When most human rights activists and scholars discuss North-South internationalization, what they really mean is big, Northern-based human rights organizations decentralizing into the global South. But how do human rights workers based in the South see this movement? Through our work at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), we have heard local actors refer to internationalization as a form of imperialism. They ask, for example, why there is no funding and support for Southern NGOs to work on and monitor American or European issues. Why is internationalization a one-way street from North to South? And the tendency of the international community of donors and civil society not to sufficiently recognize the South’s unique contributions to the global discourse on development, democracy and rights protection, can undermine contemporary attempts to internationalize human rights groups.
One major reason for this Northern dominance is the perception of professionalism, and thus legitimacy. Indeed, professionalism and agreed processes buoy good partnerships; the lack of them does quite the opposite. Where reports aren’t written on time, meetings are not well prepared for, or communication is poor, it might seem less time-consuming to work with like-capacitated groups rather than the passionate but amateur NGO founders who may be territorial, reluctant to share information, or lax with their accounting procedures.
Yet this perception of professional superiority creates a system in which well-established international organizations view themselves as wholesalers, expanding their footprint by distributing globally produced human rights products for a donor to domestic NGO retailers. The job of local activists is then simply to publicize and distribute, rather than to co-produce. This is not only humiliating and disempowering for local NGOs, but also devalues the special wisdom of local activists, local histories of rights seeking, and the uniqueness of regional cultures
