Human Rights Leadership in Challenging Times

With the corporate and business world having supplied much of the basic material for the development of leadership theory and leadership training courses, including in the human rights sector, this project aspires to co-produce new tools or frameworks. These will build on participants’ priorities and collective learning over the duration of the project, with the aim of sharing with defenders elsewhere and promoting their uptake and experimentation.

This project is an action-oriented project into leadership in a human rights context. We are working with 19 human rights defender participants to understand what ‘human rights leadership’ means and what the challenges for human rights leadership are. The project includes 20 semi-structured interviews, an introductory workshop, and thematic workshops on the topics of leadership, gender and intersectionality, and values and leadership.

Participants will also engage in individual learning processes through the development and testing of individual action plans and 1-to-1 coaching. Emerging project insights reveal some discomfort with the notion of ‘leadership’ among participants; tensions between command-and-control forms of leadership and more collectivistic types of decision-making; value conflicts, such as between participation, safety and risk management; and discrimination within the human rights movement, in particular along lines of gender, class, race and ethnicity. Further workshops will consolidate individual and collective learning, with the potential to co-produce outputs such as tools, frameworks and definitions of leaderful behaviour in the human rights context.

The project is led by CAHR associate John Gray and lecturer Eric Hoddy.