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Enviar a un amigo New Tactics in Human Rights: Empowering social change advocates with knowledge, innovation and community
"To advance human rights requires the capacity to innovate tactics and combine them to create strategies as comprehensive as the problems we face.” - Douglas A. Johnson, United States, Executive Director, Center for Victims of Torture |
New Tactics in Human Rights is project of the Center for Victims of Torture. CVT's mission is not only to heal the wounds of torture, but to stop its practice worldwide. Our New Tactics in Human Rights project connects the broad human rights community around the world to share experiences, resources and tactical ideas to advance their own human rights advocacy efforts. As a result, we are all better able to address complex human rights issues facing our communities.
Why New Tactics in Human Rights Project?
Despite an increasingly global and connected network of human rights organizations, strategic and tactical isolation remains a constant challenge to activists across the world. Confronted with local challenges, groups often resort to “reinventing the wheel” or deploying known tactics that, while familiar, may not offer the best possible solutions. The creative innovations of one group often remain invisible to others, and these actions therefore fail to enter the collective tool kit of global advocacy.
Since 1999, the New Tactics in Human Rights Project has worked to provide resources to human rights advocates that offer innovative tactical solutions for confronting specific local challenges. These resources enable activists to map the unique challenges specific to their site of intervention, identify approaches that have worked in other contexts in order to adapt and implement these tactics locally.
The New Tactics Project conducts its work in three ways
The interactive website NewTactics.org offers an online community of more than 2500 human rights practitioners in more than 130 countries. Users have access to a database of over 190 specific and successfully-implemented human rights tactics. The website hosts peer-to-peer exchange through monthly Tactical Dialogues, forming an online global community of human rights advocacy.
New Tactics provides in-person training, such as the international symposium held in Turkey which brought together 450 human rights activists from 89 different countries. New Tactics has also provided small grants and technical assistance to more than 50 groups, allowing them to reach more than 8,000 other activists and 80,000 general audience members via radio, newspaper, and internet.
New Tactics creates and distributes publications which offer concrete frameworks for thinking about tactics and strategy in promoting human rights. The project’s 48 Tactical Notebooks are written by those who implemented the tactic, providing first-person, detailed information on the use of a tactic and how it may be adapted to other situations.
Impact of Using New Tactics Resources
There is a growing demand from activists around the world, and this has translated into real-world indications of the project’s impact, such as:
- A group of Mongolian activists working on the Convention of Disability switch to higher visibility tactics to attract public attention and media coverage.
- A Slovak organization using a Korean approach for preventing corruption in local government.
- A Macedonian group increasing the representation of women in Parliament by modifying a Dutch mobile phone tactic to mobilize constituents.
Leadership
The New Tactics in Human Rights Project is led by a diverse group of partner international organizations, advisors and practitioners. The project is coordinated by the Center for Victims of Torture and grew out of its experience as a creator of new tactics and a treatment center that also advocates for the protection of human rights from a unique position—one of healing and reclaiming civic leadership. We hope you will join us and the New Tactics community in developing, using and promoting strategic and tactical thinking within the broad human rights community.
For a quick introduction on the goal of New Tactics, watch our video on YouTube!
[Download this summary in English, French or Spanish.]*
How YOU can get involved!
- If you are interested in supporting the New Tactics project with a monetary donation, you can do it online!
- If you are intersted in a volunteer position or internship, please contact Kristin at kantin [at] cvt [dot] org.
The New Tactics web site is made possible by the support of a number of generous funders. The opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed on this site are those of the New Tactics project and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.
