Citizen action and the perverse confluence of opposing agendas

By Lisa Veneklasen

Are people organizing against injustice in ways that differ fundamentally from those of recent decades? And, today's uprisings and mobilizations compared to their predecessors, do you find more continuity than difference? These and other question on contemporary citizen action and the Occupy movement are addressed by Lisa Veneklasen in her highly interesting article on opendemocracy.net. Here you will find a short introduction of her article.

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What with claims of “Facebook revolutions” in the Arab Spring and “leaderless movements” in Occupy-Wall-Street protests across the world, the media is abuzz with commentary on the changing nature of citizen action. But – aside from new gadgets and unexpected locations – are people really organizing against injustice in ways that differ fundamentally from those of recent decades? Or, when you look closely and compare today’s uprisings and mobilizations for equality and freedom to their predecessors, do you find more continuity than difference? And then, setting aside old vs. new, can we say that present-day strategies are in fact advancing the cause of justice?

Occupy Wall Street had not been born when a diverse international collection of scholars and activists met over two days in The Hague in September 2011 to consider how citizen action is changing. Nonetheless, the Arab Spring, worldwide digital activism, Slut Walks, Indignados, and multiplying mobilizations against austerity packages around the world seemed to signal new energy and, at the very least, a fresh round of youth activism and political ingenuity.

Not surprisingly, perceptions of what’s new, what’s old and what’s better are shaped largely by age and place. Young Egyptian activists – still optimistic about the future despite the military’s hold on state power and the reversals of women’s rights and roles – see their country and their fellow citizens in a fresh new light. Leila, a young Spanish-Syrian activist and social media journalist with Al Jazeera exclaimed that the Arab uprisings and Spanish Indignados  felt like “the day the people woke up!”

It’s the younger generation of netizens who fully own the possibilities of technology. From the instantaneous blast of images of injustices to the text messaging to protect activists from riot police and military, virtual citizen action has exponential reach, as many digital activists in their twenties described to the gathering in The Hague. A Brazilian hack-tivist working with many social justice groups, Pedro declared that the new technology has made old-fashioned hierarchical and formalized communication and organization irrelevant. With new technologies, anyone can be a journalist and an activist. “NGOs are dead. Journalism is dead…. Being a citizen with no power is boring, but technology makes it possible for anyone to be in the middle of the action.” At the same time, he flatly dismissed the notion that the technology drives the revolution. “There’s no Facebook revolution. There’s just Facebook and then there’s people organizing.” Does the Internet limit the depth and staying power of citizen action, as many people fear, reducing it to an isolated click of a mouse by disconnected individuals? Sure, Pedro admitted, there are a handful of lazy pseudo-activists, “slactivists” or “clicktivists.” It’s about how you use the technology. “It’s the interaction and connection between the street action and the digital action that matters.”

Older activists and scholars at the meeting – with experience ranging from revolutions of the 1960s and 70s to the anti-globalisation and feminist movements – viewed these new developments with a mix of excited interest and scepticism. Their questions boiled down to the issues of vision, ideology and strategy: “What are we building?” Puzzled by some of the dynamics in the Arab Spring, one long-time Dutch activist, Kees Stad, asked about Libya, “How is it that NATO is bombing a country and we call this a revolution? What ever happened to the idea of imperialism?”...