Beyond Rights Advocacy: Civil Society Organisations and the Responsibility to Challenge Structural Injustice

Introduction

This short piece was originally delivered as a keynote address at the 2023 Oromo Studies Association Annual Meeting and has been slightly adapted as an intervention. Although it focuses primarily on the experience of the Oromo nation of Ethiopia and Horn of Africa, its conceptual framing and analysis speak more broadly to the experiences of other Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples of Ethiopia, as well as to human and more-than-human worlds subjected to systemic and structural forms of domination and subjugation.

In the aftermath of the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a powerful reflection on the nature of injustice. Speaking at the funeral of three of the four young girls killed in the attack, King urged his audience to look beyond the immediate perpetrators and confront the broader social order that had produced the conditions for such violence:

They have something to say to every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. […] They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.^[1]

With this speech and as highlighted by Sally Haslanger, Dr. King conveyed that some forms of oppression, repression, and violence run deeper than causally attributable blame to an individual wrongdoer.^[2] Instead, such injustices emanate from social structures and are embedded within institutional systems that sustain and replicate the vulnerability of groups and individuals to various forms of violence over a period of time.^[3]

In this context, the question that is particularly relevant to my intervention is: What happens when deep-seated, institutionalised structural injustices are visited upon bodies not primarily as a result of intentional individual wrongdoing, in the legal sense, but rather as a function of institutional design? What is the role and responsibility of civil society organisations (CSOs) when social and institutional structures operate to disenfranchise a community or an entire nation?

Drawing on insights from critical political philosophy, theories of structural injustice, and critical international law, I make a modest attempt to develop an argument about why our responses to these questions matter. They shape not only how we understand the past, but also how we contextualise and frame the present (including what we choose to problematise, justify, or accept) and how we imagine the future within the broader discussion of the role of civil society organisations.

The intervention unfolds in three parts. I begin by outlining the conception of structure employed in this analysis. I then contextualise the notion of structural injustice, with particular attention to the experience of the Oromo nation. The third part turns to questions of responsibility for structural injustice, focusing specifically on the role and responsibilities of CSOs in the Oromo context offering some concluding reflections on the implications of this analysis for rethinking the role of civil society in confronting and transforming unjust structures.

What is a structure?

Structures are defined differently by social scientists,^[4] political and legal philosophers.^[5] For the purpose of the current contribution, I will adhere to the concept of structure both as social and institutional systems. The social structure refers to the norms and traditions that have been practiced over time shaping our epistemic awareness, ways of being, seeing, and engaging with the world around us, our fellow humans, and the non-human more-than-human worlds. These social structures, when unjust, can perpetually work to empower one group while disempowering, humiliating, and disenfranchising others.^[6]

Institutional structures, on the other hand, are systems such as bureaucracy, legal or justice, economic, and political systems. These too can serve as infrastructures of empowerment and disempowerment.^[7] The two, i.e., the social and institutional structures, are not necessarily distinct; rather, they work in a continuous feedback loop. Vulnerability emanating from social structures continuously informs and becomes embedded within the institutional infrastructures, forming an unjust structure such as institutions of governance that normalise institutionalised racism, ableism, sexism, socio-economic marginalisation and other modes of biases and marginalisations. As argued by scholars, unjust structures are remarkably stable, not just because they are built over time but because agents have strong incentives to cooperate with the existing social and institutional structures, even when they are disadvantageous.^[8]

What is structural injustice?

Scholars define structural injustice differently. I will use Maeve McKeon’s three distinct forms of Structural injustice^[9]: The first is pure structural injustice, which refers to the character that injustice is unintended, unforeseeable and there are no agents with the capacity to remedy it. The second is avoidable structural injustice. In this second category unjust outcomes of structural processes are foreseeable, preventable and there are powerful agents with the capacity to remedy the injustice but fail to do so. The third type is deliberate structural injustice in which powerful agents actively perpetuate the injustice because they benefit from it.

In the context of Ethiopia and the Oromo nation, the latter two forms, avoidable and deliberate structural injustice, are of paramount relevance. This is primarily because structural injustice occurred (and continues to be experienced) in the name of state-building nationalism, a nationalism that sought to build Ethiopian identity by eliminating cultural differences through education and deep penetration into people’s ways of life, culture, and worldviews^[10], both directly and indirectly. This effort culminated in the emergence of a new form of nationalism, that is the Oromo nationalism, before Ethiopian nationalism could fully take shape. However, this did not end structural injustice; it continues to break bodies and penetrate ways of life, further disenfranchising the lifeworld of not only Oromo but many other people, nations and nationalities of Ethiopia albeit in different ways and with different magnitudes.

Then the question arises: What kind of responsibility is generated by structural injustice, and how does responsibility for such violence relate to the responsibility of CSOs?

Responsibility

Responsibility in the context of structural injustice first and foremost requires paying attention to the path dependent experience of people rather than isolated incidents of harm.^[11] It is misguiding to think and frame experience of institutionalized structural violence as an isolated incident of rights violation and individualised harm. Instead, responsibility for structural injustice entails a duty not just to focus on incidents but to unsettle structural power dynamics and, when feasible, transform such structures. While holding individual perpetrators accountable and punishing wrongful conduct is important, it is often insufficient for addressing the structural background conditions that systematically render a community and nation vulnerable to cycles of violence and other forms of oppression.^[12] Thus, while human rights-focused narratives, grammars, and campaigns are crucial, unsettling and transforming a system requires something that goes beyond.

In this regard, the ways in which structural injustice might be engaged and transformed can vary. Some cases may require individual agency (i.e., what we can do in our individual capacities), and others may necessitate collective agency (i.e., what collectives such as CSOs can do). However, what is always essential is an agent of change, whether collective or individual, along with a pathway for radical reform. Taking a closer look at the collective approach to engaging with structural injustice, the role of CSOs is central. As argued by Iris Marion Young, this centrality is primarily due to their collective coordination capacity, which is not available to individual agents acting alone. This capacity enables them to serve as an information hub, to influence policymaking, raise awareness, apply pressure, and monitor public and private actors in the best interests of the vulnerable.

However, as convincingly shown by Susan Mark^[13] and other critical international law scholars, the work of NGOs in the field of human rights often falls into the trap of reporting human rights violations in ways that fail to engage adequately with the structural conditions that produce and reproduce violence. Mark identifies three limitations in this approach; here, I focus on two of them.

First, investigations into the root causes of human rights violations often stop too soon, as disproportionate attention is placed on the abuse itself rather than on the conditions of vulnerability that engender and sustain it. Consequently, an emphasis on technical solutions can lead to the depoliticisation of injustice, while privileging the state as the primary agent of change. This approach overlooks situations in which the state itself is a perpetrator of violence. In doing so, it can demobilise and foreclose alternative social movements that seek not merely to address the symptoms of injustice but to transform the structural conditions that give rise to it.

Second, effects are often treated as though they are causes. In discussing this fault line, Mark uses an example that is particularly relevant to the contemporary situation of the Oromo and the political regime operating in their name. Are corruption, impunity, and lack of accountability the causes of arbitrary detention, or does the chain of causation run in the opposite direction? In other words, do authorities detain people arbitrarily because they are corrupt and exempt from accountability, or are they corrupt so that they can detain people arbitrarily? This distinction is important because the latter perspective helps us to see that arbitrary detention is not an anomaly or merely a dysfunction. Rather, it is a rational and operative logic embedded within the system itself—a sustaining condition of violence. The former perspective, by contrast, directs attention towards individual decisions and thus individualises a deeper systemic problem. In doing so, it obscures the structural nature of violence and diverts attention away from the system within which individuals are embedded. This recalls Karl Marx’s well-known observation that: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”^[14]

In the context of Oromo CSOs, the Mecha-Tulema Self-Help Association provides a particularly instructive example. During a period in which the Oromo nation was subjected to multifaceted forms of oppression, the Association emerged as a pan-Oromo movement that heralded the rise of modern Oromo nationalism.^[15] Its objective was to mobilise and organise the Oromo people around modern education, socio-economic development, empowerment, and cultural and political consciousness.^[16] It played a central role in awakening political awareness among the Oromo public and in inspiring those Oromos serving under the repressive regime of the time, many of whom later became symbols of courage and resistance. This is a clear example of a civil society organisation engaging with, and seeking to unsettle, unjust social and institutional structures. It also demonstrates how the role of CSOs, when understood through the lens of responsibility for challenging unjust structures and sustaining a nation, extends far beyond a narrow focus on rights advocacy. Just as this was true in the 1960s, it remains true today.

Challenging and transforming underlying unjust structures also requires an inward-looking and self-critical orientation. In this regard, as Kuwee Kumsa has extensively demonstrated^[17], the Siiqqee institution of Oromo women, although not a civil society organisation in the contemporary sense, provides an unparalleled example of an organised indigenous collective institution that has historically resisted domination and promoted social justice both within Oromo and beyond. It demonstrates that responsibility for confronting injustice need not reside exclusively with the state; rather, collective social institutions can serve as important mechanisms of accountability and as agents capable of challenging and transforming unjust structures.

Within this context, the challenge facing contemporary CSOs is how to move beyond the bare minimum. This requires reimagining the role of civil society not merely as an advocate for rights, but as an active agent in the struggle against unjust structures embedded within Ethiopia’s social, economic, political, and cultural institutions. The question is not only how CSOs can respond to violations, but also how they can exercise their agency to confront and transform the structural conditions that make such violations possible in the first place.

Such a reimagining call for a shift from a predominantly reactive approach to one that engages critically with the underlying systems and institutions that produce and reproduce injustice. It requires CSOs to see themselves not only as defenders of rights, but also as participants in broader projects of social and political transformation aimed at dismantling entrenched structures of domination and exclusion.