"We, the undersigned, call on the House of Representatives of the USA, the Senate of the USA, the Parliament of Great Britain and the National Assembly of Mauritius, to work to ensure:
1. The immediate decolonization of Diego Garcia and the Chagos Archipelago through the disbanding of the illegitimate "British Indian Ocean Territories"; the cancellation of the Orders in Council that prohibit the return of Chagossians to their native islands; the re-unification according to international law and the UN Charter, of the Republic of Mauritius that was dismembered as an illegal condition to Independence in 1968.
2. An immediate halt to ever using Diego Garcia for B-52's or other military apparatus to attack other countries (whether Afghanistan, Iraq or any other land) and the complete closing down of the United States military base on Diego Garcia."

Sign an online petition to make international trade rules fair, cancel crippling debts and provide more and better aid.

Available through the link below is a sign-on letter from U.S. civil society objecting to the nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to become the next President of the World Bank. While it is not clear whether the European governments - the only ones with the voting power at the institution's board to stop the nomination - will take any substantial action in opposition, the decision is not final until the board votes on it. That vote is expected on Thursday, March 31.

"Governments, international organisations and financial institutions, private enterprises and all members of society have a responsibility to respect, protect and fulfil the Right to Water for Life.  With one third of the population of the world suffering from lack of adequate drinking water and/or sanitation, it is clear that the realisation of the universal right to Water for Life is far from complete at the grass roots level."

Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa faces rising discontent within his ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) as senior party leaders accuse him of failing to rein in corruption, analysts said on Monday. Mwanawasa, who took office in 2001 vowing to get tough on graft, has seen a series of defections by top allies that analysts say could leave him in a much-weakened position ahead of a party congress in May.

You will lead the development and implementation of a coherent advocacy strategy for Oxfam in Sudan. You will specifically focus on issues of conflict analysis, humanitarian space and the ongoing peace processes.

The incumbent will be creating innovative campaigning strategies aimed at decision makers and other audiences, resulting in concrete and long lasting change for the human rights situation in Zimbabwe.

Changes in the status of women are key features of globalization. Some analysts have even concluded that globalization is, in part, feminization. ‘The feminization of what?’ is the question. We are not going to try to answer this question here. Rather, we want to open discussion on how stories about women and globalization relate to the world of activism. What functions do these stories perform for the left? How do they constitute social movements and mask that civil society is not an ideal space; that inequities are often reproduced there?

The question of whether the changes associated with globalization have been aggregately positive or negative for women tends to be one around which activist and civil society politics is mobilized – and key assertions about where our global society is going and how it wants to get there are framed.

Digital divide notwithstanding, hours of web searching every possible combination of key words for ‘women and globalization’ essentially *revealed* that little to no progress of any meaningful kind has occurred over the last 100 years, and that women as a whole remain overwhelmingly powerless, voiceless and victims. The trade in colors, with the image of black and brown women as the “face of poverty”, is particularly robust.

But, can we trust these stories completely? The way power is organized tends to allow –even encourage - relatively well-resourced and socially privileged spokespersons (men and women of various colours) to use popular discourses about the affects of globalization on women. Discourses do things; they have effects. Or, more strongly, people say things in order to achieve things. They offer excuses, assign blame, win support, seize the moment, cast themselves in a particular light, and so on.

Women in the social movements in post-apartheid South Africa provide testimony to the fact that whilst they may form the mass base of the movement they most certainly are not well represented among the leadership ranks. The movements have garnered the support of thousands of poor black women and have through their political action challenged the state’s provision of basic services to the household and raised consciousness around the plight of poor women. Yet within the movements, a male, top heavy leadership speaks on behalf of thousands of poor black women while the added burden of moving much needed gender reform forward is one that falls primarily to women – often finding an uneven, even cold reception from leaderships accustomed to defining gender equality as secondary to class and race struggles.

That inequities are reproduced in civil society – from local to global - raises questions about a left that trades on taking up the plight of women, a left that looks to women’s experiences to legitimize movements, organizations – even activist careers. Commander Esther, Zapatista Army of National Liberation, highlights the contradictions:

“[A]s women, the rich man tries to humiliate us, but also the man who is not rich, who is poor like our husbands, our brothers, our fathers, our sons, our companions in the struggle, and those who work with us and are organized with us. So we say clearly that when women demand respect, we demand it not only from the neoliberals, but also from those who struggle against neoliberalism and say they are revolutionaries but in the home are like Bush.”

In South Africa, the social movements have traditionally been perceived to be the place where poor, black women coagulate to regain their self-respect, their dignity, their strength as a collective and their identity as women. However, this safe space of the movement continues to displace value and repeatedly uses the same oppressive forms of structure and organising. Thus, when women gain it may be merely as a component of other geometries of power, such as unions or civil society organizations - whose decision-making processes and well paid positions are overwhelmingly occupied by men. Some predict that if this were to continue then women will be compelled to reconstitute themselves as a group identity of women that will supplant class interest as the chief medium of political mobilization.

Still, not much is done within social movements to empower women to participate more effectively, so that they can be their own voices and be their own faces and agents of their own experience. For example, often the male leadership simultaneously co-opt women’s powerfully articulated demands for better municipal services while conceiving of and scripting women’s organizational roles as merely supportive. The commitment from the male leadership to the transformation of gender relations appears strategic and limited. As a result, women in the movements are feeling a greater sense of isolation and that their particular issues and their identities as women are being ignored. Ten years on now from the end of apartheid and there is a growing sense that women’s development in the movement - other than what they are able to achieve as individuals – has stalled.

If women consistently fail to escape the everyday indignities of discrimination in social movements, that those movements might unravel under the weight of their contradictions, is not surprising. Among the members of the now frayed and fragmented Concerned Citizen’s Forum [CCF], for example, it was a commonly held perception that, while women are at the forefront of the struggle and many occupy leadership positions in their local branches, there was no development of women in the CCF - other than what they are able to achieve as individuals - and there existed few mechanisms in the social movements leadership structure to encourage active participation of women. Similarly, to date in trade unions, the democratic rights that have been achieved by the unions for women members in the workplace are not paralleled by democratic rights for women within the unions. More insidiously, however, the values and beliefs encountered within the union structures have been of women as inherently subservient, whose issues carried less weight than those of the broader working class struggles.

Cutting into the question of women and the left where we have seems to suggest that one route out of the impass might be to play closer attention to what women can and have achieved (in terms of extracting themselves from their particular experience with a tangle of patriarchal norms and institutions) through acts of individual creativity and innovation. For example, a breaking down and breaking out – moving beyond what seems structurally or organizationally possible within existing hierarchical parameters – has long been the innovative strategy of black women – and a mode of power of the so-called ‘powerless’ more generally. Since their demands have perpetually been left out by feminist movements and movements for racial liberation, it is often individual creativity that has brought about the actual gains that translate into bargaining power and leverage in movements.

In this light, while there is little point to romanticizing the ruptures and border zones of the globalizing world, some analysts point to not yet well understood informal temporary zones and multi-centric functional networks nested within sprawling “scapes” where important social resistance and renewal takes place. That is, beyond totalizing rhetorics and hardened organizational hierarchies of the left there is an array of women’s insurgencies taking place. The widest array of which may be, to borrow Castell’s language, “practical feminists” (2000b: 200).

“Aren’t the struggles and organizations of women throughout the world, for their families (meaning mainly their children), their lives, their work, their shelter, their health, their dignity, feminism in practice…Under different forms, and through different paths, feminism dilutes the patriarchal dichotomy of man/woman as it manifests itself in social institutions and in social practice. So doing, feminism constructs not one but many identities, each one of which, by their autonomous existence, seizes micropowers in the world wide web of life experiences.”

Authors like Saskia Sassen have noted that in the global cities “[t]here is a large literature showing that immigrant women's regular wage work and improved access to other public realms has an impact on their gender relations: Women gain greater personal autonomy and independence while men lose ground.” It may be that we like our stories of women having new freedoms, of gaining ground, to be less messy. We have been trained to see as primary her exploitation in the capitalist labour market. But what if we change the lens from capitalism to patriarchy? And what if we set that picture afloat within a global left that doesn’t value women any more than capitalism does?

The organized left’s skepticism about women’s agency and what can be achieved without being organized tends to operate to script the work of ‘the struggle’ in service of ‘the revolution’ as nobler, more important, more immediately pressing. But the promise that women’s everyday lived indignities will simply evaporate once race and class issues are addressed relies on futurology as vague and discredited as Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Capitalism seems to trade on patriarchy, but so can the left.

We are skeptical about global discourses and politicized terrains that remain dominated by debates that frame women’s autonomy as something won on behalf of women. It renders invisible much of the day-to-day innovation and activity that individual women leverage to incrementally reinvent daily life. More insidiously it co-opts and confiscates the gains made by women in the everyday, attributing it to activists, organized civil society organizations and international development agencies, many of which primarily serve the interests of a narrow band of elite often organized along principles where men are able to move through the ranks leaving the bulk of women behind as shadow workers.

Many of the women who belong to social movements in South Africa often don’t restrict themselves to the work of the organization. Women in the Anti-Eviction Campaign in the Western Cape pointed out that it is not only evictions that they are concerned with. They work in their communities around issues of HIV, poverty, rape, drug-abuse, accessing social grants, teenage pregnancies and access to education for their children. Yet this work is not considered as a form of activism that is altering the political landscape. Rather “strategic” interests of the left are perceived as a more evolved and informed type of activism (where most of the men congregate around) and set in opposition to “practical” issues like daily survival.

With the specter of revolution denied looming intimidating, women are called to justify and rationalize the authenticity of their interests - to stop pursuing those interests and be drawn into the diversionary web of defending them. In her seminal 1985 article Spivak asked the question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The point was not that movements for social change can somehow ‘get it right next time’ when they speak on behalf of those who have little voice in existing architectures of power. Rather, she wanted to know when and under what conditions will the subaltern speak for themselves?
As Poet Sujata Bhatt has said:

I am Indian, very brown, born in
Malabar, I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one. Don't write in English, they said,
English is not your mother tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in any language I like?...

* Saranel Benjamin and J. Zoë Wilson are with the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, and Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability, York University, Canada. The authors would like to thank Amanda Alexander, Raj Patel and Richard Pithouse for their valuable comments. All errors remain the responsibility of the authors exclusively.

**NOTE TO READERS: the authors would like to invite people everywhere to send their experiences with gender equity in social movements to: [email][email protected] and [email][email protected] Accounts will be compiled, verified and made available to all respondents. Please note if you wish to remain anonymous.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

References

Benjamin, S ‘ “We are not Indians! We are the Poors!” : Investigating Race Class and Gender in Social Movements’ Development Update, Vol 5 No. 2, 2004.

Castells, M. . The Power of Identity. Great Britain: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Spivak. G. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, pp. 66-111, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds. Hemel Hempstead & New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. (First printing 1988)

The Millennium Campaign Voices Against Poverty now has a bi-monthly e-bulletin providing the latest on poverty and MDG campaigns from around the world. It also provides a platform to share campaign ideas, updates and events. The Millennium Campaign, a UN initiative, informs, inspires and encourages people's involvement and action for the realisation of the Millennium Development Goals and supports citizens' efforts to hold their governments to account for the Millennium promise. Visit www.millenniumcampaign.org to subscribe to the bulletin and its Inter Press Service Newsletter.

You will lead the development and implementation of a coherent advocacy strategy for Oxfam in Sudan. You will specifically focus on issues of conflict analysis, humanitarian space and the ongoing peace processes. You will act as the focal point for Oxfam International (OI) in Sudan (both the geographic North and South) for advocacy and liaise and co-ordinate the work of OI affiliates outside of Sudan.

As the Indian Parliament prepares to tackle the country’s implementation of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) agreement regulating patents on medicines, Médecins Sans Frontières is urging Indian decision makers to ensure that patients in developing countries will continue to have access to affordable medicines. Visit MSF's webpage and find out more about their Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines.

Published by CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation and Millennium Development Goals Campaign Office, this manual aims to assist you and your civil society organisation in campaigning for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The Millennium Development Goals form an ambitious agenda for reducing poverty and improving lives. World leaders formulated the MDGs at the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000. Each goal contains one or more targets to be reached by 2015, and each country has to set realistic, time-bound and measurable national development goals in line with these targets.

Amnesty International South Africa and CIVICUS together with partner NGO's are organising The Zimbabwe Solidarity Rally which will be held on the 12 & 13th of March 2005 in which thousands of people and organisations will be marching to the main border posts of Zimbabwe in the neighbouring countries of Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. This demonstration is part of a series of civil society activities and events aimed at putting an end to ongoing human rights violations in Zimbabwe.

Electoral campaigns began on Saturday nationwide in the Central African Republic (CAR), with the majority of posters and banners appearing in the streets of the capital, Bangui, belonging to CAR leader Francois Bozize. Presidential and legislative elections, which are scheduled for 13 March, follow decades of political instability and violence.

"We, the undersigned international and national non-governmental organizations, networks, and parliamentarians from every region of the world, representing great political, social and religious diversity, underline the importance to us and to women worldwide of the ten-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action and the 30-year Anniversary of the First UN World Conference on Women, held in Mexico in 1975. We urge governments gathered at the 49th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women to:
1. Universally reaffirm the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the Outcome of the 23rd UN General Assembly Special Session (Beijing +5);
2. Re-commit to immediate national level implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and the Outcome of Beijing + 5.
3. Recognize that the realization of the Millennium Declaration and Millennium Development Goals depends on achieving the human rights and empowerment of all women, the attainment of gender equality and full implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action;
4. Commit to incorporating these into the discussions and outcomes of the Millennium Summit at all levels."

This document offers a brief introduction to a few different techniques of electronic advocacy using email, the Web, and other "new media" to bring about social change. This document is not intended to endorse electronic campaigning tactics at the expense of other offline tactics.

This is a call for mass mobilization during the 2005 Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, April 15-17th, Washington DC. The main action will be April 16. The 2005 meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank will represent the five year anniversary of the first major demonstrations against these institutions in the United States.

"Members of our union have always been compassionate and committed to helping those in need, whether it's in their own backyards or across the world. Now, more than ever, our help is needed for a cause that's near and dear to my heart: the AFT-Africa AIDS campaign. It is a cause that feels near to me, despite the geographic divide, because I was able to learn about the devastation first hand as part of an American Federation of Teachers' contingent that travelled to South Africa in fall 2003. As many as 60,000 teachers are expected to die of AIDS-related illnesses there in the next five years." You can learn more about the Africa AIDS crisis and how you can help by going to the AFT's Web site: www.aft.org/partners/africa-aids

The Open Society Institute (OSI) is calling for proposals to support projects aimed at improving local, national or regional policies and programs on TB/HIV co-infection. This TB/HIV advocacy small grants competition is intended to support TB/HIV advocacy work by organizations of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), HIV/AIDS treatment advocates and activist community groups and regional PLWHA networks in countries and regions affected by the dual TB/HIV epidemics. Projects proposing activities in one country can apply for up to $5,000. Projects from regional networks may apply for up to $15,000. Deadline: Friday March 4 2005

We, members of civil society, Zimbabweans in the Diaspora and citizens of Africa, would like to express our serious concern about the continued violations of civil liberties in Zimbabwe, particularly against the freedom of opinion and expression, association and assembly. We call upon the Government of Zimbabwe to immediately cease the systematic human rights violations in the country, including all forms of intimidation, arbitrary arrests and torture of members of civil society. We advocate for the immediate repeal and/or progressive amendment of all pieces of legislation (including those mentioned before) which contravene Zimbabwe’s international human rights obligations and its Constitution.