Technology is rapidly disrupting the relationships among people, governments, and multinational companies. The outcome of wars, the fate of shaky democratic governments, and the ability of a country’s economy to remain globally competitive increasingly depend on networked communications systems. Acts of resistance and oppression are increasingly enacted by bytes dancing in data centers across the world. The powers that be have also understood this new scenario—and they are actively trying to control it. Our ability to offer a coordinated defense of our human rights is intertwined with the fiber and copper cables that circle the globe.
Meanwhile, civil society organizations in the Global Majority face myriad challenges as they try to protect the digital ecosystem upon which many of our human rights have come to depend. First, an increasingly complex stack of technologies has, in recent decades, become simultaneously critical to public life and inscrutable to the public. Second, in a climate of growing authoritarianism and shrinking civic space, governments are rapidly embracing these opaque technologies. Third, an unprecedented funding crisis in the digital rights ecosystem compounds these problems by making it difficult for organizations to scrutinize technological developments, thus creating an oversight vacuum at the time it is needed the most.
Article 7: Everyone has the right, individually and in association with others, to develop and discuss new human rights ideas and principles and to advocate their acceptance..." UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders
These challenges have forced many organizations to rapidly redirect their advocacy strategies and develop innovative programs to address emerging threats. Organizations with robust institutional foundations can weather these disruptions and respond strategically, while those operating on short-term funding cycles often find themselves paralyzed at precisely the moments when adaptive capacity is most crucial. International law has long recognized the role and importance of organized civil society groups with a mandate to monitor violations, advocate for victims, and hold governments accountable to their commitments, as laid out by the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Yet most organizations remain chronically underfunded. Nevertheless, the scale of the challenges to be met and the fragility induced by imposed austerity call for a radical reimagining of the digital rights movement.
A new model: Networked advocacy
If the challenges facing the movement are global, the response should focus on developing a networked response that can operate at the scale of the problem. Beyond traditional approaches, such as creating long-term endowments, the field of digital rights needs to develop mechanisms to create a footprint that better matches that of the multinational companies it seeks to challenge, the climate crisis it seeks to avert, and the spread of fascism it seeks to counteract. I believe a way to stitch the tapestry of existing organizations into something bigger is to create mechanisms for sharing human resources, infrastructure, time, and funding.
On the human side, this could include devoting resources to sustaining a pool of experts, maintaining crisis response networks, and creating collaborative leadership development programs and mechanisms for sharing capacity that draw upon the core area of expertise of certain organizations. Externalizing certain roles and capacities may allow multiple organizations to access specialized expertise without having to build and maintain it internally.
Technological infrastructure is also key. Setting up secure communication platforms, building shared security audits and strategies, and pooling storage and data processing power are simple and productive steps that are seldom considered part of the movement-building process.
Building a backbone for resilient movements requires the patient development of connections, both personal and professional. This approach implies setting up time for convening, promoting shared learning platforms, and committing to trust-building processes that enable diverse stakeholders to function as a coherent whole rather than a collection of competing entities.
Financial infrastructure also needs restructuring. Decentralizing resource administration would make the digital rights movement better prepared to withstand economic or political volatility in any single geographic location. On the other hand, equity demands redistributing away from the Global North and developing more accessible fiscal sponsorship strategies to reduce barriers for emerging organizations and create pooled funding mechanisms with a strong regional focus for existing schemes.
Philanthropic institutions are uniquely positioned to understand and address these challenges effectively, as they operate with a broad perspective that individual organizations simply do not have access to. Take, for instance, the Ford Foundation’s BUILD program, which addresses organizational capacity needs rather than individual project funding. Funders can identify needs across their grantee networks and deploy system-wide interventions aimed at strengthening the overall resilience of the movement.
The shift towards shared infrastructure and resource models would help smaller organizations access a level of strategic and technical support that larger, better-funded institutions develop in-house. This would distribute resources across the movement, making it more resilient and effective.
Seeing through the network
The networked approach should also result in a change in mindset. Rather than perpetuating competition for grants based on narrow “impact” metrics that often reflect donor priorities rather than genuine public interest or need, we must create conditions that enable organizations to support one another, share knowledge, and develop collective strategic capacity.
Networks represent a path toward movement-wide resilience that is capable of withstanding sustained political and economic pressures. Without this coalition-centered approach, the digital rights movement will continue to fragment, leaving critical public interests vulnerable to corporate capture and authoritarian overreach.
When human resources, infrastructure, time, and funding are networked to operate in concert, they create robust peer support systems that would allow the digital rights movement to function as a resilient ecosystem rather than a collection of individual organizations with local priorities. This integrated approach offers the only viable path toward sustaining digital rights advocacy in an increasingly hostile political and economic environment.
This blog is part of OGR's ongoing Technology & Human Rights series.