The ability to interrogate and disrupt power is key to advancing people-centered justice. This is a lesson we have learned collectively as a cohort of lawyers and activists engaged in human rights struggles around the globe, brought together by the Legal Empowerment Lab at the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at NYU School of Law. We come from Argentina, Colombia, Guyana, India, Malawi, Uganda, the United States, and Zimbabwe and work on a range of human rights issues—including climate, gender, labor, land, water, housing, immigration, and criminal justice. Some of us hail from communities forced to live on the margins, while others of us work in solidarity with marginalized people engaged in human rights struggles.
We all came to the Lab through our shared commitment to legal empowerment and to learn how participatory methods, such as participatory action research (PAR)-oriented methodologies, can improve our legal empowerment work. After over a year of gathering, we leave with critical questions and reflections about power dynamics in human rights and legal empowerment work. We’ve come to understand PAR as a process that builds collective power beyond the influence of any one individual. We jointly wrote this reflection in that spirit.
Legal empowerment is the ability of individuals and communities to know, use, and shape the law. Its aim is to build people-centered justice through bottom-up innovation and lessons learned from those left out of the law’s protection. At times, however, legal empowerment centers on the provision of legal services rather than on a process that builds community power and resilience. It can lose its liberatory potential by explaining, rather than questioning, the law and how it functions.
This is where the Lab steps in. Through monthly co-learning and one-on-one sessions, the Lab gave us a foundation in PAR and ethics based on care and encouraged us to put these into action. The Lab also hosted monthly online “tea times” to provide an open space for us to discuss common themes and build social connections with a deep emphasis on collective care and solidarity.
This process culminated in an in-person learning exchange in Zimbabwe, where we learned from women community activist-researchers engaged in feminist participatory action research (FPAR) to address forced displacement, the global climate crisis, and structural violence. Together, we experienced how participatory action research builds power in grassroots human rights movements.
PAR challenges traditional research: “subjects” are instead actively engaged as co-researchers throughout the process. Rather than providing ideas and solutions, PAR poses questions for participants to think about, and through this process of collective inquiry and reflection, it offers space to decide what measures to take forward. The process includes group work that facilitates the community’s critical understanding, such as role-playing exercises that explore their experiences of injustice and identify ways to respond to challenges, the creation of community timelines or resource maps to identify common trends and issues, and problem and hope tree analyses to examine causes and explore how problems can be overcome. Through these group activities, participants generate data and document and share what everyone has learned.
This engagement necessarily challenges conventional understandings of research, the construction of knowledge, and what constitutes data. PAR affirms the expertise that community members hold by virtue of their lived experiences and realities. Our participation in the Lab has invited us to critically examine the criteria we traditionally use to determine if research or data is reliable. We’ve come to understand the marginalization of community-based and participatory methods as epistemic injustice, a subtle form of oppression that the communities we work with often face.
We have also learned that self-awareness regarding one’s privilege and identity is crucial to PAR. Otherwise, we may unknowingly project power based on our roles as lawyers, academics, or activist leaders or on our gender, race, country of origin, or social status. This is especially true in communities that have suffered from racial injustice, income inequality, and a lack of access to resources or political power.
When we take time to reflect on our roles in the communities we serve, we can take small steps to avoid creating reliance rather than resiliency. This may involve emphasizing the commonalities we share with the people with whom we work rather than our differences, gradually stepping back and allowing others to assume the role of facilitator. We also must accept that relationships are built over time.
Ultimately, our participation in the Lab and introduction to PAR has led us to reflect on how traditional ways of engaging with the law and legal processes can usurp power from communities engaged in human rights struggles. This can happen when we assume that people will not be able to understand the law or decide on legal strategies.
Too often, legal practitioners see the law as a starting point: things are regulated in a certain way, and we need to conform. As a result, we may stick to a narrow legal perspective without taking into account the community’s knowledge, experiences, and opinions. Consequently, we will fail to understand how traditional and informal norms in a community might precede and interact with the visible power structure.
In contrast, PAR methods focus on whether the law is responding to community needs. It forces practitioners to ask, together with PAR participants, which aspect of the law does the community want to understand? How do we want to use the law, and to what end? How does the existing legal system need to change to better serve the community?
This approach requires that legal practitioners work more openly and flexibly with communities and not arrive with a preconceived solution. A PAR approach to legal empowerment focuses on the individual and collective transformation that emerges from the process rather than the outcome of a particular case. This emphasis is crucial because legal outcomes are unpredictable and depend on factors that practitioners cannot control. When we devote our efforts to participatory ethics and methods, however, participants build critical consciousness and gain a sense of their own power, helping the community build resilience—regardless of whether a legal battle is won or lost.
Fundamentally, PAR methods give people the tools to interrogate the history of the law and its role in upholding oppressive systems. Through the eyes of communities, justice then comes alive—no more a distant institution or an unfriendly, tricky machinery to avoid. By connecting the law with their lived reality, communities define justice in ways that make sense to them and that can then be used to guide their efforts for change.