“Today, people in half the world are still not living in that future. In China, Cuba, and North Korea, democratic opposition parties are banned. In Belarus, Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, regime opponents are harassed and jailed. In Palestine and West Papua, self-determination has not been achieved. In more than 40 other countries, government is not based on the consent of the people.

Yet in all these countries, repression is resisted by people who know instinctively that better lives will only follow better ways of being governed. Workers and peasants in Asia want to have a say about where they live and work. Africans and Central Asians want to be free of the corruption that steals the value of the resources they extract from their wells and mines. Bloggers in the Middle East want to use the Internet without being arrested and tortured. And women in a score of nations want the right to vote where they cannot, the right to dress as they prefer, and the right not to be beaten or even mutilated where those abuses are sanctioned.

The impulse to assert the dignity of being human, to claim what Lincoln called “a fair chance in the race of life,” is universal. But Lincoln said that something more was needed than that impulse. You must also have the power to rise up and shake off oppression.”

Originally published in The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs – Vol. 30:2, Summer 2006

Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall