Introducing the Concept of Liberatory Social Change
Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director
The Institute was founded on an understanding of liberation as having what is needed to live into full human complexity and capability without doing harm to others or to natural systems. A specific experience of liberation, however, can only be defined by the individual who desires or experiences liberation, so liberation cannot be specifically defined for a whole social system without limiting expressions of human complexity and capability.
For this reason, the work of the Institute is focused on liberatory social change rather than liberation. The difference is significant. The following principles define the Institute’s founding vision for liberatory social change:
Liberatory change is ongoing. Liberation is an endpoint; it can be completed or achieved and must be specifically defined by the person or group who experiences or desires it. But the history of collective human experience , human systems, offers evidence that even when something is finished it will inevitably change again. All systems die when they cease to change.
Human beings are and will always be vulnerable to fear, thoughtlessness[i] and greed, and so pulled to do each other harm. On the other hand, people are and always will be motivated by shared humanity, care and compassion to turn toward collective well-being. Ongoing change is driven by both of these eternal human impulses. It is possible, however, to create change that over the course of time results in ever-increasing numbers of people having what they need to live into their full complexity and capability without doing harm to others or to the natural world.
Liberatory change is emergent. Because we accept that change is constant, liberatory change also assumes a constant emergence of understandings about human experience and the natural world. In the context of social justice, this means that understandings of identity, social power, inequity, and actions necessary to create liberation are constantly emerging. That means that unyielding ideologies and beliefs about essential characteristics of others, even when they seem to be in service of liberation, do not further liberatory social change; they lead to violence.
Liberatory change is non-violent. Violence is antithetical liberatory social change. The Institute is founded on a broad understanding of violence as any action based on a belief about the essential characteristics of others, that is, that reduces others to being anything other than complex human beings worthy of having what they need to live into full human capability without doing harm to others or to the natural world. We understand non-violence as an insistent and strategic effort to effect change without dismissing or doing harm to the human complexity and capability of others. To be clear, non-violence is active and intentional; it is not necessarily civil, often subversive and even coercive.
Liberatory change is systemic. Systemic change is transformative, shifting believing, thinking, and behaving in all of the ways people relate collectively to one another, including work, community, economy, governance, health care and learning. Because the dynamics that challenge liberatory change are systemic, the Institute seeks to identify innovation that drives systemic change.
[1] Capability refers to the existence of opportunity and choice, rather than the existence of particular functions or specific outcomes as the measure of success, often imposed or defined by people with arguably unjust social power. This notion has been advanced especially in critiques of international development and understandings of justice. See Sen, A. (2001) “Development as Freedom: An Approach”.
[2] Critical race theorists, among others, argue against common definitions of terms like liberty and justice, suggesting especially that people with fundamentally different experiences (or narratives in critical race terms) understand these things differently. See for example Delgado, R. & Stefancic, J. (2001). Critical race theory: An introduction. New York, New York: New York University Press.
[3] The notion of thoughtlessness as a primary challenge to liberatory change grows from Minnich, E. (2017) The Evil of Banality: In the Life and Death Importance of Thinking. And Minnich, E. and M.Q. Patton (2019) Thought Work: Thinking, Action and the Fate of the World. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.