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Editorial, volume 6, number 4

In 1991 the following statement was added to the body of international agreements concerning human rights:

Development is not only a fundamental right but a basic human need, which fulfils the aspirations of all people to achieve the greatest possible freedom and dignity, both as individuals and as members of the societies in which they live ... A development strategy that disregards or interferes with human rights is the very negation of development.¹

Commitment to the indivisibility of human rights was reinforced in the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, where the prevalence of gender-based violations of the rights of women and girls also received long-overdue emphasis.²

Yet, as the 1996 UNDP Human Development Report illustrates, global development strategies entail precisely such a disregard for the rights and freedoms of all human beings.³ That the wealth of just 358 individual billionaires should exceed the combined annual incomes of countries that are home to almost half the human race is an aberration of breath-taking proportions. And with such economic domination comes the power to shape the policies and decisions affecting others' lives and aspirations, processes that both derive from and deepen the exclusion of millions of fellow human beings. Defining power as 'control over material assets (whether physical, human, or financial), intellectual resources (including knowledge, information, and ideas), and ideology (the ability to generate, propagate, sustain, and institutionalise specific sets of beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviour)', Srilatha Batliwala argues that real power corresponds to the 'resources [that individuals or groups] can control, and the extent to which they can shape prevailing ideologies, whether social, religious, or political. This control, in turn, confers the power of decision-making.'⁴

The deepening abyss between rich and poor is, then, not only a question of equity, of social and political stability, or even of so-called 'enlightened self-interest'. It is one that implicitly denies that we are bound by our shared humanity, which is the very basis of the concept of universality. For, in the words of the Burmese political activist and Nobel prize-winner, Aung San Suu Kyi,

[t]he value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged. In the matter of power and privilege, the difference between the haves and have-nots is not merely quantitative, for it has far-reaching psychological and ideological implications ...

Linking the alleviation of poverty with more subtle kinds of change, she says:

It is not enough merely to provide the poor with material assistance. They have to be sufficiently empowered to change their perception of themselves as helpless and ineffectual in an uncaring world.⁵

The exploration of the links between the various expressions of power, and the corresponding levels of disempowerment, is what informs this specially commissioned issue of Development in Practice. While the theme defies comprehensive treatment, the range of topics -- from agrarian reform to the sexual abuse of children, from economic liberalisation to the problems of meeting the needs of civilians in war, from forced eviction to the denial of cultural and intellectual independence -- gives an insight into its complex dimensions. Yet this collection of papers also attests to the thoughtful and creative ways in which women and men in every corner of the world have sought to analyse their disempowerment, and to dismantle it.

Deborah Eade

November 1996

Notes

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