An Institute for Strategic Activism
TPYN is working to establish an Institute for Strategic Activism, a kind of popular think-tank with an activist agenda. Through it TPYN members will develop campaign strategies, hold conferences, offer joint training programs, share analyses and materials. The Institute will also promote needed dialogue between activists and academics.
Despite periodic gatherings sporadically attended, the grassroots lacks venues for regular networking, collective analysis, professional training, strategizing, planning joint actions, follow-up or evaluation — plus the ability to collectively brainstorm around Big Issues such as more just and sustainable alternatives to the world system we now have. Grassroots activists also lack access to intellectuals and academics whose empowering analyses are often confined to universities and think tanks. Finally, progressive civil society lacks the means of effective outreach to the wider public.
The Concept of the Institute
Creating an infrastructure. The concept “infrastructure” is strategic. Rather than trying to impose a structure or an agenda on the thousands of disparate groups the world over, an infrastructural approach allows voluntary association in a network that is participatory, non-hierarchical and transparent. Organizations will join if they feel that by doing so they will be furthering their own struggles as well as wider global ones, and if they can determine their own level of engagement.
Through the medium of the Institute, TPYN serves as a kind of clearinghouse offering focused discussion, strategizing, planning and resources required for grassroots groups seeking to parley their disparate campaigns into an effective movement for counter-hegemonic change. The place of the Institute within the TPYN system is illustrated as follows:
Creating “venues.” Initially, TPYN will establish seven regional centers — in Latin America, North America, the Mediterranean/Middle East, South-East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern and Western Europe — each doubling as a regional Institute center. In addition to running or participating in the programs outlined above, the Regional Centers would develop a “venue” as a prime means of effective outreach to the general public. Useful as they are, social media and the web cannot replace face-to-face encounters and events as means of conveying complex issues to people beyond the activist circles.
This project envisions, then, popular venues attached to each regional center where people can gather to learn, interact, strategize, express their cultures and artistic creations, and communicate on many levels. A venue would include an open space — a kind of commons or People’s Park, whether in- or outdoors — that offers diverse places for learning, presentation, performance, workshops and discussion. As sites of conferences, festivals or other events, such venues may also generate income for chronically under-funded grassroots groups.
Institute Structure and Programs
Creating a Forum for Counter-Hegemony. Through its Institute for Strategic Activism, TPYN seeks to generate a movement of progressive counter-hegemony. The Institute would certainly represent an important resource for grassroots groups pursuing their different issues, offering a forum through which analyses, ideas, initiatives and even materials could be shared. Its ultimate goal, however, is nothing less than transcending the structurally unequal, violent and unsustainable world system with which we are now saddled with one that is human-centric and sustainable. What does this mean, conceptually and politically, and how could we achieve it?
The Forum for Counter-Hegemony within the Institute is intended to create a forum which keeps the Big Picture in focus even as civil society addresses its many local and regional issues. The Forum would actively solicit views from public intellectuals, academics, analysts and grassroots activists alike over what a more just and human world system would entail and how to get there. In addition to providing a framework that facilitates grassroots strategizing and planning, the Forum would host an annual conference on an issue central to the topic of counter-hegemony utilizing on-line conference technologies, together with regional forums initiated by its member organizations.
Publications. Vast resources, both printed and digital, are available to activists seeking information, analysis and guidance. Most activists, however, lack the time to keep fully abreast, especially in regards to analyses for which many lack of the necessary academic background. This mass of material requires both distilling and “translation” into language, concepts and forms that render it accessible, though not simplified or “dumbed down.”
Acting, again, as a kind of clearinghouse, the Institute, through its regional branches and activist-members, would collect this material, select the most useful pieces, and distill them into a regular web-based format. (Regional branches of the Institute would translate the most useful materials into regional languages.) Here is where a “layered” system like TPYN is particularly useful. The collection and initial distillation of locally-generated material would fall to each of the Institute’s regional centers, from where it would be uploaded and made available. Each center, in turn, would further distil and convey material of relevance to the wider global community where it would be translated and uploaded by the Institute’s central office. A mix of volunteer translators (students, volunteers) and paid translators (professionals who put the material into final form) could perform this essential task. In this way TPYN, through its Institute of Strategic Activism, becomes an effective channel of inter-regional, inter-cultural and inter-issue communication, affording seldom-heard voices of the Global South their proper space in the global discussion.
On-Line Communication. Grassroots groups on the Left are notoriously bad at communicating with the wider public — and that includes a lack of knowledge of how to best exploit the possibilities of the internet. The “Country Called Global” portal into transnational capitalism is an example of an effective use of digitial technologies for interactive education. The Institute could also initiate programs of training grassroots groups to better utilize the internet, as well as for more effective “packaging” of their materials and messages.
Critical Activist Education and Training. MOOCs are massive open online courses aimed at unlimited participation. Through the Institute, organizations already offering such courses and training to activists would have a framework in which they could promote their programs — again, another clearinghouse function of the Institute. But the Institute could complement these programs by developing courses focusing on global and critical perspectives, as well as courses for develop skills of critical thinking and analysis, and introducing the views of key thinkers around key issues. It could also develop a “directory” of activist campaigns the world over so that participants in the training could take advantage of “best practices.”
