Recognizing Human Rights
Throughout the last few decades, human rights work has become more focused on bringing human rights abuses to light. However, the simultaneous rise of populist governments throughout the world has led to a suppression of human rights actors, delegitimizing the value of human rights as a concept in their societies and hindering the effectiveness of traditional monitoring and reporting practices. Some had called this the “end times” for the human rights experiment as mounting pressure exposed the fault lines and blind spots of contemporary practice. Others saw this as an opportunity: an opportunity to retool the human rights playbook by moving beyond conventional audiences and building bridges while, importantly, crafting a new narrative that moves away from traditional methods of naming and shaming to one that actively crafts a vision of human rights in today’s society.
Today’s human rights must do more than document and monitor human rights violations, but work to craft the way in which human rights is understood and actively constructed within society.
Research from psychology and neuroscience has shown why this change is imperative, highlighting how repeated exposure to accounts of human rights abuses may inadvertently prime individuals to engage in the very acts we hope to eliminate. However, the brain’s ability to imagine or simulate new experiences is fundamentally based on our ability to remember. Without a way to envision what “human rights” actually are, we cannot build an effective framework for implementing them.
“We cannot make decisions and take action on something we have no experience with. So, if we want people to support and promote human rights, we need to start showing them what that looks like. If we only show them what abuse of human rights looks like, that’s all they will know.”
— Laura Ligouri, Executive Director, Mindbridge
in an interview for Oxfam, Narrative Power & Collective Action, Vol. 1
Mindbridge is dedicated to harnessing psychological and neurobiological science, where a new model of human rights is made manifest in the world. In-house research emphasizes the need to devise messaging and programming that actively promotes what human rights are as a means for cultivating them. Mindbridge capitalizes on the latest research in this arena to help support human rights messaging, campaign development, and programming.
HIGHLIGHTED PROGRAM: NEUROPSYCH HRD LAB
Psychology & Neuroscience for Human Rights Defenders in an Online Course
The Neuropsych HRD Lab is an intensive, hands-on virtual learning event that makes fundamental psychological and neurobiological processes accessible for human rights defenders. This online course is grounded in research that builds the knowledge and skills necessary to bridge science to application. Participants critically engage with course content through interactive activities designed to explore how best to apply psychological and neurobiological insight to human rights programming, media, and intervention design.
The HRD Lab is a collaborative effort built in partnership with Thomas Coombes, former Head of Brand & Deputy Director of Communications at Amnesty International, and founder of Hope-Based Communications; and Gabe Twose, Senior International Affairs Officer at the American Psychological Association.