MuseumDESCRIPTION:
John Norris, Executive Director of the Enough Project discusses how his organization is working to end genocide and crimes against humanity.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic. Welcome to this week’s episode of Voices on Genocide Prevention. With me today is John Norris who is the executive director of the Enough Project. John, thank you for joining me today.
JOHN NORRIS: Hi, Bridget. Thanks for having me.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: For our audience who has not yet looked at Enough’s web site or knows of your work, although I imagine there are very few of them who don’t, can you tell us, what is the Enough Project?
JOHN NORRIS: Sure. The Enough Project is a relative newcomer. We were established several years ago by a couple of veteran Africa hands, John Prendergast and Gayle Smith, and the idea behind the Enough Project was a fairly simple one. Both John and Gayle in their professional careers as well as my own we looked around and it seemed that the approach to combating genocide and war crimes tended to be very episodic, that you had huge numbers of Americans who stood up and demanded that something be done in Bosnia, that something be done in Rwanda, earlier even something like large numbers of people demanding that the situation with the Ethiopian famine had to be addressed, but then once the crisis du jour began to fade those constituencies kind of drifted away. The mailing lists came to a halt, the pressure on policy makers stopped, and the Enough project was really put together with the idea of making this constituency against genocide and war crimes a permanent standing and growing constituency. By giving that constituency the right policy information they needed to make a difference as well as trying to combine it with some creative activism so that their voices can be heard.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: There are other organizations like one you previously worked with, International Crisis Group, who focuses primarily on reporting and sort of policy recommendations for professionals. What position is Enough staking out for itself, somewhere between policy and activism? How are you managing to balance these two sides?
JOHN NORRIS: Yeah. We think it’s really important that the activist community and policy makers walk and chew gum at the same time. I think what we’ve all seen is that there’s a lot of really good hard-nosed policy organizations and there is a lot of really good activist organizations. Unfortunately it’s often been the case that never the twain shall meet, that policy makers tend to be a little more insular and isolated. Crisis Group where I worked and loved working does great serious 30-page, 40-page reports designed to change the minds of policy makers. There’s lots of good activist organizations around town and around the country, but it’s always been my impression that if you really want activists to be effective you actually have to have them asking for the right things in terms of policy. And the Enough Project is really trying to shorten that distance between sound policy and sound activism by bringing together activists and policy makers and trying to find the right pressure points so that we can actually move policy makers.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: What is Enough’s theory of change? You’re trying to get American constituency primarily motivated to change U.S. policy or are you working to get them engaged directly with groups on the ground in places you’re concerned about?
JOHN NORRIS: We’re primarily focused on American policy and policy makers and using activists and giving activists the tools they need to be able to reach them. Our theory of change really is that genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, is something that most policy makers don’t want to deal with. The issues are hard; they’re disruptive. There has traditionally been very little benefit for addressing them and potentially high costs for addressing them.
The other part of our change that we really want and hope to nurture over time is achieving something that I think if you look at the environmental movement over the last 20, 30 years has really achieved. And I think it’s a model for what we would like to see in the anti-genocide movement. Every third-grader in America knows “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Every third-grader in America is beating up on their parents to buy a hybrid car and that really is revolutionary and that didn’t happen entirely by accident. It happened because those values were really taught and really shared I think at a pretty early educational level, and I think what we need to do in America is hopefully get to a point where collectively a majority of Americans simply say that genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, are simply unacceptable. It requires a sound and effective policy response from our leaders. If they lead those kind of sound responses we’ll reward them politically and if they don’t we’ll punish them politically. And that’s obviously an over-arching goal and a long-term goal but hopefully that’s where we can get.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: One of the past challenges as you’ve already mentioned is that the constituencies have tended to grow up around particular conflicts. How have you found the work of getting a public constituency around these larger concepts rather than around specific episodes? Are people receptive to the idea of working against genocide and then how does that translate into actual action on a particular conflict?
JOHN NORRIS: It’s a very good question, and I think we’ve all experienced that people get interested in conflicts in these situations very much on a geographic basis --for whatever reason, that they had a family member that did Peace Corps in this country or that they shop with somebody who’s from Congo or from Sudan or somebody who is a college student just saw some pictures or a slide show on the web that fascinated them about this place. So people tend to get somewhat stovepiped in specific causes. We’ve got Free Tibet. We’ve got a very active bunch of people working on Burma, Darfur and Congo, and each of these different groups kind of in a little silo as it were. What we hope to do over time is get it so that the community as a whole in moments of great crisis can stand up collectively.
You could have a moment where the Free Tibet activists and Burma activists and Save Darfur activists all stood up and said, “What’s happening right now in Uzbekistan or Colombia or wherever is simply unacceptable and that we’re going to act in a united fashion to address it and demand the policy makers address the situation.” And then hopefully after that crisis they- maybe they all go back to Tibet and Burma and Darfur and kind of focus on what they do day to day. I think again this goes to the idea that this is a set of values that people embrace over time. And I think once people understand these values and really embrace them in a specific geographic context it’s really much easier to kind of pull them in and explain why something in Country X or Y is simply unacceptable plus also to try to get them to focus on preventing these things before they actually happen.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: What are the specific initiatives that the Enough Project is working on now?
JOHN NORRIS: Sure. We’re focused pretty heavily on Africa, almost exclusively on Africa right now. Sudan-- all of Sudan and not just Darfur has always been a big focus for us. Congo has been a very heavy focus for us over the last year or two, doing a lot of work on Somalia and the situation there is quite grim right now, Chad and Zimbabwe to a lesser extent.
I think our campaign on Congo is a really interesting one. Congo is a conflict that people always said nobody in the United States is ever going to care about. It’s a big country. It’s a complicated country. It’s a war that was fought and is fought in French. It’s a place where there isn’t a big diaspora community in the United States and people who worked on the issue kind of got used to, you held a meeting in Washington, D.C., on Congo, you get 15 or 20 people who showed up, and they were all the same faces that were at the last Congo event. And what we have tried to do is to take some sound policy recommendations but also have tried to reach out to some new constituencies. The incidents of sexual violence in eastern DRC are horrific. It is the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman or girl. We’ve used this as a way to reach out to a bunch of communities that didn’t normally focus on the situation in Congo, and also the conflict in Congo continues to be driven in large part by conflict minerals--minerals that are found in eastern Congo that end up in our laptops, cell phones, digital cameras and other portable electronic devices, and trying to put consumer pressure on electronics companies to stop doing business with some of the very lawless, very dangerous militias in eastern Congo that are really reaping enormous benefits from the sale of illegal minerals. And I think that’s a good example of taking something that is a very specific policy idea -- that these militias on the ground are really perpetual motion machines because they benefit from the illegal mining trade -- combining it with a very practical policy ask for activists so they can reach out to cell phone companies, that they can demand that their products are conflict free. And I think it’s a very sustainable marriage of policy and activism over time.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: What sort of products can people find on your web site? It’s recently, at least within the past few months, been refurbished and there are lots of multimedia things, but are there any things in particular that you think would appeal to an audience just learning about some of the work that you’re doing?
JOHN NORRIS: Yeah. We’ve tried to make the stuff that we produce accessible and meaningful for people that are just becoming familiar with an issue or maybe expert on an issue. I think that there is a way to talk to people in a way that is fair and reasoned and in language that is not gobbledygook and filled with acronyms and we’ve really tried to do that. I’d recommend our blog, Enough Said. We have four, six, seven posts every day on a whole range of topics that appeal to a bunch of different people, slide shows, different multimedia stuff, videos, podcasts, and I think it’s a pretty easy site to navigate. So I would encourage people to go there, surf around, poke around in the corners a little bit.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: For you personally, you have spent a good deal of time in the field in other jobs that you’ve had previously on humanitarian issues, policy. How was the transition for you from working directly and sort of really in depth on a particular conflict to heading up an organization here in Washington? How has that transition worked for you in your career and what are sort of the ups and downs of those changes?
JOHN NORRIS: Yeah. I’ve been lucky with my professional career both to do a fair amount of work on the ground in different countries in conflict both as a policy analyst and a humanitarian relief worker, places like Rwanda and Bosnia and Sri Lanka and Nepal--my mother’s always been fond of saying I need a new travel agent--as well as kind of doing the macro stuff, that I’d worked as a speech writer at AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and at the State Department and in ways of professionally trying to look at kind of the broader picture and the bigger picture. So for me I think the most interesting place has always been the nexus of policy and activism and good communication. Obviously, organizing and managing a decent-sized organization brings its challenges, but it’s good work and we’re happy to have it. I’m very fortunate to be surrounded by a bunch of people that are very committed and very creative and hardworking and care passionately about these issues but also have a sense of humor. I think it’s really important that- not only for people that work in the field but for your listeners and people who care about it that it isn’t all grim and we really do see change in places.
I’d worked in, Liberia a number of years back, five or six years back. Charles Taylor was still in power. It was absolutely one of the most hopeless seeming places I’d ever worked. It was full of despair. Rebels were outside the capitol. There seemed to be no international appetite for dealing with the situation, and Liberia today is an entirely transformed place. There have been successful elections, Charles Taylor is spending his days in The Hague, and a place that a lot of people had written off changed, because of some international pressure, a constituency for dealing with it, and the hard work and aspirations of the Liberian people. So I think again and again we’ve seen places that really did have a rough time of it, but if you go to the former Yugoslavia today, if you go to Liberia, if you go to Angola, if you go to Rwanda, places that had been an absolute horror show within recent memory really are experiencing very positive change. So when people talk about Darfur, they talk about Congo or they talk about Burma and say that it’s too complex or too hopeless, I think that’s simply unacceptable and I don’t think it’s true.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Finally, as executive director of, as you said, a very young organization that is growing considerably, what do you see for the Enough Project say five or ten years down the road?
JOHN NORRIS: Ultimately, we would love to work ourselves out of business and get to a point where there didn’t have to be a panoply of different organizations working on genocide and war crimes and crimes against humanity. I don’t think that will happen immediately or probably even in the medium term, but I think it’s a long-term goal, and hopefully I’d like to see us kind of remain a very creative and dynamic place. And I think one of the most important lessons that we’ve learned is if we want successful activism and successful activists we have to not only talk a fair amount and put out a lot of information, but we have to listen. We have to listen to activists. We have to listen to what’s going on in the community. We have to be a place where there is a virtuous loop of feedback and where we’re in a day-to-day conversation with a community of people who care about these issues. So hopefully a number of years down the road we’ll be at the center of a very lively community of people who care about these issues.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: John, thank you again for taking the time to speak with me today.
JOHN NORRIS: Great to be here. Thanks.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Before we sign off I do want to make sure that our audience knows that your web site-- It’s www.enough--
JOHN NORRIS: Project.org.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Thank you very much.
JOHN NORRIS: Great. Thanks.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
