Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

COLLAGES OF BETTERMENT 197CULTIVATION OF TRANSFORMATIVE LEADERSHIP IN CIVILSOCIETY AND THE CO-CREATION OF THE ENERGY FIELD FORDEMOCRATIZATION IN ASIAChaiwat ThirapantuThe challenges of the 21 st century: Democracy incrisis and the roles of civil society movementsIn the 1930s and 1940s, many European and Americanscholars turned their attention to the crisis of democracythat followed the economic depression and the rise oftotalitarianism (Strang 2006). Since the fall of the BerlinWall at the end of 1989, people in Eastern Europe, inLatin America, in Asia and Africa have been throwingoff dictatorships and tyrannies. However, democracy,the political system that they are yearning for, cannotfulfill their hopes for a better life. Even in WesternEurope and the United States, people have turned theirbacks on their governments. Voter turnouts sink, publicdebates get nastier, and democracy seems stymied in theface of mounting multiple challenges. The problemsthat the world faced before the Second World War werenot as complex as those we face now.We live and work in an era of turbulence andchallenges. The winds of change sweeping the world—digitalization, globalization, migration, demographicshifts and terrorism, as well as the degradation of socialand natural capital—are giving rise to arenas of clashingforces. These clashing forces play out as tension betweenmultiple polarities: speed and sustainability, market andsociety, progress and conservation, global and local waysof organizing, and top-down and bottom-up leadership(Scharmer 2001). In the last decade, there have beenmany articles and books and media reports warning usabout the world’s crises. Otto Scharmer has summarizedthese very poignantly:“The crisis of our time is not just a crisis of asingle leader, organization, country or conflict.The crisis of our time reveals the dying of an oldsocial structure, and way of thinking, and old wayof institutionalizing and enacting collective socialforms” (Scharmer 2007).In the last decade, civil society has become a new “power”in the virtual and real world. The growth of socialforums and the anti-war movement represents whatsocial movement theorists call “political opportunitystructures,” a new framework within which individualscan participate in local and global debates. In particular,the social forums have become the institutionalizationof the newest social movements from so-called anticapitalistmovements to environmental, social andmigration concerns. Moreover, in many parts of theworld, civil society joins with the state and the businesssector as the key institutions that are trying to shapeglobalization and sustainable development.However, civil society also has its weaknesses, particularlyin Southeast Asia. There are diverse groups with widelyvarying agendas that occupy the space that can bedefined as civil society. There is no single viewpointbut rather multiple views, sometimes contradictory.After the tsunami, there were some voices talking aboutthe accountability and transparency of civil societyorganizations. The double challenge, then, is not topromote civil society per se but rather to strengthenthe parts of it that can enhance the quality of publicpolicy outcomes and help advance progressive values.In pursuing these aims, there is a first crucial step tocreate a positive change in the complex system of civilsociety networks and then weave these changes into thefabric of the modern world. This is the most crucial taskin building a community of committed and distributedleaders in civil society movements. My researchmethodology is a kind of action research that combinesthree dimensions of observer, namely, the first person,second person and third person.As the first person, I reflected on my tacit (intrinsic)knowledge from personal experiences in trainingaround five hundred change agents and local leaders inthe last seven years. Moreover, I have used my body toexperience the ki energy flows and the field of energythrough practicing aikido and Japanese calligraphy.Ki (energy in Japanese; qi in Chinese) is a thousandsyear-oldEastern concept that Yasuo Yuasa has tried toinvestigate in a scientific way. Yuasa (1993) has definedthe concept of ki-energy as “an energy unique to theliving human body that becomes manifest, while beingtransformed, at psychological, physiological and physicallevels of self-cultivation.” Self-cultivation in Japanese iscalled shugyou and refers to training the body. However,it also implies training, as human beings, the spirit ormind by training the body. This is the self-cultivationmethod, or mind-body training method. In other words,Asian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows