This was a fun post, another chance to bring one of my new found hero’s, Enrique Dussel ,to the world of today’s journalistic fight against evil. There are so many examples of people in the world that need voicers with the majority being people of color and more specifically the old, the young and women. We as human beings need to take note and advocate for change urging our elected officials to change their policies or we take to the streets and vote the out of office. It will take all of us together to create the change we need.
Ashira Darwish is an advocate who fights for the oppressed today, becoming the most valuable figure at the present stage of global discourse. The flow of her work reminds me in a sense of the ideas of the prominent liberation philosophy thinker Enrique Dussel. To credit Darwish’s work, one needs to understand her contributions to trying to dismantle the oppressive system, understanding the strategies she emphasizes for eliminating the oppression, the changes she advocates for, and how she raises awareness and questions on colonialism, globalization, capitalism, patriarchy, racism, femicide, and ecocide. Her vision opposes this dominance by using concepts for the renewal of the ethical and social professions.
She saw oppression in its most absolute form, especially how the powerless battle structures of powers were created to maintain the fortunate few. These observations fueled her activist spirit, which led her to fight for indigenous people, oppressed women, and the oppressed labor force (Mansueto, 2023). In this context, her insights seek to understand Ashira Darwish’s identity and approach to Activism by situating her work within a multi-dimensional framework where these different forms of oppression intersect to construct a singular narrative of resistance.
From her critique of colonialism and its subsistence in current systems of globalization, Darwish responds similarly to Enrique Dussel’s philosophy. In the viewpoint of liberation philosophy, Dussel appeals to create a decolonial ethic that means that the subordinate global forms are superior to the dominant Eurocentric ones. Drawing from Darwish, Valente, and Grohmann (2024), they reveal how colonial frameworks of domination have transformed in the form of globalization. She disaggregates transnational companies that extract resources and enslave workers in the third world, therefore reproducing dependency and pollution. Skeptically, Darwish proposes that globalization’s commonness only intensifies segregation through concentration on capitalist ownership instead of common development, perpetuating colonialism under a different shelter over equitable development, thus maintaining the colonial legacy in a new form.
Another significant part of Darwish’s critique is styled as a pillar of the greedy system of capitalism. Worldly-wise rationality captures the reality that, when left uncontrolled, the logic of accumulation becomes one of human dignity in the environment. As Dussel stressed the aspects of ethics, Darwish also appeals to have a different economy of sharing than an economy of possessing. Her fight for the best interaction of others and other economies shows that she is against the exploitation of people that comes with the capitalist approaches to the global economy (Mansueto, 2023). Also, she cautions against consumerism because it benefits workers in the value chain aspect while also leading to environmental degradation.
The purpose of Darwish’s Activism stems from a profound commitment to justice and an understanding of the interconnectedness of oppressive systems. Misogyny refers to prejudice against women. On the other hand, patriarchy is a model system where men hold power dominating over women. These two themes are not isolated phenomena but are deeply tied to colonial and capitalist frameworks. Darwish critiques patriarchal structures that deny women their autonomy and reinforce their marginalization (Lawrence & Simhony-Philpott, 2021). She brings attention to the global crisis of femicide, which is often a direct result of these intersecting oppressions. By amplifying the voices of women, especially those from marginalized communities, Darwish addresses the systemic silencing imposed by patriarchal norms.
Racism, another focal point of Darwish’s Activism, is understood as a tool of both colonialism and capitalism. She deconstructs how racial hierarchies, established during colonial eras, continue to define global power dynamics. Drawing inspiration from Dussel, she challenges the Eurocentric worldview that devalues non-Western knowledge systems and cultural expressions (Valente & Grohmann, 2024). Darwish insists on recovering and honoring Indigenous perspectives, often providing sustainable and inclusive approaches to societal challenges. This decolonial shift, she argues, is essential for achieving genuine global equity.
The insights portrayed in Darwish’s work stress ecological disasters brought about by the ignorance and greed of man for nature’s Wealth, which she describes as ecocide. She notes vehemently that environmental degradation and the domination of vulnerable groups of people are two sides of the same coin, both being borne out of the removal of natural resources mainly for exportation with minimal processing. Compared with Dussel’s liberation ethics, she calls for a new ecological ethic that acknowledges the value and worth of all living beings (Mansueto, 2023). They include campaigns for planting trees, encouraging ecological agriculture, or respecting the rights of indigenous people as the manifestations of the belief that people and nature have to interrelate in harmony.
An essential part of Darwish’s Activism is how she connects the themes, highlighting their relationship. In some instances, she highlights how globalization worsens ecology and society, similar to the way women are through the exploitation of patriarchy and capitalism of labor systems. This approach enlarges the spectrum of her work. It also helps to avoid framing problems into symptoms and find the key causes instead.
The emphasis in her work goes beyond critique and enacting. As an activist, she brings marginalized voices to the table in the policy-making process through lobbying and on a global platform. These are development projects such as Educating girls in rural areas, lobbying against employers’ unfair display of labor, and championing Indigenous people’s legal cases on the ownership of ancestral lands. Moreover, all these efforts are based on recognizing how past inequalities impacted current conditions.
Darwish’s influence has spread globally as it conveys inspiration through her poetry. However, her work is profoundly local and, at the same time, is speaking across continents about injustice and those who fight it. The former intervenes with activists from the Global South to construct solidarity networks disrupting ruling structures (Lawrence & Simhony-Philpott, 2021). Darwish’s work is an example of the type of dialogical space that Dussel envisions for an interconnected world, where the world comprises multiple public spheres, none of which is more potent than the other.
As evidenced in Darwish’s work, Activism is most relevant to the present and reflects active struggle. There is no standing still in the face of the rising emerging global and local threats, whether environmental, social, political, or economic threats; Darwish is correct in saying that we cannot sit back and wait to act (Mansueto, 2023). She always quotes Dussel, who went further to say that when ethics fails to address the cries of the needy, justice is denied and slams on the lips of the privileged, repeating the Latin saying that justice delayed is justice denied. Her work appeals to understanding these crises as related and starting to take vigorous actions for change to build a better world.
In conclusion, Ashira Darwish is the perfect figure of a liberation philosophy in practice as she speaks for and fights the oppressors. Whenever she questions colonialism, globalization, capitalism, patriarchy, and ecological devastation, she walks the talk through organizational struggles and advocacy. She establishes a comprehensive strategy of resistance and transformation by presenting all these aspects in connection with one another. In this way, Darwish is paving not only for herself a path going beyond the critique of oppression to a hopeful understanding of the possibility of justice and sustainability. It is a beacon of ethical commitment that makes her work sympathetic to the postmodernist liberation philosophy in the justice context.
References
Lawrence, D., & Simhony-Philpott, L. (2021). ANTISEMITISM AND MISOGYNY. https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Antisemitism-and-Misogyny-Overlap-and-Interplay.pdfLinks to an external site.
Mansueto, M. P. (2023). Critical Discourses on Technology in the Era of the Anthropocene. Social Ethics Society: Journal of Applied Philosophy, 9, 84-113. https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/86742/ssoar-ses-2023-mansueto-Critical_Discourses_on_Technology_in.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y&lnkname=ssoar-ses-2023-mansueto-Critical_Discourses_on_Technology_in.pdfLinks to an external site.
Valente, J. C., & Grohmann, R. (2024). Critical data studies with Latin America: Theorizing beyond data colonialism. Big Data & Society, 11(1), 20539517241227875.https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20539517241227875