Human Rights & Accountability in the Arab World: 15 Years After the Uprisings | Mai El-Sadany, TIMEP Executive Director

Let's say you're speaking to a, uh, like a college senior who is like, "Yeah, I wanna do human rights.

I'm human rights.

I wanna do this." I-- or, like, let's say like a, um, an Egyptian American at Georgetown, right? Uh, saying, you know, "I wanna do human rights.

I, I care about the region." What do you think that person fundamentally misunderstands about what, quote-unquote, "doing human rights" is?

I think, one, there's so many different ways to do human rights, right? You could be a journalist working to uphold the right to freedom of expression.

You could be a protest organizer gathering people in the streets.

Hell, you could even be an advocate knocking on doors of people you disagree with and governments that may not stand with what you stand for.

All of that could be human rights work.

And so I think really broadening our imagination of what it means to movement build and what it means to kind of organize around policy change or change, that's a really, really big thing, right? Often in our communities, and I'm sure this comes up in Afeka conversations as well, people sometimes think there's only one way to change policy or one way to deliver human rights, or it's either my way or the highway.

And I think I really encourage folks, without distilling your values, without distilling what's important to you, and only you can really determine what that is, is to have this broader imagination of how change gets done.

Just like you need the journalist doing investigative journalism in order to cover a human rights abuse or an incident of corruption, you need the lawyer who's gonna be taking that stuff to case, to court, excuse me.

You need the, uh, professor who's talking about it and creating space for discourse and dialogue.

You need the researcher who's gonna go out and do the kind of, um, work that you need to do.

All of that, all of that is really, really, really important.

So yeah, I, I wonder if there's like, there's one career under that sort of umbrella that from your vantage point as somebody who leads TimeUp, you feel like people under-index.

Especially young students who are coming into the field, they don't realize there is such a need in one of those manifestations of, quote-unquote, "doing human rights."

I don't necessarily think there is.

I think what it is, is actually a lot of these students are told there is one way to look professional or one way to develop experience or one way to do this, and I actually wanna push back on that and say that often the best human rights work is done in a context in which you're comfortable, in which you're working in a space where you like the people, where you care about the mission, where you care about the values.

I think that's often actually undersold, right? People are like, "Oh, well maybe I should go intern on the Hill because that looks good on my resume," or, "Maybe I should work with this professor because he's well-known and he's been published a lot," or, "Maybe I should work with this large organization because it's well-recognized in the space." I'm actually here to push back and say, work at the small organization if it speaks to you.

Do the research that's less known if it's what gets you going.

Go back to the region.

Spend time there.

Learn the language if you didn't grow up speaking it.

Develop that fluency.

Get to know what people are doing on the ground and really approach these issues with a humility.