Friday Notes, April 19, 2024
Dear Friends —
I’ve been worrying about the relationship between decolonization (good!) and violating international human rights laws (bad!).
I’m not talking about the process of decolonization between 1945 and 1960 in which colonial powers formally handed over power to (or had it stripped from them by) the governments of newly independent states in Africa. I’m talking about the more recent version, which calls out and rejects the dominance of institutions and mindsets from the Global North, particularly in the “development” sector. Here’s one example, from Oxfam’s Amitabh Behar in Devex in February:
It is imperative that the [development] sector’s global leadership channel the positive push for a shift in power by decolonizing areas such as organizational design and structure, the distribution of money, and how knowledge and competence are valued.
While the idea of decolonization is manifested too often as an unnuanced approach to “localization” (see earlier rant on that topic), the power shift implied by decolonization is hugely positive and long overdue.
There’s a risk, though, that bad actors will appropriate the concept of decolonization, using it as an instrument to reject or distort actions above the level of the nation-state, including international human rights law. It is not a theoretical risk; they are doing it now. As Haley McEwen and Lata Narayanaswamy descrbed in the 2023 paper “The coloniality of anti-gender politics,” a quadruple-reverse play is underway to promote an anti-rights agenda that is particularly hostile to people who hold LGBTQI+ identities, to the empowerment of women, and to sexual and reproductive rights.
McEwen and Narayanaswamy take an academically rigorous approach to describing the situation. I’m going to try for something more direct, even though it glosses over a lot of historical nuance.
The sequence of events has gone something like this. First, colonial powers and missionaries ran roughshod over existing social structures, promoting Christianity and concepts like the “traditional” nuclear family. As part of this, they instituted harsh anti-homosexuality laws, including in countries where societies had been relatively accepting. They also imposed the type of gender-biased laws around property-holding, abortion, and various civil freedoms that were prevalent in Western Europe at the time.
When formal decolonization occurred, Northern governments left colonial-era laws on the books, and maintained connections to their former colonies through markets and immigration. Over time, they also built an official aid enterprise premised on a backward South that needed to develop along the same individualistic and capitalistic lines that had spurred economic growth in the North.
Social policies and norms in the North became increasingly liberal, embracing gender equity and other rights. Laws that had previously enforced traditional gender roles were updated. Donor programs themselves incorporated the social values of their home countries. In doing this, Northern actors often ignored people who had been fighting for civic and human rights in their own countries for decades — a battle that was, in part, against the remnants of the colonial past. Northern advocates brought in their own vocabulary and theories of social change, promoting internationally agreed rights frameworks but often failing to understand how they fit within the social context, or how they could be integrated into domestic law.
Thanks to some combination of international pressure and the life-long efforts of in-country advocates, many governments in the South made commitments to rights-based conventions. They created ministries and programs (often donor-funded) to advance gender equality. And some liberalized or at least decriminalized abortion and the treatment of members of the LGBTQI+ community.
In recent years, that very real progress has been experienced as deeply threatening in both North and South among conservative and fundamentalist religious groups, and others who hold anti-gay, anti-gender equality views. Through transnational networks, they’ve deployed many tools to unwind government commitments to human rights, and labeled progress as the result of neocolonial influence. They now say that rejection of international human rights around women and people with LGBTQI+ identities is part of decolonization — a return to traditional African cultural values.
If you have any doubt, witness the spread of ever-harsher anti-gay rights bills across many African countries, the rollback of commitments to sexual and reproductive health and rights, and the threatened repeal of the ban on female genital mutilation in the Gambia. In each case, decolonization is invoked and has served as both motivation and political cover.
Given the shifts over these eight decades, it’s impossible to discern what is “colonial” and what is “indigenous.” The social and legal changes introduced by colonists based on then-dominant Western religion and family structures are now considered by some to be “African.” The progress in the post-colonial era was due partly to influence that carried a neocolonial valence — but it wouldn’t have happened without African social justice champions. Now the backlash against gender equality and other forms of human rights comes from both domestic and external actors, often working in concert.
We can and should decry colonial behaviors and unwind systems that reinforce them. But we need to be aware of the temptation to strategically choose the moment when history starts — and we need to know that the decolonization agenda is being coopted to undermine hard-won advances in human rights.
For an excellent depiction of the interaction Northern and African social justice movements, I recommend Love Falls on Us: A Story of American Ideas and LGBT Lives, by Robbie Courey-Boulet.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that the least favorite activity for most people who work in the so-called knowledge industries is scheduling meetings. Especially one-off meetings of more than three people in which each and every person is essential to the discussion. (This is in contrast to same-time-next-week 1:1s or large meetings where no one would expect each and every person’s calendar to be accommodated.)
Why is this common task so soul-crushing? To start with, aligning available hours across the days of people with meeting-heavy work lives — especially if there are time zone differences or idiosyncratic work-from-home schedules — can be a puzzle harder than the Three Gods Problem.
But the real problem isn’t the technical difficulty of the job. It’s managing the subtleties of organizational hierarchies and the behavioral quirks of commitment-phobes and ghosts. If invitees don’t respond quickly, calendar holds pile up or are disregarded, and it takes twice as long to get to “accepted.”
Then, after the heroics are done —a time and place have been found! the participants have all confirmed! — it’s pretty discouraging to hear “Oh no! Not another meeting! What a waste of time.”
Scheduling is an example of two things that we often forget. The first is that administrative work can be intellectually challenging and often requires a combination of excellent organizational and interpersonal skills. Much of it is neither rote nor able to be palmed off on technology because it takes high-level judgment calls.
The second is that administrative work is essential to almost all other kinds of productivity. Meetings need to be purposeful and well designed so we can accomplish our work together. They also need to be scheduled.
I will spare you the layer of gender theory that explains a lot of this. But: if you’re the person who does a lot of scheduling, know that you’re doing important work. And if you’re the person being asked if you’d rather meet on Monday at 4 or Wednesday at 2, please respond to the email or Doodle poll now.
A quiz: How to Tell Your Real Work Age
At the risk of inviting the New Yorker lawyers to come after me this week, here’s a great cartoon to end on:
Have a good weekend,
-Ruth