SPP Assistant Professor, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick presented a paper at a Department of Public Policy research seminar hosted at SPP on November 11.
Entitled Cultural Disincentives for Conservative Mobilization: Paternalism and the Decline of Bonded Labor in Rural India. The presentation explored why contemporary rural slaveholders in India have not organized to protect their interests in the face of social movements to end bonded labour.
Explaining that more attention has been paid to how movements secure rights than to how the powerful lose control, Choi-Fitzpatrick's work shifts the focus from movement challengers to those movements target. Using qualitative data drawn from interviews with current and former perpetrators, he has captured the situations of human rights violators as they are in the process of losing the control they had previously enjoyed thanks to their caste status and ownership of land. He has found that this sudden loss of authority has come as a surprise and an offense to these perpetrators who have not even recognized their actions as being in the wrong.
The control they had previously enjoyed was thought to be part of a larger system of paternalistic ethical obligation. This worldview led perpetrators to believe that debt bondage was a mutually beneficial socio-economic relationship. Turning the lens onto the experience of the slaveholders unpacks a critical phase in which eroding authority is often met by resignation. Choi-Fitzpatrick suggests that resignation by the slaveholders, who have simply given up, may explain a significant percentage of success of social movements.