Social change is an integral and natural process of human progression. Without transformation human life would become stagnant. Right now if one were to look around the world, one would find many situations that just cannot contain itself from change. The present world order has failed to be socially and politically responsive to the need for social and political change because human affairs have been engulfed with despair and hopelessness in a very unjust intolerant system.
Human failure to recognize and respond to the natural call for transformation only indicates that human beings have lost their humanness and capacity to make adjustments with change. In the process the existing world order has become immune to the cries for truth and justice and have fallen victim to the dialogue of the deaf. The dialogue of the deaf has forced the circumstances on people to readily turn to violence as the only means of ensuring change. As a result of this blindness, the people are unable to recognize that through its actions it would only succeed in reconstructing the status quo and enhancing the viscous cycle where the oppressed becomes the oppressor.
The present generation of leaders has a responsibility towards embracing a more holistic understanding of knowledge, culture, patterns of interaction and relationships in the struggle for social change. One of the greatest challenges for the leaders is to seek ways in which it can restore the transformative elements of relationship not only between peoples but also between people and the structures. Unless this restoration takes place, movements for social changes will invariably continue to perpetuate the dominant understanding of relationship, which is violent in itself.
Theories of social change are contextual and contentual in nature. Strategies and design for social change must be made on the needs of the people. However, what the present world order must recognize is that it cannot completely focus only on one’s cultural understanding and interpretation of the world. The present world order needs to realize that for the survival of all life, it needs to provide the space for a pluralistic and inclusive humanity to take its rightful place in human history.
Western paradigms have lived off its usefulness in contemporary politics and that it is time to turn our attention and focus towards indigenous paradigms, which have remained suppressed and dormant for a very long time. The recovery of the indigenous principles is a response to multiple domination and deprivation of nature and non-western cultures. It sustains its very existence on the principles of respect, accommodation, diversity and sharing. It is an inclusive process that seeks to recover nature, woman and man in creative forms of being and perceiving. There is thus, a shift in the concept of activity from one of destruction to creation and the concept of power from domination to empowering partnership. Its nature of assuming the role of a sustainer and provider needs to be recovered for the survival of all life.
