Civil Resistance and Social Work Integration for Social Change

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everyone. Welcome to Podcasting Social Work. Podcasting Social Work is a platform for learners, educators, social workers, and activists to share your stories and skills to empowered communities and transform lives. My name is Hasan Mahabou. I am a social worker and community organizer. I teach social work at Sentinel College of Ontario. Today's episode is on how can civil resistance and social work integration and hence social change. I'm going to host this episode and please to inform you that Mr. Herdy Meriman, who is a leading political scientist, educator, and civil rights scholar in the recent time, will join us in this episode. Mr. Meriman is the president of International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and Brief IC&C, a US-based nonprofit social justice organization that supports nonviolent civil resistance study and practice across the world. It was my great pleasure to meet the IC&C president in the Latin American regional institute on the study and practice of strategic nonviolent action in Kyoto, Ecuador, where over 55 civil rights activists, educators are participating from across the world. How are you, Herdy? I'm doing great. Thanks. Thank you so much for your time. I know you are very busy in regional institute in Latin America. And I am very happy to participate in your sessions on civil resistance, social nobibance nonviolent strategies and tactics in Ecuador. Now, through this podcast, I would like to connect you with our students, social workers, educators, and community activists. Can you please tell us about your work and passion in civil resistance, social movement, and nonviolent action? Great. Sure. Thank you, Sana. And thank you for inviting me to join this podcast. I'm excited about the topic that we're going to discuss, social work, civil resistance, and social movements. I think it's an area of great potential growth. And so my work focuses on nonviolent movements that are struggling for rights, freedom, and justice around the world. So I've been doing that for 17 years, almost. And what I try to do is figure out, why do some movements succeed? And why do others fail? That's very important, Katie. Yeah. So I take a social science approach to that, trying to learn whatever the research can tell me, as well as learning from activists that I talk to around the world. And really, the emphasis that I have is on strategy. So when we look at why movement succeeds or fails, we can look at the movement's environment. For example, what are the conditions in which the movement exists? How challenging are they? Are there opportunities? And that's a very important line of inquiry. My line of inquiry looks on the things that a movement can control. It's strategy. It's choices, the development of its skills. And so looking at the way skills and strategy can help a movement overcome challenging conditions is a focus of my work. Wonderful. And as you know, that our social work works in the current situation, according to international Federation of Social Workers, social work is a practice-based profession and academic discipline that promotes social change and development. Social work also promotes social cohesion, the empowerment, and liberation of people. So from this perspective, I tried to give an overview about social work. Can you please define some key concept for our audience, like civil resistance, social movements, and non-violent action? Sure. I'd be happy to. So civil resistance and non-violent action are pretty much the same thing. Some people just prefer one term or another. I actually used to use the word non-violent action a lot. Now I use the term civil resistance a little bit more. But different people prefer different ones. And that's totally fine. Regardless of which term we use, what we're talking about is a way for ordinary people to struggle without the use of violence for rights, freedom, and justice. And it consists of three kinds of acts. So the first is acts of commission. This is where people do things that they're not supposed to do, not expected to do, or that are illegal to do. So for example, a protest or a sit-in, or changing your social behavior at a public event or a holiday or some high visibility time, for example, things that you're not supposed to do, or that may actually be forbidden from doing. And then acts of omission or the opposite, where we don't do things that we're supposed to do, expect to do, or require to do. And when you think about your day, and all the things are expected to do, imagine if you stop doing them. So what if you didn't pay taxes? What if you didn't pay your utility bills? What if you withdrew your money from banks? What if you stopped buying a certain product, or just shifted your buying pattern somehow? What if you didn't obey certain rules of social behavior, or started withdrawing from political institutions that you may participate in? All of those would be acts of omission. And then the third is a combination of both, and that would be something like building an alternative institution. So for example, alternative schools, where children may both come out of a regular school system and then enter into an alternative school that's been created sometimes by a movement, this may sound distant to some of us, but actually this has happened in countries around the world. Similarly, alternative governance structures, alternative economic structures, those are all part of civil resistance as well. And what's really interesting about this definition to me is there's an embedded theory of power in this definition. What we're really seeing here is it's about people's consent and obedience patterns. It's about that their behavior and their cooperation or non-cooperation. And so the embedded theory of power here is that if a lot of people shift their behavior patterns in a strategic way, they can actually shift the balance of power in society. Great. So I can see from the values and principles of civil resistance, it's about realizing human rights. It's about working towards social justice. It's about people's voices in the government process. So I see real connection in that. So in this regard, I know that you have great interest in civil resistance and social work integration. So I would like to ask you, how can civil resistance and social work integration enhance social change? You already elaborated, but it would be great for our audience to know more from you. Sure. Well, so if we compare social work and activism or civil resistance, one thing we'll see is a common set of values, right? Some of the values you listed are exactly those values that cause activists to join a movement and mobilize. So there's one thing in common right there. One difference, however, is that social work is professionalized, right? You have a whole educational process, mentorship, practice, a body of literature that gets updated with research every year that then gets taught to students, and then professional associations. And that is that educational infrastructure is so critical to making social work. Thank you for this. I want to continue to develop it, right? And so if we compare that with the activist or the organizer has, I mean, there are many people who, for example, make go through law school and become an activist or go through social work at school and become an activist. But if someone wants to really make their vocation, trying to really organize people to nonviolently discover their rights, there's not a lot of educational process set up for that. Some of it could come through social work school. But there's a huge body of knowledge about how do you organize communities and how do you struggle nonviolently against one's systems are really unaccountable. Absolutely. And so when I work, my work is international. So I see that activists don't have the kind of educational infrastructure and learning opportunities that they need to become better at what they do. It's pretty amazing. Activism is a fairly looked down upon and disrespected vocation. And yet it's one of the toughest jobs in the world, right? The skills that activists need, everything from building coalitions to listening, to learning how to communicate effectively, to strategic planning and analysis and gathering facts and figuring out what their opportunities are. I mean, that's skill-based work. Absolutely. And if we don't create structures for activists to, again, learn from each other, learn from examples in other parts of the world and in history, and learn from what the research is telling them, they're left with very few resources. And so it's pretty amazing what they're able to achieve with so little educational infrastructure. What would it mean if we mainstreamed that a lot more so that it was available to a lot more people? Great. I would like to update you about that is some trend in social work practice. We say anti-oppressive social work practice. In this practice, we look at the issues that cause marginalization and powerlessness and that cause poverty. So that we can support the person effectively. We can support the family effectively. At the same time, we also work with groups and communities on different community issues. And we work together to address that. And at the same time, we also engage them in movement so that the voices are heard by the policymakers. So I can see, I'm pretty nice to see that how civil resistance work and social work integrate so much. And that's a great discovery. Yeah, well, I appreciate you sharing because as someone who is not going through social work school, you know much better what is taught in the profession than I do. But it's interesting. This year, I've heard from several social workers about, wow, there's big potential synergy here. And in fact, we even recently published a blog post on ICMC's website about this, about why aren't we working together more. So again, I think people are feeling the spirit of times, the fact that we have a lot that we can learn from each other. And so I just love that we're able to talk about this and push this conversation forward. Thank you so much. And we hope that I have already gone through the blog. You have provided me. And it's really fantastic. And getting more ideas, how we can integrate civil assistance study in social work. Now, I would like to ask you advice, especially for our students and social workers. And also for community activists, you have great experience when you were working with world communities in designing and executing social nonviolent strategies and tactics for a campaign. So would you like to give us some tips in that regard, how we can plan? Sure. So I certainly can't add to Gandhi's first step, which was investigation. Gandhi first said, you need to deeply understand the issue, the grievances, the causes and conditions of the issue, and the people and groups involved. And so that is just fundamental. For any kind of organizing that I know is deep understanding of the context, the individuals, and sometimes the history, the social and political and economic dynamics. And once you've done that investigation, the next step would be actually trying institutional means. Dialogue might work, negotiation might work, voting might work, the legal system might work for you. And so it's really-- I mean, most people want to try to work with institutions. I mean, engaging in nonviolent action takes more effort if institutions are working. So however, if you find that institutions are insufficient, are dragging their feet, are taking too long, or in many parts of the world, they're just categorically unavailable or deeply corrupt, then that raises the question, what do you do next? What kind of pressure can ordinary people bring when they're facing oppression? What can they do when powerholders that seem to have all the advantages, more structure and hierarchy, human resources, control the information environment, and material resources, and even the capacity for repression, what do ordinary people do? And so at that point, that's where this critical insight about power comes from. That actually, it's through the behavior of lots of people that this hierarchy exists. And so that's when we start to think, OK, what is our vision for change? This is sort of step three. What is our vision for change? Not just what are we against, but what are we for? It's often easiest for people to articulate what they feel oppresses them. And that can be a basis for unity. But also saying, what is it that we proactively want to achieve if we start to organize as a community and engage in civil resistance? So then the next step after that would be what are the major intermediate steps we can take towards achieving that vision? And these are what we call campaigns. So campaigns are really important because a lot of people lack confidence that actually engaging in nonviolent action will work. This is despite the fact that actually there's a very rich history of movements doing unsuccessfully. So a lot of onlookers need to see that if people are engaging in nonviolent tactics like strikes and boycotts in civil disobedience and various acts of noncooperation, that they're actually going to be effective. So picking those intermediate objectives is critical because when you achieve them, it helps to build confidence. We saw this, for example, in the US Civil Rights Movement, where the Montgomery bus boycotts of 1955 were successful. It showed people that there was a technique that could be replicated and indeed other bus boycotts happen throughout the South. In 1960, you had the sit-in campaigns in Nashville and Greensboro. And similarly, you had sort of a proof that for these intermediate objectives, for these campaigns, this nonviolent technique was effective. And so these campaigns build on each other. And then the last level of planning would be tactics. What are the actual-- what's the actual sequence of tactics that you want to engage in? And on the issue of tactics, a lot of people think that nonviolent civil resistance is just about protest. These are protest movements is what people think but actually there are hundreds of different tactics. I've listed a few others, but there are many tactics that are also very low risk. So it's not like people need to be full-time activists to engage. Some of the most powerful tactics are just changing buying patterns. For someone, it may require very little sacrifice to do it. But the cumulative effect of thousands of people do it could be very significant. Yes, great. So there are very important tips and guidelines for our community workers, students, and social workers. Thank you so much for sharing these. And I have seen your little bio. And I have found you have tons of experience in this area as a educator, as a researcher. And you have represented many organizations in the United States. And congratulations for that. Now, I would like to know about ICNC where you are leading the team and supporting various activist group and community groups for non-violent conflict and civil assistance study. So in this regard, can you please tell us how our students and community workers, social workers can participate some of the initiatives of ICNC? Sure. So generally speaking, we have two big areas of activity. The first is our academic and research area, and the second is our direct work with practitioners. And so in our academic and research area, we support PhD research. We actually publish special reports, which are about 10 to 20 pages, generally, some are longer, and also monographs, which are shorter than a book, but fairly substantial, usually between 1,500 pages. And we provide financial support for that, and then we publish them. Wonderful. We also support teaching. So if there are educators who want to actually incorporate more content, about moving, organizing, and non-violent civil resistance in their classes, we offer a small stipend, and also can help provide guidance on curriculum resources and models of curriculum that people can use. And then in our field programs, if there are those who are interested in learning more as whether it's activists or other kinds of practitioners, I mean, we have a lot of resources on our website that you can download. And many of them are in different languages. We actually have resources in 70 languages and dialects while our website. We also used to have a program of making grants to activists, although currently we're reevaluating and recalculating the next step with that, although it's been incredibly successful and powerful. And we're also doing work on regional institutes, which is where we are right now, where we are trying to set up institutes in different parts of the world. We have one in Ecuador, one in Kepman-Dew, one in Ukraine, and hopefully we'll be able to establish one in West Africa. Great initiative. Where we partner with local institutions, universities, and NGOs, to try to do a week of in-depth civil resistance learning. I would like to say that I was very happy to receive a curriculum fellowship from ICNC. And that actually inspired me to learn more about this civil resistance study. And as a result, I'm here today in QTO to learn more from you and from other facilitators from this region. And I have been using the materials provided by ICNC. And not only the materials, I receive immense support, mentorship from ICNC. And that I have been using, my knowledge, that I have been using with my students. And recently I'm going to develop one online version for Power and Social Movement's course in our college. And I hugely rely on these materials, just this is for your kind information. And this education model, research, support, and your overall mentorship is so important for us. So thank you so much, hardy once again. And regarding our conversation, what you would like to say to our learners and social workers and how actually we can actively engage in this kind of civil resistance around us and fight for social justice and human rights. Well, I mean, what I'd say to anyone who is going out in the world and dedicating their time, whether it's professionally or outside of their profession to being a change agent for the better, is thank you. Thank you for your work. It is not easy. We all know that. It is not always highly rewarded, but it can be highly rewarding. And whether your perspective is social work, public health, civil resistance, whether you are more comfortable at a macro setting or a micro setting, thank you for your work. And let us continue it together. Let us learn from each other. Let us work together. Let us support each other. So on behalf of our audience and our students, I would like to thank you once again for your leadership, for ICMC, and also as individual, I can see you passion and support for us. And thank you so much once again. Dear audience, we'll come to you with another episode with other issues. Keep in touch. Thank you. Thank you.