We need a “quiet room” to prepare for the future

Hossam Bahgat, Executive Director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), talks here about creating a space for reflection at the organization and movement level. In Egypt, under the rule of a former army general, the judicial system has been gutted and rights defenders and journalists are subject to systematic persecution. EIPR is often in emergency mode but is working on ways to do concrete future planning.

What is the quiet room you’ve referred to, and why is it needed?

There is no bandwidth for the staff that is doing the daily responsive work and the firefighting to forget about the now and reflect about the future. So in my organization we are trying to create the space and resources and staffing for people to do this. And to convince them, sometimes beg them, not to be prisoners of the moment. Because in a country like Egypt, where everything is so bleak, it’s really hard for people to do today’s work and imagine a different future. We have to actually remove some people from the daily work and say, “You have one job, your job is to think about the future.”

We learned from experience how important this is. In 2011, it only took 18 days for (former President) Mubarak to fall after 30 years in power, and we were woefully unprepared. So, imagine something happens now. Imagine there is a change in leadership if (current President) Sisi is dead or incapacitated? What is the next-day scenario?

Now is the time to prepare, because what’s happening now is untenable, it’s going to change sometime, whether through a crisis or an opportunity. But even if it doesn’t change, we owe it to the next generation to leave them with some ideas and proposals.

What are your organization’s priorities in that sense?

We have identified three tracks that we need to work on in Egypt – not for the transition between now and change, but for what we, or others, can do once change happens.

One track involves deconstructing the authoritarian or autocratic structure that’s been built over the last ten years. So that group is not in charge of documenting or diagnosing the damage, but instead asks, what would it take to undo the damage if we had a democratic government tomorrow? And the centrepiece is rebuilding the justice sector and the rule of law, which have been eviscerated.

Track two is imagining an alternative foreign policy. Egypt has a huge, outsized footprint in the world right now. So the question is, how can we leverage that and formulate a foreign policy that is both progressive and realistic? Not us as an organization, but the reform movement.

And the third track relates to charting a just economic transition. How can we move beyond a neoliberal economic paradigm, while at the same time staying connected to the global economy? 

So, these are things that we think we need to start working on immediately, right now, and for which we need the quiet room.

So the quiet room includes people outside your organization?

Some of us at EIPR can be in the quiet room, but we cannot be the ones formulating these plans and policies, because we are so imprisoned in the moment, and so drained and traumatized. But we also need for this process to be collaborative in drawing on diverse voices and backgrounds and eventually endorsed and owned by a critical mass of democratic actors who hold differing views but agree on a minimum set of core values and proposals. So this is more like a study group, attracting others and providing a space and maybe some background research and questions, and acting as a neutral convener of these discussions. And making sure it’s not just a brainstorming exercise, but actual work.

When it comes to the movement at large, I think it has to include people who are part of the movement, together with people that are either retired from it or have studied it. I don’t think donors should be part of the conversation, or the international NGOs that have an interest in defending the status quo.

My proposition is that this quiet room be limited to those that agree that what we have is not working, that the house is on fire, that we don’t need to improve or fix what we have, but maybe reimagine the whole thing. People that agree, most importantly, that we are in crisis, and that the causes of the crisis are not all external. We are part of it, and we need to revisit our models.

Is this an aspiration or something you are already doing?

It’s something we’re very actively working on, at the level of my organization and at the level of the movement, where we’re cultivating like-minded people.

At the few convenings of human rights defenders that I’ve been to over the last year, many people realize that there’s a need to revisit everything very boldly. They are asking, do we still invest in the UN? Or in national capital advocacy? Do we still do this high-level policy work? Or do we shift resources to community-level, grassroots organizing? Do we keep the current organizational model of the professionally staffed NGO, or do we reflect on other models? Do we have one executive director, or collective leadership? How can we diversify revenue streams beyond foreign funding from major donors in the West?

We are not the only ones asking these questions. I heard this from so many others, especially Global South organizations and activists.

Download the complete series of interviews of Hard Conversations for the Future of Human Rights.