Can communication rights bring about peace and security?
By Pradip Thomas, School of Journalism & Communication, University of Queensland, Australia.
Pradip N. Thomas
Will the extension of communication rights bring about peace? Before I move on to answering that question, it is important to define what peace is. In common parlance peace is a state of affairs characterized by the complete or relative absence of conflict and violence at different levels – within the family, the neighbourhood, between communities, between countries. In this way of thinking structural peace be it at home or between countries is a necessary pre-condition for physical and mental peace, the basis for ordinary people to exist and co-exist, to live life. Peace in other words has both macro and micro dimensions. However, while overt violence remains the cause of the majority of human suffering, there is also the slow and unexamined play of violence at the heart of poverty that is rarely if ever represented as violence. This violence impacts negatively on the quality of life and on the ability of communities to exist inter-subjectively. One contemporary example of this violence is what the media have described as the global food crisis – the increasing costs and scarcity of essentials such as grain and its implications for human survival.
If one were to explore the basis for the current food crisis, it is clear that multiple factors have contributed to this crisis - over-consumption in the developed world and in pockets in the developing world, demand for food grains as a result of population growth, speculation in the commodities market, the failure of export-oriented agricultural policies, in particular, the kind espoused by the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF, among other reasons.
Writing this piece on my way back from Lai Chau district in North Western Vietnam, home to a number of ethnic minority groups including the Tay/Thai, Dao and the H’Mong, it is clear that larger structural factors including government and donor community policies related to agricultural investment have negatively affected the futures of entire communities. A plethora of donors and an array of projects have only marginally contributed to the development of these communities.
Traditional communities, be they in Vietnam or Haiti, rely on subsistence agriculture. However when export crops are considered more worthy than upland rice or traditional rice varieties, these subsistence farmers are expected to stop cultivating rice, replace it with cash crops and buy rice in the open market. The growing costs of agricultural inputs merely contributes to the furthering of ‘unsustainable agriculture’ and is another example of the slow violence that is at the heart of the global agricultural crisis. This violence is invisible to all except the communities who are faced by this crisis on a day to day basis.
Can communication rights bring about peace and security in this context? In the context of Vietnam where civil society is relatively undeveloped and a strong state directs development and has pinned its hope on the maximization of growth and productivity, the communication rights of ethnic minority communities, as of now, can only be realized through advocacy by external agencies be it the ADB, GTZ, DANIDA, the World Bank, DFID and other national and multi-lateral agencies. There is little prospect for an extensive operationalisation of communication rights given the political context. The voices of ethnic minorities are yet to be heard.
While concerned individuals within the state government apparatus certainly can play a role in advocating on behalf of ethnic minority groups, they are not in a position to influence the direction of policy. The prospects for a national agricultural movement in support of subsistence agriculture is rather slim. I would think that communication rights for peace in this context is the right of people to be heard and to practice subsistence agriculture. But how can this be achieved?
All major donors to Vietnam need to acknowledge that subsistence agriculture supports a way of life and is the basis for food security. While subsistence agriculture is itself under great pressure because of rising input costs – the present food crisis offers an opportunity for governments to support sustainable agricultural practices, to revitalize indigenous agricultural practices and to explore growth and productivity in the context of sustainable agricultural development. Donors also need to acknowledge that ethnic minority communities in Vietnam are the poorest of the poor and that their voice needs to be treated on par with the dominant Kinh/Vietnamese community.
While the prospects of communication rights advocacy by mainstream aid agencies may be remote, we need to nevertheless acknowledge that there are many dimensions to communication rights and numerous contexts such as in Vietnam that are not conducive to civil society-based interventions or solutions. The valorization of Voice is by no means a given. It is important that we recognize that communication rights for peace will require contextual solutions.
The author, Pradip N. Thomas, will conduct a workshop on Communication Rights during WACC’s Congress 2008, to be held in Cape Town October 6-10. The workshop will introduce participants to the notion of communication rights, explore different experiences and understandings of communication rights, look at the history of communication rights and its contemporary status, and examine possible strategies for communication rights advocacy.
Pradip is former director of WACC’s Global Studies Programme and currently Associate Professor at the School of Journalism & Communication, University of Queensland, Australia.
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