Snapshots of Living

I've been thinking that my blog might be better named "snapshots of living" rather than "ruminations on living." But before making any rash changes, I thought I would share some ruminations, which I have done little of. Here's what's happening in my world:

1. In personal news, my bosses denied me a vacation in Maine with friends, family, human rights activists and the natural world. I failed to follow the policy for requesting vacation (lesson #1 from the real world of work). As such, I have been and will continue to live in the dark shadow of that vacation 6-17 August. I am missing, thinking about Oma, Alicia, Judy, Meliisa, Arcadia National Park... Indeed, I later asked for today off (just have three hours of meetings on Wednesdays) so I could go on my off time, and that too was denied--very clearly a punitive action. An hour before meetings were to begin today, both were cancelled; after all that, you've got to be kidding me!

2. In HRTU news, I spoke with Lizzie yesterday and she's going to try to get me a draft proposal about how the house is going to evolve, become sustainable, financially and otherwise. I am pleasantly suprised that the house will continue to be a progressive community arts space. This information is now posted above.

3. Re HRTU news (ctd), Activist Book Club (ABC) held its first successful meeting on 8/11, Monday morning, at 10:30 am. Four people including myself partook in lively and reflective conversation for almost two hours regarding what are global values and how to actualize them. In synthesis, we talked about the value of:
a) compassion in daily living, that is, treating people like the humans they are
b) breaking the culture of misinformation and silence by acting upon our constitutionally-given responsibility to dissent
c) challenging ourselves to understand the perspective of others, in part by reading across disciplines such that we trip over the assumptions of our own views
d) prioritizing international law over national law (both their merits and pitfals)
e) diplomacy over militarism and our related responsibility to urge our representatives to press for this in national policy

ABC will reconvene at the HRTU house on Monday 8/25 at 9:45 am. Global Values 101 (the book we are reading) is always in the mailbox on the porch and anyone is welcome to stop by and read the first section (intro and three chapters), which is what we will discuss. Please note that you do not have to read the entirety of the section to attend or contribute. I will provide coffee. We will begin by 10 and conclude by noon. If you are unable to attend at that time but would like to join the book club in the future, please contact me with alternative suggestions for meeting days/times.

4. I'm working on a book chapter called "Activist Reflections on Globalization, Human Trafficking and War Crimes in the Former Yugoslav Space." (I was suprised and thrilled when ABC inspired talk that closely related to these themes!) The chapter is slated to be published as part of an anthology in 2009. My goal and that of my editor is to have a draft by the end of the summer. I have written and revised the abstract, but I have yet to start the chapter itself. I will write something today! In the meantime, here's some more specifics. Feedback is welcome:

Book Chapter Outline including Methodology
I blazed my activist path to the fight against human trafficking in mid-Missouri between summer 2007 and spring 2008. Opportunities made possible via the Humanity in Action (HIA) fellowship program paved the way for both my engagement with the Balkans and the movement against modern-day slavery. A month-long human rights fellowship in the Netherlands laid the groundwork for one month of informal field research in the former-Yugoslav space as well as a three-month legal internship at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. I consistently utilize my training in feminist sociology and qualitative ethnography. These research approaches implicitly formalize my personal and political goals to contribute to the understanding and advancement of human rights and social justice, locally and globally.
HIA brought me to Amsterdam in June 2007 to study “minority rights as human rights” in contemporary Europe. For the purposes of this chapter, I recognize a minority as any underprivileged group worthy of legal protection and interpersonal attention. Indeed, I depart from the same assumption as the fellowship: that a state cannot declare itself democratic unless it considers minority rights as human rights. HIA charged fellows with understanding the effect of the Holocaust on the modern-day treatment of Dutch minorities. For example, I learned about the asylum seeking process—and was particularly horrified by the compounding nature of this experience for survivors of contemporary genocides. Through my Dutch fellowship studies, I befriended the young, Muslim woman who would later become my host in Sarajevo. This led to a month of personal travel and eye-opening exploration mostly in Bosnia but also through Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro.
HIA is also indirectly responsible for my participation in the movement against modern-day slavery. Though I was previously aware of human trafficking, I first recognized it as an issue on which I could have an impact during a July-2007 HIA Poland presentation. The presentation reported the preventative efforts of La Strada, an anti-trafficking group, which faces a future skyrocketing demand for sex workers during a soccer tournament in the summer of 2012. The event will substantially increase the trafficking of the already-thousands of women and children from their Eastern European homes, or origination countries, to Poland, a country of destination and transit to wealthier, Western-European nations. The HIA fellows discussed what engaged citizens like myself could look for and should do to help a suspected victim, being bought and sold for sex against his/her will. When I soon after found myself in the Balkan states of origin on which the presenters had focused, I was too involved in my incipient studies of Slavic culture, history and language to actively take on the challenge of modern-day slavery.
But when I arrived at the ICTY in October 2007, I was exhilarated to have somewhere to focus my indignation about war crimes and other such instances of inhumanity that had gone unanswered for over 13 years. Looking down on The immaculate Hague from an Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) computer on the fourth floor of the United Nations’ (UN) building, I become a cog in the international justice machine. During my three-month internship, I recognized the groundbreaking contribution of international law to individual and government accountability for human rights abuses. Having spent time in the former Yugoslav space, The Hague also helped me comprehend the importance of independent tribunals for the adjudication of crimes against humanity as a clear statement about the unacceptability of ethnic cleansing. Still, I wondered at the unending resources invested in paying western lawyers to live lavishly in the Netherlands as opposed to investing in infrastructure and civil-society building in the former Yugoslav space, itself. At the same time, given the limited resources actually devoted to the Defense, the ICTY’s “justice system” did not appear very just, at all. Most importantly for this chapter, I began to believe that the ICTY was not capable of establishing what Serbia needed in order to achieve reconciliation and closure. Under such circumstances, how can the Balkan states effectively collaborate with their neighbors around imperative transnational issues like human trafficking?
Returning to the United States, I recount my initial difficulty and ultimate success in finding local connections to such international issues. I describe my own contributions to the first annual Stop Traffic Now Anti-Human Conference held at the University of Missouri-Columbia. I also explain the ensuing establishment of a sustainable community coalition of service providers, law enforcement agencies, students, educators and professionals who have come together to identify and help human trafficking victims as well as engage in preventative education. I identify the new imperative for activists of my generation to be uniquely global in their personal perspectives and political action strategies.
Anticipated Findings
Among the most heinous of Serbian genocidal strategies in Bosnia was the use of rape as a systematic weapon of war. The poor, underprivileged rural women who were most likely to fall victim to sexual violence during the war remained equally, if not more vulnerable, to human trafficking after the war. Indeed, previous research confirms that post-conflict regions are an ideal breeding ground for human trafficking. As such, I hope that my story, which connects these two human rights abuses, might provide the basis for more formal research into the retraumatization of rape victims through sexual slavery. A 2005 Save the Children report claims that such rehabilitation programs set up by the international community are "drastically underfunded and often do not adequately address the girls' needs." Ultimately, I hope to increase the funding for an improved model of constructive, feminist intervention for the reintegration of retraumatized survivors as active members of civil society in post-conflict states.
Tentative Conclusions
Ultimately, I analyze the ways in which the past and present policies of my government have exacerbated human rights problems in the former Yugoslav space. I identify state actions as part and parcel of an all-too-ubiquitous Western conviction that neoliberal capitalism can provide a panacea for the still-ailing Balkans. Given the nature of contemporary capitalism—that money moves without limitation on speed or destination, while people are confined to their birth nation state—I outline various ways in which globalization contributes to the ease and growth of human trafficking across international borders. I argue that capitalism creates a system that reinforces and exacerbates existing inequalities, an unacceptable outgrowth of which is modern-day slavery. The Balkan trail of women and girls trafficked for sexual exploitation provides a case example and, in this context, I argue for the roles that we as global citizens can play in what I believe should be the international justice movement of the next generation.