Meet the team: Helena Zeweri
Written by SAHR member, Habiba Akther.
Helena is our Director of Research and is currently based in New York. She is crucial to our philosophy and our approach to human rights work. Read on to hear her views on human rights lawyering, self care, and book recommendations.
1. How long have you been with SAHR and what is one of your favourite things about it as a collective of young women?
I have been helping to develop SAHR’s research approach and seminar-style dialogues since 2009 on a part-time basis. I enjoy getting to collaborate and engage in meaningful conversations with women across the world. We have members based in Singapore, London, San Francisco, and various parts of India, among other places. While the ability to communicate transnationally is becoming increasingly normal, I still sometimes can’t believe that we have been able to collaborate on so many projects through Skype calls, google hangouts, and WhatsApp voice notes! I also find it really encouraging that our members are so willing to constantly grapple with and critically question how they understand and tackle social injustice.
2. What change would you like to see in the way human rights work is done and how does SAHR embody that to you?
The human rights framework as outlined in the UDHR has a fraught and complicated history. I think it is impossible to remove SAHR’s work from that history. We are constantly grappling with what human rights means for different movements, both global and local. Through participating in SAHR and learning about the breadth and systemic nature of social injustice, specifically gender-based violence, across geographies, it has become increasingly clear to me that meaningful human rights work cannot afford to be apolitical. The history of modern human rights’ frameworks cannot be divorced from the political struggles of refugees and statelessness in the post-World War II era. In any work that we do, we have to collaborate with local initiatives to treat gender-based violence as a systemic problem that implicates both state and non-state actors, institutions, and historical processes. I think a key part of SAHR’s governing ethos is to work with communities’ understandings of justice and to avoid promoting one framework for what justice looks like. We are always discussing what meaningful collaboration looks like, what power relations look like in those collaborations, and what it means to be working alongside other NGOs and initiatives that have themselves been borne out of colonial aftermaths and histories.
3. How do you take care of yourself as someone who grapples with what can seem like intractable social challenges on a daily basis in your work?
I find it difficult to disconnect my personal ethics with an ethics of nuanced and thoughtful collaborative work around human rights. It is hard for me to compartmentalise my what I’m doing at work or as a volunteer with SAHR with how I collaborate with others outside of that space. Sometimes that is a blessing and a curse. Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I find it really important to laugh as it keeps things in perspective for me, and it is a way of humanising yourself and those with whom you’re laughing. Sometimes, laughing is a good reminder that at the end of the day, most people are doing the best they can with what they know how. It’s a sobering reminder that social change does not only have to mean practicing an ethics of shaming and blaming, but it can also mean practicing a critical ethics of empathy.
4. If you could recommend one reading to our followers right now, what would it be and why?
I would recommend Mimi Thi Nguyen’s book The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and other Refugee Passages (Duke University Press, 2012). It explores, through the history of Vietnamese refugees to the US, how the logic of US empire is one that promises freedom to vulnerable populations through war, but simultaneously makes that freedom contingent on fulfilling various forms of debt, thereby keeping those populations locked into the colonial histories that made them seem ‘unfree’ in the first place. I think it’s a great book with which to understand contemporary situations, namely the logics through which the US continues to administer development and humanitarian aid while at the same time conducting military operations in Afghanistan.
You can follow Helena on Twitter.
