politics serve to indicate a problem, rather than to propose a solution, others (such as the Occupy movements) have a value as ‘prefigurative politics’, or, as Van de Sande (2013: 230) describes it, as ‘a practice, movement, moment or development in which certain political ideals are experimentally actualized in the “here and now”, rather than hoped to be realized in a distant future’. In this sense, unruly politics is not about creating a state of total anarchy, but rather about creating ‘subversive ruliness’ (Shankland 2012). The necessity of political governance and a system of laws is not denied altogether; rather the modalities for such governance are questioned: the formal, representative democracy that is seen as faulted for serving elites and private interests (see also Burke 2014).

Unruly activism can be distinguished from what is theorized as ‘contentious politics’, as described by McAdam et al. (2001) in relation to the post-1968 New Social Movements. The latter typically refers to the (similarly disruptive and confrontational) activities of movements that emerged in the 1960s and that are distinguished from older class-based movements by their specific and clearly voiced agendas and identities based on post-material values. In New Social Movement theory, a particular emphasis is placed on identity claims, used to plead for equal rights for marginalized and deviant groups to be granted by the state powers. The struggle of New Social Movements also addresses social exchange and cultural production, not (only) class (Melucci 1996). The feminist, environmental, peace and civil rights movements are all seen as examples of New Social Movements that resort to a shared culture and collective identities in order to push for political change (Castells 2009). This emphasis on a shared culture and collective identity, which provides meaning and a position to the movement actors across different local contexts, is absent in many expressions of unruly politics.

Expressions of unruly politics convey a general wish to live a dignified life and to be treated justly by state representatives and other power holders, regardless of the particular envisioning of what a dignified life might contain in each different situation, for every different person. Unruly politics does not originate in the recognition of people who have always shared the same identity or who clearly articulate the same, clearly formulated political demands, but it forms a site of solidarity for people who recognize a similar precarious situation in their lived experiences (see Butler 2010: 32). What brings people together in unruly activism is thus not necessarily a consciousness of a collective identity, ideology or even political dream, but rather the shared determination to overcome singular hardships.

The emphasis is placed on the undertaking of collective ‘action’ (sometimes out of self-interest) rather than on the articulation of collectively shared ‘meaning’ (Bayat 1997: 57). Asef Bayat speaks in this respect of ‘nonmovements’, in reference to ‘the collective actions of noncollective actors; they embody shared practices of large numbers of ordinary people whose fragmented but similar activities trigger much social change, even though these practices are rarely guided by an ideology or recognizable leaderships and organizations’ (Bayat 2010: 14). Such collective actions are characterized by more inter-group competition and spontaneity than (new) social movements, according to Bayat.

The incoherent, spontaneous, and sometimes violent nature of unruly activisms also distinguishes them from the Arendtian notion of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience should always be non-violent, directed at the laws and policies of the government, and openly expressed in public, according to Arendt (1972). Civil disobedience becomes permissible when it is expressed by ‘organized minorities that are too important, not merely in number, but in quality of opinion, to be safely disregarded’ (ibid: 76). Expressions of unruly politics, however, can sometimes be violent, stealthy, anonymous, messy, or questioning the legitimacy of established laws and authorities on a more fundamental level.

It has to be noted that emergences of unruly politics are always temporary. They serve more to indicate a deficit in the system of political representation than to propose a clearly elaborated alternative model of governance. Nonetheless, sometimes unruly politics can transform into articulated, more structured forms of activism that have more longevity. Moreover, individuals engaging in unruly politics can be mobilized for the support of a more developed general political programme. In that case, the spontaneous, unpredictable and ‘uncivil’ interventions of unruly activists transition into tactics that more easily fit with those of other civil society actors, such as established political pressure groups, labour unions and NGOs. To come back to the Pussy Riot case, Maria and Nadezhda have now strategically shifted from subversive unruly activism to more established advocacy work. They are now founders of their own NGO and recognized partners in a global conversation on human rights abuse and the lack of the rule of law in Russia (Guardian 2014b), and therefore no longer need to resort to unruly tactics to be heard (which might explain the less punkie aesthetics of their latest artistic projects).¹ The approach of Maria and Nadezhda may thus represent a transition from a temporary, spontaneous and unruly action repertoire to sustainable, structured and ‘professional’ advocacy work.

Before a more general political programme is developed, however, the heterogeneity in identities, agendas, needs and interests in combination with the rejection of vertical leadership and the ostensibly sudden, quick, and surprising nature of the eruption makes unruly politics difficult to manage for institutional politics. It also forms a significant challenge to IHROs that, hitherto, have failed to connect to this new civil society activism.

Unruly politics and international human rights organizations

There is a sense of urgency for IHROs to make themselves relevant to this new generation of activists, some of whom are engaged in unruly politics. With public funding and donations diminishing in times of austerity and welfare cuts, and geopolitical power relations shifting, IHROs are eager to mobilize new constituencies beyond traditional sectors in the West for moral and financial support. Attracting global audiences is, however, not an easy task. We will briefly discuss two broader challenges for the international human rights system (contestation of dominant rights norms and new, possibly competing, frames related to social and economic justice) before discussing three specific differences that we observe between the politics of IHROs and actors engaged in unruly politics.

One broader challenge for IHROs is that middle classes, let alone the masses, in non-Western regions may not necessarily identify with their dominant legalistic approach to human rights, grounded in a global human rights framework. In the post-Western world of declining American power and of newly empowered Southern middle classes, local interpretations of what rights are and which rights should be prioritized may increasingly compete with dominant norms embedded in international treaties, laws and institutions. Activists' increased exposure to and direct participation in global information streams also makes them less dependent on IHROs as transmitters of information and as hubs for access to international publics and institutions. Individuals who can engage directly in networking, organizing and exchanging information will increasingly challenge the ‘gatekeepers’ role IHROs have played, transgressing traditional boundaries (between North and South, centre and periphery, elites and grassroots, etc.) that continue to permeate the human rights movement (Rodríguez-Garavito 2014). Established IHROs, which have long exclusively worked on civil and political rights and often continue to focus largely on international criminal justice and procedural justice (due process), may be confronted with alternative notions and prioritizations of rights and justice. Their accountability, impact and responsibility will be scrutinized, as well as their transparency and democratic legitimacy. The long taken for granted authority of human rights, as we know them today, is likely to be increasingly tested in the years to come (Hopgood 2013b: 172; 2014: 17).

Another broader challenge is that law-based IHROs are confronted with new urgent issues such as socio-economic inequality and related claims for social justice, which require an engagement with power relations and redistribution rather than merely with rights. Despite a decade of work on economic and social rights, doubts remain about the usefulness of human rights to fight economic injustice (e.g. Bjørnskov and Mchangama 2013; Landau 2012; Mchangama 2014). Samuel Moyn (2014), for instance, calls human rights ‘a powerless companion [of modern capitalism] in the age of neoliberalism’. Even though he rejects the claim that—as sometimes suggested—human rights are per se complicit in the success of neoliberalism, Moyn questions the effectiveness of economic and social rights norms to tame or counteract economic globalization. Especially in the arenas of international trade law and policy, and corporate social responsibility, Moyn believes that ‘human rights have proved distressingly ineffective, and their record does not seem likely to change’.

Research shows that the majority of protests of recent years, and those aiming specifically at changing the economic system—in particular its production and reproduction of inequality—have not pursued their aims in terms of rights, but instead in terms of economic justice and the need for ‘real’ democracy (Burke 2014; Ortiz et al. 2013). A reason why activists use alternative discourses and other methods, including more confrontational ‘unruly’ politics, may be that the advancement of human rights is indeed not seen as (the most) useful for the ultimate attainment of social and economic justice goals. And that (international) human rights organizations with their legal instruments are seen as too institutionalized, too hierarchal, too modest in their aim, and too polite in their civil society discourse to achieve the radical system change the protestors deem is needed to actually fight further inequality. The tide may turn against institutionalized human rights organizations as described above, if they ignore these local and global contestations. As a collective of NGO activists recently stated in a letter posted online:

Sadly, those of us who work in civil society organisations nationally and globally have come to be identified as part of the problem. We are the poor cousins of the global jet set. We exist to challenge the status quo, but we trade in incremental change. Our actions are clearly not sufficient to address the mounting anger and demand for systemic political and economic transformation that we see in cities and communities around the world every day. A new and increasingly connected generation of women and men activists across the globe question how much of our energy is trapped in the internal bureaucracy and the comfort of our brands and organisations. They move quickly, often without the kinds of structures that slow us down. In doing so, they challenge how much time we—you and I—spend in elite conferences and tracking policy cycles that have little or no outcomes for the poor. They criticise how much we look up to those in power rather than see the world through the eyes of our own people. Many of them, sometimes rightfully, feel we have become just another layer of the system and development industry that perpetuates injustice. We cannot ignore these questions any longer. We need a meaningful commitment to a set of global organising principles and a model for the world we want. (Sriskandarajah et al. 2014)

For IHROs that do not wish to jeopardize their credibility in the institutional political domain, it is no easy task to relate to the unruly politics of new civic activists and their claims for social justice. We believe there are fundamental challenges for institutionalized NGOs, in particular for IHROs, to match the aspirations of new generations of activists. We relate these challenges to three key differences between IHROs and actors engaged in unruly politics in their strategies, modes of organizing, and understandings of rights and justice.

Fighting the system or reforming the system from within? Different understandings of social change

The mismatch between subversive and anti-establishment activism and civilized advocacy can be traced back to a different understanding of and different approaches to rights and justice. Whereas unruly activists attack the political and economic system in which human rights violations occur, most IHROs aim to be politically non-partisan and look to the implementation of human rights within the given economic and political system. Their stated goal is to ensure that states and other authorities fulfil their obligations under international human rights treaties, which themselves are rather neutral in terms of political or economic systems. They thus tend to condemn human rights violations, regardless of the political or economic system in which they occur or the culture or ideology of the perpetrator. This impartiality is contested by some who argue that Global Civil Society, including IHROs, by offering regulatory band-aids, actually legitimizes the global capitalist order, and hence can be understood as integral to governmentality (Lipschutz 2005: 202).

We are not suggesting that all human rights advocates have been equally committed to the idea of human rights as an impartial, neutral space detached from power politics, nor that human rights have never been misused by political powers for domestic economic and security interests. Stephen Hopgood (2013b: xiii) argues, for instance, that some American advocates have been far keener to harness state power to the task. According to him, they favoured using liberal democratic states' power to build global normative institutions. Human rights are consequently seen by some as inextricably aligned with liberal agendas, even neoliberal agendas, and human rights organizations as complicit in the expansion of Western power.² In general, however, notions of impartiality continue to shape the strategies and methods of most IHROs.

The approaches of contemporary protest groups, in contrast, involve a structural critique of state policies and ideological and economic systems causing and perpetuating socio-economic inequalities. The Occupy movement, for instance, confronted the global market economy and revolted against the privatization of public goods and communal spaces. Like the alter-globalist movement, it has roots in anti-imperialist thinking and revolutionary leftist groups in the South such as the Zapatistas movement (Glasius 2012). Part of its agenda is a critique of neoliberalism and economic globalization, which are associated with processes of privatization and trade liberalization that would safeguard the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

While many activists engaged in unruly politics therefore take a direct position, human rights experts will generally avoid getting entangled in ideological or political debates that exceed the ostensible objectivity, authority and institutional mechanisms of the law (Chong 2010: 101). Even where they have been working on the protection and promotion of economic and social rights, their agenda remains more minimalist and modest than that of contemporary protest movements (Burke 2014; Moyn 2014). The targets of their activism and advocacy, moreover, are still predominantly state authorities, even though focus is shifting to other non-state actors that are said to have human rights responsibilities too. Targets of unruly politics are more diffuse, because causes and solutions are sought in transforming prevailing (social, cultural, economic and political) power dynamics that go beyond the purely legal and beyond the state as the sole arbiter and deliverer of justice.

There is thus a disjunction in the vocabularies for social change between activists engaged in unruly politics and international human rights groups that work from a legal understanding of rights embedded in international treaties and conventions. Engaging with revolutionary action groups and movements can therefore create a tension between IHROs' emphasis on impartiality, on the one hand, and, on the other, the pressure to take a partisan position or particular stance on which (socialist, capitalist, neoliberal etc.) approach is most or least conducive for human rights.

Vertical organizations or horizontal networks? Different modes of organizing

Where human rights organizations aim to reform existing economic and political systems through incremental changes by negotiating with and lobbying institutional representatives, agents of unruly politics hold a much more antagonistic position in relation to state politics. Consequently, their form of organization itself is typically anti-authoritarian and originates at a grassroots level. This has to be understood against the backdrop of the global disaffection with larger political and economic processes as described earlier.

Many events with an explicit unruly character emerge ostensibly spontaneously. Within riots, obstruction or occupation, people encounter each other in a shared sense of frustration and urgency, to criticize the dominant status quo of political and economic governance or protest against recently experienced injustices. Participants do not plan such events ahead and often engage with each other in temporary and ad hoc alliances. The place where they meet often forms a crucial binding factor, bringing a diversity of people together who otherwise live completely different lives in different areas. Such events can suddenly and unexpectedly spark a sense of common purpose and a hope for political change. These hopes and that sense of common purpose can be symbolized by spontaneously emerging images, signs and slogans, which are sometimes shared across contexts and large distances.³

Within protests with an unruly character, participants often refuse to be represented by a single political organization or NGO that defines the programme or mode of communication. They reject the mediation and framing of their message by institutionalized actors, fearing that mediated forms of participation will disempower and distance them from defending their own identities, needs and interests in the public sphere (see e.g. Maeckelbergh 2014). As a consequence, the standpoint of protesters can at times be difficult for the general public to understand, especially in the case of riots and other events of public disorder in which no banners are carried and no spokespeople are addressing the press.

Some protest movements that are organized yet display unruly elements, such as the Occupy and the Indignado movements, express their critical attitude to conventional forms of political governance by experimenting with alternative democratic and citizenship processes in their own internal planning, decision-making and implementation (see Sitrin 2012). Movement actors develop decentralized and open-ended network structures, which they use as a basis for decision-making, sometimes on an international scale. Practices of horizontality and participatory and consensus-based decision-making tend to shape the models of organization of such movements (Sitrin 2006; Maeckelbergh 2014).

This fluid and horizontal organizational structure of modern protest movements and action groups contrasts with the hierarchal decision-making and verticality that characterize many IHROs. As a result of the ‘NGOization’ or institutionalization of the human rights movement (Lang 2012), activists who previously stood at the barricades during demonstrations or volunteered in letter-writing campaigns are now paid managers, directors, heads or board members of NGOs involved in professional advocacy and lobbying, fund-raising and branding (Hopgood 2013b). Functionally specialized, paid, professional staff engage in strategic planning to produce reports aimed at influencing public policy or other well-defined goals, which still tend to be defined in the ‘centre’ of the organization. As a result of their professionalized, centralized and rather hierarchal modes of organizing, institutionalized (human rights) NGOs can be perceived as ‘highly alienating hierarchies’ by contemporary activists (Tandon 2012).

Consequently, a dilemma emerges. Because of their close association with institutionalized power and vertical organizational structure, human rights organizations can be seen as part of the elites with entrenched interests in the status quo, which the unruly agents aim to transform, rather than as representing the needs and interests of ordinary people. Institutionalized civil society actors such as labour unions or human rights NGOs and political parties that try to articulate a shared interest and represent public groups can be viewed with ambivalence and suspicion (see e.g. Ishkanian and Glasius 2013: 24–7). As a result of this suspicion, it can be difficult to build constituencies among the new generation of activists or to form alliances. The asymmetry between North and South in the human rights movement is an extra complicating factor. IHROs which originated in the North continue to have disproportionate power when it comes to setting the international agenda, which is often based on internal deliberations, rather than a result of collaborative processes with Southern NGOs, social movements and others (Rodríguez-Garavito 2014: 41–2). Deeper forms of inequality, precisely one of the challenges that unruly politics seeks to address, can be institutionalized in the modus operandi of large IHROs, which are consequently sidelined by the activists challenging such inequalities.

Unruly or civilized? Different tactics, methods and action repertoires

Besides these different forms of organization, the tactics and action repertoires of activists with a more unruly signature differ from those of IHROs. We believe this can also be related to their different attitudes towards and relations with institutionalized politics and power.

IHROs will generally avoid hard or unruly forms of direct confrontation, in part because they engage with the system to influence public policy making. Chong (2010: 42–4) observes two dominant and often jointly used strategies of human rights organizations. The first consists of research into human rights violations and ‘naming and shaming’ governments through mass media, letter-writing campaigns and petitions, accompanied by high-level advocacy. The target of shaming actions must be a violation of international law with a clear perpetrator and a legal remedy. A second strategy is court-based, involving (quasi-)judicial proceedings, and consists of methods like strategic litigation, representing victims of human rights violations in courts or similar arenas, and submitting opinions known as amicus curiae briefs.

There are many more methods and action repertoires in the human rights movement that may not fall neatly in either of these two strategies, such as public education, grassroots movement building, calls for boycotts or weapons embargos, and many other methods. In fact, over time IHROs have forged links with varied local NGOs, social movements, religious organizations, and grassroots groups, many of which also enable strategies that are not necessarily law-based (Rodríguez-Garavito 2014). Some actively engage with (needy or marginalized) rights holders to enable them to deploy the tools of human rights advocacy and help them develop the capacity to hold authorities accountable (Saiz and Yamin 2013). Combinations are also possible. Large membership-based human rights organizations like Amnesty International, for instance, are characterized by both high-level advocacy in Geneva and New York and activism, educational and campaigning work at local, national and regional levels. Nonetheless, most IHROs will generally use the mechanisms of the political and economic system (courts, parliament, stakeholder and ministerial meetings) to try to move policies in a better direction by identifying which policies are likely to be (in)consistent with international human rights standards.

In contrast, radical, anti-establishment and counter-cultural elements characterize many public interventions related to unruly politics. These interventions can become very ‘uncivil’ and in some cases even violent. Direct action, civil disobedience and forms of cultural expression such as visual arts, songs, poetry, street performances, dances, graffiti, and political cartoons are used to defy and discredit the system and underlying power constellations. Examples are the occupation or blocking of symbolic centres of political power such as public squares, parliaments and embassies and the physical resistance to eviction (Shankland 2012; Stavrides 2012; Patel 2013; Dhaliwal 2012; Arnold 2012); the performance of loud and intrusive flash mobs in shopping malls and metro stations (Costa Vargas 2014: 10,11); and the occupation of the tills at hospitals so that patients can be seen without cost, or the reconnection of electricity in houses where provision was cut (Pantazidou 2013) and so on.

People engaged in unruly politics can take direct actions to solve problems that the state fails to address (Bayat 2010). They step in to correct the ways by which they are governed and demonstrate what a fairer system looks like, even when this implies transgressing existing laws, norms and regulations. In other words, direct and unruly actions have become a tool to demand accountability and to correct injustices, while at the same time they help to oppose government policy and empower citizens (Pantazidou 2013: 765).

Emotional expressions of rage and indignation can also spark actions of violence and crime, such as the smashing of windows of banks or the stealing of consumer goods. These violent acts are easily and quickly denounced by politicians as merely criminal behaviour, disregarding their political meaning and that they are also a direct reaction to perceived injustices. Others claim that violent tactics might actually be more effective than non-violent ones by pressuring institutions to take the grievances of marginalized groups more seriously and bringing about long overdue change.⁴ Regardless of what position one takes on the issue of violence, the unpredictable outcomes, the uncivil measures, the leaderless nature, and the disruptive impact of unruly events pose fundamental and practical difficulties for IHROs seeking alliances with contemporary activists. They may jeopardise their credibility in relation to institutional partners for siding with law-transgressing activities. They risk being associated with the radical agendas and subversive, disruptive, immoral and sometimes illegal or even violent actions of protest groups, which may discredit them in the eyes of the political elites they try to engage and mobilize into action, or their constituencies on whom they depend for funding. In turn, unruly activists blame IHROs for not repudiating the mechanisms of law enforcement or the very laws themselves, which in their eyes uphold injustices.

Suggestions for human rights practice

We end this section by sketching three broad directions how the work of IHROs can become complementary to that of unruly agents, whose agendas are broader than their own and who display elements of unruly activisms that conflict with their own preferred strategies and methods. We argue that synergies between IHROs and unruly activists who struggle for progressive social change do not necessarily need to be based on consensus. Some theorists even claim that the dominant focus on consensus-building in institutional politics forecloses fundamental ideological debates. They speak of a ‘post-political time’ in which social and economic interactions are professionally managed, but structural inequalities are not tackled (Swyngedouw 2007; Žižek 2000). For political agency to return in such a situation, a certain amount of unruliness or subversiveness might be necessary, besides human rights advocacy inside of the centres of power.

At the same time, we are convinced that in order to secure sustainable solutions the spontaneous and direct actions of unruly activist groups ultimately need to be complemented by endeavours that have more longevity and durability. This, in turn, requires flexible repertoires of action that combine both confrontation and engagement with the formal governance systems. In other words, both the confrontational, disruptive tactics of protesters on the streets and the institutionalized methods of international NGOs in the corridors of global human rights institutions might together contribute to more inclusive, rights-respecting, and effective forms of governance, and do not necessarily need to be reconciled or brought into consensus.

In fact, the differences and antitheses between unruly politics and ‘civilized’ human rights politics may even function to reinforce each other: the radicalism of the former can both display alternatives to existing power structures and enhance the legitimacy and credibility of (international) NGOs in the realm of institutional politics, whereas the latter's access to institutionalized governance areas can help to authorize activists' own calls for justice, equality and democracy, as long as both approaches are equally valued for their own merits, and the one is not used to discredit the other. To come back to the Pussy Riot case: even the anonymous Pussy Riot members made it explicitly clear in their letter to Maria and Nadezhda that they appreciated the advocacy work of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, albeit that they did not wish to see their own activism being mixed up with it (Guardian 2014a). So how can the two types of civic engagement become complementary?

The first way in which IHROs can complement and strengthen the activism of unruly agents is by continuing to defend the basic civil and political rights of protesters at various levels, even if these resort to unconventional or violent means, or both. Recently Amnesty International sent observers to Ferguson in the United States to monitor and report on human rights abuses during the protests against police brutality. Without explicitly supporting violent actions, or representing the activists at state meetings, Amnesty publicly spoke out for the right of protesters to express frustrations about police brutality on the streets without being subjected to the same use of excessive force that had cost several unarmed black people their lives. This example demonstrates how IHROs, in their traditional rights advocacy and research work, but also with trial monitoring and providing legal assistance, can support protestors and activists, while refraining from explicitly denouncing or supporting violence as a tactic. If IHROs manage to tailor their advocacy to the needs and interests of the rights holders in question they can continue to play an indispensable role in creating a protective environment for local activists engaged in unruly politics.

Second, IHROs can engage more effectively with the individuals and groups involved in new civic politics. In particular, organizations such as Amnesty International, which combine high-level advocacy with grassroots mobilization, could continue to seek greater collaboration with a much more varied range of activists even when these express their demands for rights and justice in different ways. This requires that, in addition to their own preferred institutional tactics, IHROs create space for activists' own preferred methods in such collaborations, including direct action and civil disobedience or expressive cultural forms, and even unruly, transgressive actions. It also requires that IHROs allow activists to speak in their own terms, including in meetings with politicians which the IHROs have initiated. Instead of acting as interlocutors on their behalf, IHROs should try to enable activists to be their own agents of change. They can do so by helping activists evolve their capacities and capabilities through technical assistance, workshops and trainings or by creating (and functioning as) platforms where activists can meet to share experiences and good practices and learn to express their own grievances and aspirations on both national and international levels in more coherent and strategic ways. Even though there is a real need for some coherence in the multitude of expressed grievances, identities and aspirations in contemporary activisms, it can be questioned whether these can and should always be translated in terms of (IHROs' law-based understanding of) human rights. Perhaps the human rights frame is too limited, and the human rights strategy too orderly and moderate, to pursue the more radical social justice and democracy agendas of the protest movements.

But creating such horizontal and decentralized network relations is, for most IHROs, easier said than done. As César Rodríguez-Garavito (2014) writes:

For dominant human rights organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, this implies a difficult challenge: transitioning from the vertical and highly autonomous modus operandi that has allowed them to make key contributions, to a more horizontal model that would allow them to work with networks of diverse actors. For the time being, their efforts to globalise their operations by opening offices in new centres of power in the Global South have failed to translate into new forms of engagement, so as to interact with local, national and regional organizations on an equal footing in terms of initiative, decision-making and authorship.

Perhaps locally based members and supporters of IHROs like Amnesty can play a key role in bridging the gap between the street and the headquarters because they, in their own personal capacity, sometimes join the street protests or other actions, and hence know the unruly activists, and their grievances, as well as their lived experiences (such as with state violence). They can communicate the frustrations that exist among the disenfranchised, whether and where the work of IHROs is valued, and exchange good practices with participants of the movements and groups. This requires building new bottom-up consultation structures within their own organizations and in their collaboration with others. At the same time, however, IHROs need to make strategic choices regarding with whom and on what terms they cooperate. After all, there is a real risk that unruly events turn away from the inclusive and participatory ideals of the (moderate) activists who were interested in seeking alliances in the first place. Unruly actions can lead to a re-enactment of oppressive power structures and mechanisms of exclusion, and can turn violent, racist or sexist. These exclusionary and discriminatory understandings and expressions of politics may even be more enduring and better organized than their more progressive counterparts, hence the need for strategic partnerships.

Third and finally, IHROs can learn to relate better to protestors' claims for economic and social justice. Ignoring the dissatisfaction of the millions of protesters taking part in global uprisings since 2011, and their demands for systemic political and economic change, by continuing to do business as usual could lead to the perception that IHROs are irrelevant at best and part of the problem at worst. IHROs can give more priority to a pursuit for social justice, despite the limits of legalistic human rights understandings for radical and egalitarian social justice agendas. One way is by trying to ensure that states not only respect and protect, but also fulfil, economic and social rights, both domestically and abroad, and remedy the denial of access to basic services. Another, related way is by exploring new (quantitative) methods, which can supplement conventional legal and judicial instruments. Of course, IHROs can also continue to defend the civil and political rights of social justice activists in the ways described above. Regardless of the approach they take, IHROs must critically assess their own place and role in the existing political economic system.

Ultimately, IHROs that work on economic and social rights must make a decision whether they want to get involved in a structural critique of state (redistributive) policies, systems and power relations causing and perpetuating socio-economic inequalities, which may imply abandoning notions of impartiality. They can also choose to stick to a more minimalist human rights agenda and refrain from larger ideological or policy debates with resource implications. It goes beyond the scope of this article to elaborate on the (potentials and pitfalls of) different approaches to social and economic justice. We nonetheless believe it is imperative for IHROs to get engaged in this debate about how to pursue social justice. For if this undertaking is taken half-heartedly, a fight against injustice may become a thin layer that is doomed to fail, and even risks reifying the internal and external imbalances of wealth and power that some of the movements discussed here aim to transform through their unruly politics.

Conclusion

We have discussed how recent protest movements with unruly tendencies and IHROs differ from each other with regard to their understanding of and approaches to rights and justice, their relation to institutionalized power, their modes of organizing, and their action repertoires. These differences need not necessarily be brought into agreement but may coexist and complement each other. The spontaneous, temporary, riotous or carnivalesque events of protest that characterize unruly politics can forcefully bring into the public arena neglected issues of abuse of power, marginalization, socio-economic deprivation, and racism and other forms of stigmatization. New protest movements and action groups can point out where the current political and economic order is flawed, and how structural disadvantages mark the lives of vulnerable people. These movements enable the grouping together and empowerment of pluralist, diverse, and disenfranchised constituencies in temporary, ad hoc, and spontaneous coalitions. In their practices of horizontality and consensus-based decision-making, some groups experiment with much needed alternative, participatory and deliberative forms of governance, which could already indicate certain political alternatives beyond the problem analysis.

IHROs, in turn, bring their own specific expertise and valuable skills and resources. The methods of strategic litigation, professional lobbying, orderly activism, and high-profile media campaigns and advocacy are equally valuable for exerting incremental but fundamental changes, as long as they are embedded in the reality of ordinary people's needs. Their global networks, access to the institutional domain, resources and skills can at times be beneficial to the engagement and rights of unruly activists. Strategically, both types of activism can complement each other, even without the actors involved directly cooperating with each other, and even when disagreeing on core issues and strategies. Antagonisms can be fruitful for a process of transformation of global governance, as long as certain values of human dignity, equality and justice are shared. Ideological differences are not necessarily paralysing in the search for alternatives, but could rather give the necessary push to overthrow petrified mechanisms of domination and exclusion. An openness to different action repertoires, both with and outside the state, and new vocabularies for social change, as well as a certain courage to engage in conflicts, are both part of the attitude that might contribute to bringing an end to injustices and inequality.

References