Be the Narrative: How Changing the Narrative Could Revolutionize What it Means to do Human Rights

By Fund for Global Human Rights, JustLabs, Krizna Gomez, Thomas Coombes

Contents

Introduction

In 2018, JustLabs, along with a group of funders, held a series of labs on producing narratives as a response to the increasingly antagonistic tide towards human rights around the world.

Our starting point was the diagnosis—based on a series of workshops we ran with human rights leaders from Africa, the Middle East, Europe, the United States, Asia and Latin America—that the human rights field was undergoing a long-term period of profound transformation instead of a moment of crisis.

In this new, permanent state of existential doubt about the human rights field’s relevance and way of working, we needed to carry out this exploration process in a way that had not yet been done systematically in the field—an honest experimentation where failure was a given, where we worked with people from disciplines often unheard of in our circles, and where we aimed to surprise ourselves with something bold and fresh, and sometimes even “scary”.

To do this, first, we mapped the world according to the level of crackdown against civil society and ended up with three types:

1) relatively open but with signs of closure;
2) dangerously closing space for civil society; and
3) almost closed space for civil society.

We selected four countries per type:

1) the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and Brazil (relatively open; this was before the election of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro);
2) the Philippines, Mexico, Hungary and India (dangerously closing); and,
3) Russia, Cambodia, Turkey and Venezuela (almost closed).

Not only did we seek a variety in contexts, we also wanted to focus on countries that had clear elements if not full embodiment of what we considered a populist context. Our working definition of populism consists of two core elements:

1) anti-elitism; and
2) anti-pluralism.

In the anti-elitism component, there is a “real people” who are represented by the populist alone. The struggle is between these “real people” against a corrupt and immoral “elite”, and these elites are often coddling “The Other” in society or are not being sufficiently tough on the latter—such as migrants and minorities who commit crimes and take away opportunities from the “real people”.

In anti-pluralism, the common will of “the people” can only be divined by the populists, making moral claims which are not subject to contrary evidence.

The 12 countries above had both or at least one element of populism, and we wanted to see whether the initiatives from our lab would make an impact.

We then built a team of experts from outside of human rights around each client. These experts came from storytelling, political strategy, marketing, communications, technology (including computational propaganda), comedy, organizational development, behavioral and cognitive sciences, design, creative campaigning and low-cost guerilla activism.

After the three ideation labs, 12 prototypes of narrative initiatives were produced, which we then narrowed to the four most promising ones that now have entered a one to two-year period of testing in the real world. These prototypes are currently at their initial, high-fidelity prototype pilot stage, and depending on the outcomes of this six-month testing, they may or may not proceed further.

This paper recounts the story of this experimentation and the analysis of the outcomes, and what we are positing as the bold steps that funders and human rights actors4 need to take at the tactical, organizational and field-wide levels.

In the radically experimental spirit of JustLabs, many of these proposals are learnings that we have picked up along the way as we have been testing our assumptions and ideas ourselves. We have only taken the first step on this voyage of discovery, and we now hope that this paper will serve to invite further debate, questions and introspection from our peers.

About JustLabs
About the Fund for Global Human Rights
Acknowledgment
Executive summary
I. Introduction
II. Why narratives matter to human rights
III. 12 populist challenges and 12 prototype responses
The populist challenge we set out to address
- 1. Controversy
- 2. Crisis
- 3. Conflict
The responses through the prototypes
- 1. Culture: A response to controversy
- 2. Cooperation: A response to crisis
- 3. Community: A response to conflict 20
IV. What needs to be done to get these narratives right
- Tactical changes
Organizational changes
Field changes
V. Conclusion