Community Visions of Justice and Ending the Cognitive Empire

Human rights work is a praxis of possibility when it is based in learning from and collaborating with people directly impacted by systemic injustice and oppression. This is not happening enough, despite that it makes inherent sense to work with the people who not only have an existential stake in the outcome, but who also have the knowledge and expertise on how to survive and resist the systems that require transformation.

Part of our work at Just Ground is understanding and addressing the barriers to leadership and full participation of directly impacted people in processes ostensibly intended to protect and vindicate their human rights. 

With that in mind, I recently finished reading The End of the Cognitive Empire by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. He argues that, if we are to envision and build a better world, we must look to “the production and validation of knowledges anchored in the experiences of resistance of all those social groups that have systematically suffered injustice, oppression, and destruction caused by capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy.” These he calls “the epistemologies of the South.” 

Santos’ South is not a geographic place. It consists of the sociopolitical spaces where people are ignored and dehumanized based on their race, gender or religion. In contrast, the North is defined by Western-centric scientific modernity. The North fails to recognize the epistemologies of the South--either because they are not produced by accepted methodologies or because they are produced by people deemed incapable of producing valid knowledge.

The North’s hegemony is the “cognitive empire” that maintains capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. It is, in the words of Audre Lorde, the master’s tools that will never dismantle the master’s house.

While this all may seem quite conceptual, Santos’s analysis readily applies to human rights work. He refers to the NGO-ization of struggle, for example, in which the “knowledges, discourses and repertoires” promoted by international NGOs “impose themselves from the outside,” and seek to provide “all the relevant explanations and solutions.” Their overwhelming presence, he argues, and their work within predefined limits on preordained goals, is hostile to struggles that are “autonomous and emancipatory,” that “acknowledge the force but not the legitimacy of limits” and so act towards displacing them. 

Santos’ criticism of NGO-ization brings to mind critiques of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), the existing international framework to address corporate conduct that threatens or violates individuals’ and communities’ human rights. For example, as Prof. Surya Deva has explained, the architect of the UNGPs did not consult with people directly impacted by corporate human rights abuses, but nonetheless used the language of consensus to lend legitimacy to an effort that, in the end, limited the corporate responsibility to respect human rights “to general social norms and market expectations.” As Prof. Tara J.  Melish has noted, the UNGPs’ underlying premise that elite acceptance of its norms will lead corporations to voluntarily become “human rights leaders as a matter of constructed self-identity” relegates rights holders to “passive beneficiaries of outsider goodwill.” As a result, the UNGPs are not meaningful or relevant to directly impacted communities because they fail to provide them with any real tools to fight corporate abuse. I also see NGO-ization in the proliferation of standard-setting multi-stakeholder initiatives, such as Fairtrade USA and Rainforest Alliance, which lay claim to legitimacy through stakeholder engagement, but in practice largely exclude rights holders in their design and implementation and thus have failed to protect human rights on the ground.

I find more inspiration than indictment in Santos’ analysis, however, because he offers a way forward. The book envisions and describes methodologies and pedagogies of the epistemology of the South, in which participants are co-investigators and knowledge is a co-construction the purpose of which is to strengthen resistance to oppression.

The aim is not to lay claim to the universalism that holds sway in the North, but rather to build an ecology of knowledges, a cognitive justice that recognizes and values different ways of knowing and that allows for intercultural translation and cross-fertilization.  

The language of human rights is one way that translation and cross-fertilization can take place. Santos notes, for example, that groups engaged in struggle often resort to “the narrative of human rights in public discourse as a way of being understood by publics that do not share their cultural universe, as a way of building bridges and alliances with other movements, and even as a way of engaging with the state’s judicial and administrative bureaucracies.” Indigenous resistance to extractivism, for example, is born of traditional Indigenous knowledge, yet aided by international human rights law, which, as Prof. Rebecca Tsosie has argued in her article on indigenous people and epistemic injustice, offers a “set of norms that can address the epistemic forms of injustice that indigenous peoples continue to suffer.” More broadly, as Prof. Natsu Tayloe Saito has noted in her essay on race and decolonization in the United States, international human rights law, recognizes that all peoples have a right to self-determination, and that right, by definition, “must come, organically, from the people and cannot be prescribed from the top down.” 

In Santos’ words, change is possible when marginalized social groups have the power “to represent the world as their own and change it as if it were their own house.”  The good news is that, as Prof. Saito reminds us in her article, “there are innumerable opportunities to assert human dignity, to exercise the right to self-determination, and to set in motion processes that are, themselves, liberatory.” At Just Ground, we are focused on fostering those processes in collaboration and solidarity with communities resisting oppression. To borrow again from Audre Lorde, their knowledge holds the “power to seek new ways of being in the world” and “the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”