If there is one word that has been popular in the discourse on diversity in recent years, it is " empowerment ". Resistant to translations into languages other than the Anglo-American language that gave rise to it, the notion that places " power " at its heart nevertheless echoes older ideas from philosophical and/or militant currents around the world, such as liberation, emancipation, empowerment, mobilization, participation, etc.
To fully understand what empowerment means and what there are in terms of issues and dynamics behind a term that is much richer and more complex than intuition leads us to think, we take stock of the genealogy, definitions, mutations and criticisms of this concept.
From Power to Empowerment : Racial and Gender Issues at the Origins of the Notion
To be recognized as an active community
The social work historian Barbara Levy Simon, in her book The Empowerment Tradition in American Slocial Work (1994), traces the idea of empowerment back to the 1890s, which saw the birth of the " first wave " of feminism and, with the great waves of immigration that followed the end of the Civil War, the beginnings of what would become the Black Power movement.
Populations excluded from citizenship develop a discourse of emancipation that articulates two announcements made to society : 1/ We are a community, and in this sense, we represent a power that can be mobilized, and 2/ We will use this power to access our rights.
Don't set me free, I'll take care of it
The foundations of empowerment are there : by the fact of numbers and belonging to a community with an (unsatisfactory) shared destiny, exclu.es break the isolation in which they have been tenu.es ; and through their collective action, led by leaders they have choisi.es, are well décidé.es to take power over their lives without waiting for the powers that be to grant them, according to their agenda and methodology, what seems acceptable to cede freedom to them.
This vision can be summed up in a famous slogan of the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s : " don't liberate me, I'll take care of it!"
The " liberated conscience" : a return to the fundamentals of the philosophy of emancipation
Breaking out of voluntary servitude
But how can one free oneself when the chains are as much inside oneself, from self-fulfilling prophecies to mechanisms of internalization of the stigmata, through all the nuances of " voluntary servitude" (as La Boétie calls the " choice" of obedience to iniquitous rules, among other forms of tyrannical domination) as well as shackled hand and foot by others?
Transforming oneself and transforming the world
Paulo Freire
This question is the subject of the lifelong work of the Brazilian didactician Paulo Freire, author of the famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968-1974). Advocating the development of " liberated consciousness", he makes education a militant act... And participatory, before its time : "No one educates others, no one educates himself, men educate themselves together through the intermediary of the world," he writes, then further on, " The goal of the educator is not only to teach something to his interlocutor, but to seek with him, the means to transform the world in which he lives ."
Empowerment is therefore a power of oneself and one's community that allows one to exercise the power to change things far beyond one's own fate.
Escape the presumption of unthinking, unthought, unthinkable
Jacques Rancière
The philosopher Jacques Rancière, concerned with equality in addition to thinking about freedom, deepened this idea in his thesis on working-class culture, published in 1981. In it, he develops a whole analysis of the way in which opprimé.es are referred to material life, " locking them up ", in his words, in the " unthought and unthinkable " of their situation.
This vision is in line with the criticism of Maslow's pyramid of needs, which assumes that we can only achieve self-esteem and personal fulfillment if we have previously satisfied all our physiological needs (hunger, thirst, rest, etc.) and all our needs for security. No one will deny that it is a priori easier to devote time and energy to developing fulfilling social relationships and to thinking about the world without the most concrete constraints.
Nevertheless, says Rancière, it is a mistake to believe that one can only think of oneself on the condition of being privileged. And in this case, it is a whim of the elites, and more generally of all groups in a situation of domination (conscious or unconscious), to arrogate to themselves the quasi-monopoly of the vision of society and its bodies, even in the construction of doctrines of the emancipation of disadvantaged, oppressed and/or dominated populations.
In other words : as long as it is privilégié.es that define the situation of those who are less so, establish the paths to their liberation and draw the contours of difference, no real and lasting progress can be made in the field of equality. There is only one alternative way: to hear and take seriously the voice of those who do not have power.
Empowerment in development doctrines: when " making it possible " replaces " doing instead "
Empowerment for all vulnerable and précarisé.es of the earth
Starting with the anti-racist and feminist movements, extended to the field of social relations, the notion of empowerment took on a new connotation in the 1990s. At the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, the word was on everyone's lips.
It was brought to this UN meeting by women's rights organizations that deal with the issues of economic precariousness, insecurity, and the insufficient place of women in peace processes, but it was reappropriated in the following years by organizations (NGOs, but also the World Bank, IMF, WTO) which have the fight against North/South inequalities in their mission sheet.
Empowerment is becoming the preferred path to economic development: It is a question of mobilizing the energies of local communities by giving them the educational, infrastructural and financial means for their own development, without crushing them with debts. The rise of micro-credit, among other examples of the implementation of this approach, gives concrete expression to this intention not to do things in the place, but to support, by putting in place conditions adapted to the context, the taking control of their destiny by the communities themselves.
Empowerment requires a level playing field
While this vision of development aid receives a majority of votes, if only because it seems to break with charitable approaches, it is also subject to severe criticism. Some see this as a way for the so-called rich countries to shift their focus from large-scale development aid to visible but limited actions, while ignoring their possible responsibilities for the economic backwardness of other regions of the world.
Microfinance in particular was regularly singled out from the mid-2000s onwards, when many usurious excesses led to thehuman tragedies. However, the economist Esther Duflo is not throwing the baby out with the bathwater : for her, the " empowerment " approach that underpins the micro-credit system is the right one, as long as it is not considered the only one. For empowerment to produce its effects, it must be part of a framework of social protection and a level playing field. It is impossible to develop on one's own without having the possibility of changing the world in a way that is more favourable to one's interests...
From economic development to personal development: Being yourself to be able to act
An ecological vision of being-oneself in the world
Empowerment has left the field of self-power over the world through the door of economic development, which has somewhat reduced it to a utilitarian pragmatism; But now he is back through the window of personal development. The beginning of the twenty-first century is indeed seeing the flourishing of the ideal of being oneself, no longer from an individualistic perspective but one that could be described as ecological. : it is about being more real, more aware of oneself, more in tune with oneself, freer from social injunctions to maintain better relationships with one's ecosystem.
" Being oneself ", the new contours of women's emancipation... And men?
In this way, empowerment reconnects with its roots planted in the soil of the fight for equality between women and men. Because it is through the angle of " being able to be oneself " that we intend to remove the obstacles to women taking on responsibilities. The discourse, taking for granted the equal potential of the sexes, is one of rejection of narrow assignments, internalized guilt, and self-censorship of women. By encouraging them to accept themselves as they are, complex, multiple, diverse among themselves as each to themselves, we want to free up their energy so that they can demonstrate their ability to contribute to participating in the world and to change it.
The model gives convincing results, as evidenced for example, by the vitality of corporate diversity networks, which allows a rapid increase in the visibility of many women in organizations and an increased participation in the affairs of the collective, well beyond the sole subject of gender diversity.
The seductive power of this approach can also be seen in a new impetus of mobilization of men who, in turn, are seizing on the desire to be oneself, more and more of whom are expressing their fed up with a masculinity that limits the expression of their individual singularity.
The disempowerment of un.es, the future of the empowerment of others ?
The glass ceiling cracks with the rise of women, but does not break
However, the whole issue of equality between women and men does not seem to be soluble in the empowerment of the former. Indeed, if the glass ceiling is cracked by the rise of women who dare to express their ambition more than in the past, it is still far from bursting.
Because women's complexes (of imposture, of the good student, of Cinderella...) and self-censorship are not the only ones to blame for the difficulties still observed in making them take their rightful and full place at the table of decisions that concern and change the world.
The inertia of traditional models of apprehension of legitimacy, competence and performance is proving to render ineffective part of women's efforts to demonstrate and have their value recognized. A big waste of energy that leads to a whole reflection on the dynamics crossing the rise of women and the rise of maturity of organizations, or how at the same time as women appropriate the right to power, contexts must work on their inclusiveness to welcome as naturally, not to say as banally as possible, this aspiration expressed and let it take shape.
The ambiguities of men's disempowerment: between masculinist concern and the way forward of responsibility-sharing
With this in mind and at the heart of new thinking on empowerment, a concept has emerged in recent years : disempowerment. Putting a little foot in the dish of an enthusiastic diversity that would be for the benefit of all without anyone giving up anything, this notion covers both the anxiety of downgrading some men challenged by the empowerment of women (with all the frustrations, and therefore the aggressiveness that this can entail, explains the American essayist Hannah Rosin, and which is confirmed in the rhetoric of masculinist movements) and a new demand from certain movements in favor of equality (some of which are based precisely on men's collectives, such as ZeroMacho in France) that invite men to renounce accumulating and increasing their powers so that space can be freed up for women.
Perceived as Malthusianist and sacrificial by un.es and as frank and immediately effective by others, this vision of the sharing of power to act for oneself and for the collective has the merit of putting back at the center of reflection, discussion and action for equality, the principle of a problem concerning all.
