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20 Yale Hum. Rts. & Dev. L.J. [i] (2019)

handle is hein.journals/yhurdvl20 and id is 1 raw text is: May 2019 Dear Readers, We are honored to be the editors of this issue of the Human Rights and Development Law Journal. The writers in this issue all grapple with a problem of utmost complexity and continued salience for the entire human rights field: How, if at all, should human rights activists engage with the oppressors that perpetuate the very injustices they are fighting against? Their work is the product of a roundtable organized around the same theme, held at Yale Law School in March 2019, which brought together activists and advocates from South Africa, Israel/Palestine, and the Movement for Black Lives for two days of impassioned discussion and debate. As editors, we owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to Sari Bashi - current Visiting Lecturer in Law, Research Scholar in Law, and the Robina Foundation Visiting Human Rights Fellow at Yale Law School - who organized the roundtable and whose provocative article grounds this issue. We hope that this issue provides a way to capture the themes that emerged during the roundtable, bring the discussion to a wider audience, and prompt continuing reflection, debate, and movement-building. These theies are especially important in the current moment. Horrifying racial and socioeconomic inequalities persist across each of the three contexts spotlighted at the roundtable; human rights abuses remain common, constant, and brazen; individuals and groups with power make use of that power to oppress those whose very existence they perceive as a threat. There is no shortage of work to be done. But, as you will read in this issue, there are plenty of people doing that necessary work with creativity, commitment, and belief. We hope this issue highlights just some of the fearless global activism that brings us hope in a challenging time. Both our view of what this journal should look like and the energy from the roundtable drove our decision to put pieces from practitioners and student activists at the center of this issue. The need to contextualize and localize struggles for human rights is understood as conventional wisdom among human rights advocates. But, in our view, this insight has had too little impact on how human rights is taught and understood within legal academies. We hope that foregrounding a broader range of voices contributes to the effort to expand who gets to speak and what counts as a meaningful contribution in academic spaces and that the set of pieces begins to reflect the range of perspectives, experiences, and approaches necessary to make progress on the deep issues human rights law must confront. The stakes are too high to do otherwise. The pieces included here take a range of forms: the issue includes personal reflections, meditations on historical narratives, practical guidance rooted in theory and principle, and more. Many of the pieces blend all of these approaches. On the more personal side, Faith Barksdale writes persuasively of the engagement strategy she pursued while working at an anti-oppressive education collective; Leanne Gale movingly chronicles her process of locating her own story, as a white, Jewish woman, within a larger account of what progressive Jewish engagement with Israel/Palestine should be; and Y.N. Tang writes heartbreakingly of the pain and difficulty of engaging in the face of substantial risks. Looking more historically, but also still personally, Neeshan Balton provides a comprehensive account of the strategies activists deployed in working to overthrow the apartheid system in South Africa, and Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat draws insightful lessons from the past and present in her home country

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