What’s Ahead in Human Rights 2023
Emerging Issues Where Activists Can Make a Difference
For the last few posts, I’ve been identifying some of the more fixed topics that activists must navigate in the annual human rights survey: the resistance of authoritarian states to the development and enforcement of human rights, the surge of wars and their atrocities, the steadily rising tide of migration as these wars and globalization march on, and the fight against the subordination of women (and other groups) around the world.
Not only do these problems drive much of each year’s misery and repression, but their inter-relation and overlap are also like a heat-map of the worst situations in any given year. In some ways, they are the constant backdrop to much of the human rights movement’s activity, against which the year’s events and the activists’ denunciations and reports play: the murder of women journalists; deployment of ever-more threatening weapons; war crimes that drive migration; nationalist backlash against new immigrants; unholy alliances that undercut human rights pressure in the global order. What we can say is that even if making progress is slow, there is some hope, given the world’s investments in laws, diplomacy, institutions, and aid programs on these subjects.
But other emergent challenges shaping our world will have huge human rights impacts. Addressing these human rights challenges in their early stages is arguably just as important. Climate change, the data revolution, new means of war and terrorism, and rising income inequality all will wreak havoc with the assumptions, institutions and values of democratic states — and that could spell big trouble for the human rights movement and its reactive proclivities more generally. Unlike the old boulders of war, migration, authoritarians and group subordination(which are often misperceived as just problems of other, poorer countries) everyone knows these new issues were created by developed, capitalist societies. The fight has to happen in those nations that drive these technological and economic developments — where regulation is likely to have the most international effect.
In the next series of posts, I will look at these emergent challenges with a view towards long-term campaigns, as well as some near-term opportunities to spark action. As in many other areas of life, it is often innovators and entrepreneurs that have the edge. Older institutions are slower to pivot, though donors can help them turn more quickly.
Timely interventions can make all the difference in averting human rights disasters–the campaign to preemptively ban the use of blinding lasers in warfare is a signature illustration, and swift reaction to the prospect of fully autonomous weapons has also slowed deployment of that technology. But to get in front of an issue means shifting from the traditional, reactive approach to taking the lead in research, projection and strategy. Human rights advocates have to diversify expertise and find new allies to exercise this type of proactive muscle.
