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International
Activist Culture
Activists work to promote, guide, or impede changes revolving social issues and influence the actions of individuals or groups. They build connections among groups and communities, disseminate information on specific issues to create awareness, and influence social changes. I’m going to focus on 2 different types of activist groups who support refugees.
After World War II, the tragic experience of rejection to Jewish asylum seekers and millions of people displaced across Europe led to the creation of the UN Refugee Convention in 1951. It declared that any person fleeing persecution could seek refuge in a signatory country. About 145 countries have signed the treaty, and since then numerous European nations (e.g. Germany, France, Italy, etc.) have taken in refugees on a global scale. This initiative set precedent for many well-known modern activist groups active today.
About 1,200 men, women, and children who sought refuge in Australia were forcibly transferred to the remote Pacific island nation of Nauru in recent years; they suffered severely abusive, neglective, and inhumane treatment in the process. As a result, the activist groups Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI), known for their involvements in protecting fundamental human rights of people across the world and scrutinizing/exposing violations, called on the Australian government to challenge this issue. The latter responded by conducting a series of investigations and proved the concerns to be legitimate; the issue has been brought to attention due to the group’s work, and is currently being resolved as a joint effort.
Domestic
These groups tend to focus on issues at home, be it national, provincial, or even municipal. On January 28th, 2017, more than a dozen people (mostly refugees) were detained at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport as a result of Donald Trump’s immigration and entry ban on designated Muslim nations. The highly controversial executive order that halted all refugee resettlement into the U.S. for 120 days, denied entry for Syrian refugees indefinitely, and suspended entry from several other Muslim majority nations for 90 days was met with outrage by Chicago citizens. In turn, local activist groups such as the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, the Arab American Action Network, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Illinois Coalition for Immigrants and Refugee Rights came together and rallied more than 1000 members/citizens to protest against the detention and the executive order itself. As previously mentioned, these groups usually advocate for issues on the domestic frontier, but when the issue is interconnected to another that is much greater in scale, these groups will nevertheless bring it to the center of attention and enlist aid to challenge it.
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