Summary
New Tactics in Human Rights (2004) — the free book published by the Center for Victims of Torture’s New Tactics project, available in 19 languages — presenting the Strategic Effectiveness Method (SEM), the Tactical Mapping Tool, and the Advocacy Evaluation Toolkit. [source: new-tactics-in-human-rights]
Body
New Tactics in Human Rights is a 100-page practitioner book published by the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT) in 2004, edited by Sean Mayberry, with contributions from human-rights practitioners in over 30 countries. The book presents a five-step framework for choosing tactics — the Strategic Effectiveness Method (SEM) — and a database of 250+ successful tactics organised by the type of actor they target. It is published in 19 languages and is freely available from newtactics.org. [source: new-tactics-in-human-rights]
The book’s central methodological claim: tactics are not the strategy. The book inverts the typical practitioner question (“what tactic should we use?”) to ask “what is the smallest change that would actually shift the target’s behaviour?” and only then asks what tactic gets there. The five steps are: (1) define the problem and the goal, (2) map the terrain (target, allies, opponents, bystanders), (3) identify the decision-maker, (4) plan the spectrum of tactics, and (5) evaluate the impact.
The book is widely cited in human-rights education and was one of the early practitioner-level texts to insist on evaluation as a built-in step rather than a post-hoc add-on. It has been used in training curricula in over 50 countries. [source: new-tactics-in-human-rights]