Performing/Informing Rights: Dance, Right to Information, and Sustainable Development for Disabled People in Sri Lanka and Nepal

Civil war maims and mutilates. People with conflict-related, physical disabilities in post-war settings are likely to experience extreme poverty, social exclusion, and illegal discrimination even though the UN Sustainable Development Goals promise to "leave no one behind" and even though 184 states have promised to comply with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Indeed, disabled people in post-war Sri Lanka and Nepal frequently lack the confidence, knowledge, resources, and access to claim rights and benefits.

The earlier AHRC/GCRF-funded action research project, Performing Empowerment, used an innovative mix of inclusive dance (where disabled and non-disabled perform together) and human rights education to empower war-disabled people in Batticaloa and Jaffna, two of the most conflict-affected districts in Sri Lanka. Project participants took part in dance and rights workshops that culminated in dance performances in everyday public spaces (parks, markets, and roadsides). Our research showed that these workshops and performances helped disabled participants become more self-confident and self-assertive: several filed successful applications for welfare and disability benefits which bettered their living conditions and improved their social standing. Some participants also used their new rights knowledge and dance skills to assist other disabled people in their local communities.

This follow-on project, Performing/Informing Rights, expands impact and adds value to the earlier project in two important ways. First, it goes beyond the more general content of the earlier workshops to focus on dance and the Right to Information (RTI). RTI is a critical tool for ensuring fair, transparent, and accountable government decision-making - hence its inclusion in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Empowering disabled people to demand information from government officials about the status and processing of their applications for welfare and disability benefits will make it much less likely that those applications disappear into some bureaucratic black hole. Second, the follow-on project broadens the scope of the earlier project by adding another location in Sri Lanka (Polonnaruwa) and two new locations in Nepal (Kathmandu and Nepalgunj). Nepal was chosen because, like Sri Lanka, it is a post-war and predominantly Buddhist state with a large number of impoverished war-disabled people who have difficulty accessing welfare and disability schemes. Both Sri Lanka and Nepal have strong RTI laws but these are not much known or much used by disabled people. Both countries have been badly affected by the COVID pandemic, which has worsened living conditions and disrupted welfare schemes for disabled people.

Performing/Informing Rights consists of four main activities: inclusive dance and RTI workshops in Batticaloa, Jaffna, and Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka, and Kathmandu and Nepalgunj in Nepal; RTI dance performances in local communities and possibly for RTI officers and commissioners; filing RTI applications; and monitoring and evaluation of the project's impact on disabled participants and on RTI claiming. This follow-on project will also produce several outputs, including: a training resource for teaching dance and RTI more broadly to vulnerable groups (not just disabled people); short videos of participants in workshops, performances, and interviews; knowledge exchange and dissemination events; and a Practice Note in a human rights journal.

The project also continues the international and interdisciplinary (dance, law, human rights) collaboration among three UK-based academics and VisAbility, a non-profit German-Sri Lankan association of disabled and non-disabled choreographers, dancers, and rights advocates. For the expanded work in Nepal, that core team will now work closely with Advocacy Forum, a human rights research and advocacy organization, and Sushila Arts Academy in Nepal.