micro-managing the Arab Spring: on NGOs, management, movements, and social change
This is an excerpt from “Anarchists in the board room – how social movements and social media can help your organisation be more like people”, by Liam Barrington-Bush. Liam is currently running a campaign to have the book crowd funded. You can contribute here.
Imagine the first strategy meeting amongst an imaginary coalition of NGOs involved in ‘strategising’ for the delivery of the ‘Arab Spring 2011’ program. Probably in about April 2002:
“Our vision is: ‘A series of mostly peaceful revolts across the Middle East and North Africa in the spring of 2011, overthrowing longstanding dictatorships and kicking-off a process of bottom-up democratisation throughout the region.’”
“Great. What are our targets gonna be? Have we identified strategic partners in each of the countries? What will we accept as a ‘democratic’ victory? Do we have a system of risk management? How will we measure the impact?…”
If they had somehow managed what we now know was achieved by less strategic or coordinated means, think for a minute how the follow-up meetings might have gone:
“Do we have a figure on ‘total persons liberated’ yet?”
“What if that figure goes up after the funding period is over? Think we could fudge it a bit to boost the numbers?”
“We’re probably gonna want to avoid mentioning too much about Syria in the final report… Bahrain too.”
“We’ll have to talk about Libya, but is there a way we can avoid giving NATO too much credit on that one? If we make it look like they were the critical success factor, they’ll get all the funding in the next round.”
“Can we reshape the vision statement to reflect Tunisia and Egypt more strongly? If we were aiming to liberate the whole region and only two dictators were ousted, it’ll be easy to say the programme was a failure. What if we said it was something about ‘supporting peaceful revolts in Tunisia and Egypt’? Then we can credit the other stuff as unexpected fringe benefits of our interventions… maybe we can build the next funding app around some of the other countries that have been ‘prepared’ for future peaceful revolutions?…”
There were of course many organisations that played roles within the various uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East in early 2011, but there was no organisation that could effectively or meaningfully take credit for what took place in any single country, let alone the entire region.
Organisations (clearly structured institutions) have, throughout history played important roles in countless social movements (looser, larger, emergent and wholly autonomous masses of people), yet have repeatedly failed to understand the differences between the two forms.
The organising principles which underpin organisations and movements are almost diametrically opposed to one another, even if from the outside (and generally through the condensed lens of history) their aims and beliefs appear perfectly aligned.
An organisation in a movement is too often like the friend-of-a-friend at a high school house party who hasn’t grasped the etiquette of the group they’ve stumbled into. They do inappropriate things, hit on people they should know not to hit on, say things they shouldn’t say… and ultimately end up too drunk for their own good, being looked after by some sympathetic stranger who wants to keep them from getting beat-up or seriously damaging the furniture.
…Maybe that last bit pushed the metaphor a bit, but anyone who has participated in a movement without their organisational hat on knows the tension that emerges when an institution tries to impose hierarchy on something for which there are simultaneously no leaders and an ever-changing plethora of leaders coming-and-going, depending on the specifics of the situation.
This tension might be sparked by unannounced organisational recruitment drives at broader movement events or actions. It might be in the domination of organising meetings with particular agendas and aims. It could be the prevalence of a particular organisational face in media coverage or publicity, taking disproportionate credit for something which has in fact been a much broader effort.
This is not to say that people who work for organisations cannot bring just as much value, resource and experience to a movement as any of the rest of us, but that too often this requires their aims as individual activists to trump their aims as employees of an institution.
The desires to build brand recognition, to secure funding, to promote awareness of a particular agenda or individual name are practically speaking at odds with actually working towards a better world. They distract from the tasks at hand. We began by explaining them to ourselves as ‘necessary evils’ in the world of organising, until they gradually assumed a considerable bulk of our work. The tail is wagging the dog.
We have put the ‘cart before the horse’ when the structures created to help achieve change, become the institution’s primary reasons for being. Over time, almost without fail those ‘helpful’ structures end up practically at odds with the change they were meant to support – often at the point of engagement between the organisation itself, and the bigger movement that it is a part of.
Our organisations need to be more sensitive to their environments, and accept that we are guests in broader movements for change, rather than the stars of the show, as so much organisational campaigning, publicity and fundraising efforts have pushed us to try to be over the years.
Becoming aware of the ways our organisational hats might be at odds with the aims of a movement, is a critical step towards making a positive difference in this emergent world. If we want to be meaningful and constructive contributors, we need to understand the principles that help movements to thrive, even if they seem immediately at odds with the principles that have driven our organisations for so long.
As you read this, there are countless emergent social movements that could benefit from the people, experience and resources that our organisations have within their walls. Finding ways to work constructively – rather than antagonistically – with these looser networks will be a defining distinction of established organisations that remain important in the movements of the not-so-distant future.
But doing so means learning to take on some of the qualities of these looser networks…
_________
This was taken from Chapter 3: ‘The myth of hierarchical necessity and what we can do for ourselves.’ You can see Liam talk at more length about the book below.
Hi Jon. Sorry if you feel there’s a lack of balance here. It’s one snippet of the book, so is part of a much broader argument.
re: lack of real change associated w/ movements? It’s change that happens on a different scale – lots of small changes that most people never hear about. Public debate is part of it, but Occupy has spawned thousands of different more-specific change efforts, all over the world, focusing on changing laws, to taking direct direct action to keep evicted families in their homes. It is ‘below the radar change’ that doesn’t take on the big system, all at once, but inspires countless others to find their own ways of challenging whatever parts of it they are inspired to.
re: Inefficient decision making – participatory democracy is incredibly ‘inefficient’ in the short term, but look at the alternatives? Top-down decisions breed alienation and make it very hard for others to be invested in whatever emerges, which means countless ongoing ‘inefficiencies’ as a result. W/ consensus, at it’s best (though I agree it’s not perfect for everything, by any means) you put in the time early, and reap the benefits throughout.
Re: Arab spring – yes, it’s complex – some will always like to say ‘this action made this action happen,’ but rarely do major political actions result from single incidents. That same union action, in many other contexts, would have had a very different result. It played a role, but was not ‘the reason’ for change. In terms of the Muslim Brotherhood’s cooptation of the movement – this is definitely not ideal. This movement hasn’t achieved all of it’s goals, but how many orgs do? The MB still relied on the far wider movement to even be in that position, which they exploited for sectarian aims. Any organisation exploiting such a movement not be acting in the interests of the movement, which makes me ask, why would progressive forces want to be more like them?
re: Tea party – they had Fox news backing them and giving the allusion of success. What did they achieve, beyond a lot of news coverage on a station that was essentially part of the movement?
re: ACORN – have done some good work, absolutely. Most NGOs and charities do do some good, no arguments. But they also often treat people inside and outside of them like crap… (That was a family member’s experience of working for them, anyway). You may argue that such treatment is an unfortunate bi-product of hierarchical organisation, and a small price to pay, but the costs are far more significant than a few people having bad experiences – they kill the passion of those most committed, which is why I’ve written this book. That kind of consequence can’t be measured.
Cheers,
Liam
Hmm, sounds a bit like some of the anti-organisational anarchist dogma I hear. I prefer a more balanced view of this topic really.
Im not sure Occupy and UKuncut are the best examples, they flared up, and then subsided, without creating much in the way of lasting change. They raised the profile of the issues, but what concrete change? I think a more formal organisation could have kept this going. And to mention the consensus decision making in occupy is bringing up a much idealised and very inefficient way of making decisions.
On the arab spring. The muslim brotherhood, a formal organisation, has capitalised on the events in egypt. And one of the main reasons why in Mubarak stepped down, was because the unions took strike action at Suez.
The right wing in america has a strategy, and are being pretty successful, with the tea party movement etc. Well funded and resourced by big business, well researched, with think tanks. The tea party movement, was planned well in advance by big business, and not spontaneous.
On the left in america, ACORN deserves a mention, for combining formal membership and community organising with movement organising. Often doing coalition building, bringing together lots of organisations to get concrete changes like living wage ordinances. Combined with large scale protests against things like banks, against predatory lending.
In fact ACORNs action against H&R Block was quite like UKuncut, in that it involved a coordinated national protest at 50+ branches all over the USA. The difference was that ACORN won a fair few concessions from H&R Block.
For me, I think we could learn a great deal from formal organisation! 🙂