From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

4 RISK AND VULNERABILITY SHOCKS AND CHANGEin the upsurge of protest that led to the Sandinista Revolution sevenyears later. The feeble response of the Mexican authorities to theearthquake of 1985 galvanised independent social movements andweakened the stranglehold of the Institutional Revolutionary Party,which had ruled the country since 1929. Catastrophic famines inBangladesh in 1971 and in Ethiopia in 1985 led respectively toindependence and the fall of a dictatorship.The 2004 Asian tsunami set the stage for a resumption of peacetalks between the separatist Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan AcehMerdeka, or GAM) and the Indonesian government, culminating inthe signing of a peace agreement in August 2005 that officially broughta 30-year conflict to an end. The historic peace deal was followedquickly by the release of Acehnese political prisoners, the withdrawalof government troops from the province, the decommissioning ofrebel-held weapons, and the establishment of a government authorityto oversee the reintegration of ex-combatants and co-ordinate assistancefor conflict-affected communities. The following year saw a far-reachingautonomy law, giving the long-neglected province control over itsnatural resources.On closer examination, even gradual change often turns out tohave been a series of small shifts in which shocks played an importantrole. Key moments in the steady spread of women’s suffrage in Europe,for example, came after wars had redrawn social relations, sendingwomen out into newly independent roles in the workplace.Heraclitus believed that ‘war is the father of all things’. Modernobservers might not be so militaristic, but conflict is undoubtedly amajor source of political and social upheaval, not all of which isnegative, as the creation of the European welfare states followingthe Second World War demonstrates. War or other disasters hardlyconstitute a path to change for which reasonable people wouldadvocate, because of the immediate human cost and because thechanges that emerge are just as likely to be negative as positive. Thepoint rather is to recognise the potential of shocks to bring aboutchange and to seize the ‘moments of opportunity’ that arise, toencourage positive changes and to prevent negative ones.This raises challenging questions for the aid community abouthow to respond to wars, natural disasters, or political upheavals.287