B4. Radical Ecology

This week is the 73rd anniversary of the U.S. coup in Iran. In our latest, we give a background on the geopolitics of the Cold War, U.S.-Soviet tension in Iran…

This article Atlanta offers a model for building sanctuary was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Atlanta community organizer Bassey Etuk opened a community defense workshop in June with a stark observation, and heads nodded around the crowded room. “Atlanta was a sanctuary city until the governor of Georgia made it illegal in 2009. Now Atlanta is Cop City,” he said. 

From California to Kenya, whenever I say I’m based in Atlanta, people immediately bring up Cop City, the police training facility that sparked years of protest and major campaigns to prevent it from being built on public land. The training facility was ultimately built and is now in operation. But the Stop Cop City movement reduced the size and scale of the compound and, importantly, captured the imagination of people fighting on the frontlines against policing and state violence around the world.

In 2026, organizers in Atlanta have shifted from protests and mass mobilizations to applying the lessons they learned from the campaign and building the infrastructure needed to practice real community safety every day.

I am a longtime organizer and senior strategist with Project South, where I work alongside Bassey, an Atlanta-native who organizes in the 10 historically Black neighborhoods of Brownsville in southeast Atlanta. For the past two months, Bassey, I and the ATL Get Ready Team — a coalition of community organizers and organizations from across the city — launched a community preparedness plan to respond to escalating ICE enforcement, policing and National Guard deployments in cities across the United States. Together, we have been recruiting businesses, churches, bars and community centers to become “Sanctuary Zones” — sites that commit to preventing ICE and other law enforcement from entering. 

Building sanctuary and protection for all people is critical in this period. It keeps us alive through moments of immediate crisis while positioning our communities to build the power needed for deeper, fundamental change. We share the lessons we are learning on the ground so that we are moving in coordination and solidarity with other communities all over the country who are similarly experiencing the trauma of this moment — the murders, detentions, intimidation and indictments — as fascist forces attempt to consolidate power at every level of society.

Atlanta gets ready

After witnessing ICE operations in Minnesota and National Guard deployments in Memphis and Washington, D.C., 15 Atlanta-based organizations came together in February 2026 and asked each other some hard questions. If federal agents surge into, deploy across, or occupy Atlanta, are we ready? Are we ready to resist, to protect our communities and to prevent killings and kidnappings? Are we ready to put aside old tensions and disagreements? Are we ready to see ourselves as connected and act together, applying unified pressure in pursuit of our shared goals of community protection and collective defense?

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At our first coalition meeting, Adelina Nicholls of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights said it clearly: “We can no longer afford to mobilize in reaction to what is happening. We have to determine a political direction and alignment towards a real vision.”

Large-scale anti-ICE protests have been powerful demonstrations of collective dissent and people power. But we understood that without greater unity across race, class, gender and geography, we could not win.

It was a vital moment for those of us who have organized in Atlanta for a long time. Organizations that did not always work together and that openly acknowledged long-standing tensions and disagreements, decided that, given the rise in state repression and violence, we need each other differently in this moment.

In the face of ICE raids in Latino, Caribbean and African immigrant neighborhoods, ongoing police violence against Black youth, sweeps of homeless encampments ahead of the World Cup in Atlanta, and the targeting of youth and trans people at the federal and state levels, we named criminalization as a shared reality and a political baseline for our alignment and collective action.

We agreed on a single commitment: to prevent and disrupt the growing criminalization of all our people. We called ourselves the ATL Get Ready Team, and we began by sharing trainings and building our collective skills with one another and with communities across Atlanta. In all, 15 Black-led, migrant-led and queer-led organizations made the decision to work together, combining our strengths instead of continuing to work alone.

Over the past six months, that commitment has become a practice. We meet weekly to check in and coordinate on the work happening on the ground. We have facilitated community trainings, hosted educational forums, organized canvassing days and launched a shared campaign to protect our people.

The assembly affirms the vision

In the aftermath of the Stop Cop City movement in 2025, organizations across Atlanta joined forces to organize People’s Movement Assemblies to define and build real community safety — despite the mayor’s assurances that training police forces in advanced urban warfare techniques would do that for us. Assemblies are community gatherings where people come together to assess the problems they face, develop shared solutions and create plans of action.

Drawing on the lessons we learned during the Stop Cop City struggle, we shifted from resisting the city’s vision of public safety to building our own. The assembly process became a form of community governance to define that vision together. It also became a space to strengthen relationships and build the movement infrastructure needed for long-term transformation.

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ICE will be at the World Cup, but organizers are ready

The ATL Get Ready Team participated in the Atlanta Citywide People’s Movement Assembly in March. It was the third assembly held since early 2025 and led by the People’s Campaign. More than 500 people poured into Project South’s historic building in South Atlanta looking for connection, skills and a plan to act. Together, our organizations facilitated a large-scale, real-life scenario exercise to prepare for the upcoming World Cup season. We walked participants through the anticipated influx of federal law enforcement, drones and surveillance expected over five weeks during the summer. The gym was full of so many people — young and old, seasoned organizers and those just coming into the movement space. Naming the heightened military presence in our communities was scary, especially as we witnessed ICE murders and violence, but there was also relief that we were naming our power to prepare and act. We told the room, “Prepared people don’t panic.”  

We then moved into a full day of practical, hands-on trainings in community first response, mutual aid organizing, ICE tracking, school protection, Know Your Rights (and the risks), and porch-sit community engagement.

By the end of the assembly, participants committed to continuing to organize together, building toward May 1, International Workers’ Day, and developing community safety plans for the World Cup season. We also began to design a campaign that invited more people to participate in protections that would reduce and eliminate law enforcement entanglements.

Recruiting Sanctuary Zones

Sanctuary Zones are spaces that commit to keeping communities safe by refusing to cooperate with ICE or other law enforcement agencies that criminalize, detain and separate people from their families.

They are also a way for businesses, faith institutions, community centers and other public spaces to demonstrate a commitment to caring for their staff, patrons and neighbors. Sanctuary Zones are a practical response to the violence, hostility and fear created by the Trump administration’s escalation of ICE raids, National Guard deployments and the criminalization of protest over the past year.

The more our organizing team learned about the preparations for the World Cup — including hundreds of millions of dollars allocated for security, expanded police deployments, street closures, surveillance technology and drones — the more convinced we became that we needed a campaign with accessible entry points for more public engagement around keeping our communities safe. 

Project South organizers participate in a canvassing day to build the Sanctuary Zone network across Atlanta to protect people from ICE and police violence. (WNV/Stephanie Guilloud)

We designed a plan to invite bars, restaurants and community centers to commit to declaring themselves as a Sanctuary Zone and to become part of a network of protection. We used the word “sanctuary” on purpose to signal that even if Georgia passes legislation to make it illegal for cities to pass sanctuary protections for migrants, independent businesses, faith centers and community spaces can declare sanctuary as autonomous spaces.

The real shift came when we named a deeper truth. We built the campaign in response to the public outrage over ICE, but we also knew we had a responsibility, and an opportunity, to make clear that ICE and the police are two arms of the same apparatus. Both function as agents of the state to control, contain, surveil and criminalize our communities. From the beginning, the ATL Get Ready Team aligned around an abolitionist position not to reinforce any part of the prison-industrial complex.

Bassey opened a Sanctuary Zone workshop at Project South’s Juneteenth gathering by naming his own experience with the police in Atlanta. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve been harassed, searched, had guns put in my face,” he said. “But in 2006 when the police shot and killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston, it shifted something in this city. Police had a no-knock warrant using false information and it was the wrong house. Kathryn was old-school, she reminded me of my grandma. My grandma kept a .22 and shot it every 4th of July. When police battle rammed Kathryn’s house, she let off a single warning shot, and in return the officers fired 39 shots killing her dead. There are many battles we’ve lost, but we can’t afford to lose more battles like that if we want to win in the long-term.”

So far, some 70 sites across Atlanta have publicly declared themselves Sanctuary Zones. Barbershops, bookstores, independent businesses, bars, restaurants, retailers, churches and community spaces have all joined the network. We canvassed neighborhoods, inviting sites to display Sanctuary Zone posters in their windows and commit to the campaign. We also coordinated Know Your Rights and Risks trainings and other community preparedness workshops for participating sites, while connecting them with local policing alternatives and diversion programs that offer practical ways to respond to conflict and crisis without calling 911.

Multiple grassroots organizations canvassed over 500 sites across Atlanta as part of the ATL Get Ready Team. (WNV/Stephanie Guilloud)

The campaign engaged more than 500 sites across the city. We began by concentrating on the two-mile radius surrounding the stadium as a visible show of solidarity to the thousands of visitors expected during the World Cup. As we learned that ICE was shifting its tactics and increasingly targeting people in surrounding counties, we expanded our outreach beyond the stadium corridor to neighborhoods where watch parties and community gatherings would take place, so that vulnerable people could feel safer being in public and enjoying the matches.

Many bar owners and restaurant operators expressed their commitment to refusing ICE entry but were hesitant to display a Sanctuary Zone poster or publicly join the network out of fear of retaliation. Many Black-owned businesses appreciated that we named the connection between ICE violence and police violence. As one owner told us, “We already don’t call the cops, we can sign on to this, easy.”

In a time of economic hardship, the government’s extraordinary spending on police, ICE and surveillance feels like a slap in the face, and the people we spoke with responded with outrage at this unjust siphoning of public funds. The Federal Emergency Response Agency, or FEMA, spent more than $846 million on security and policing for the FIFA spectacle instead of responding to climate disasters. During hurricane season. During the hottest summer on record. During floods and wildfires affecting hundreds of thousands of people. 

At the same time, as many of us feared, ICE kidnappings and detentions escalated, reaching 43,000 in the month of June alone. Over the previous two months, four Black men were killed by federal troops and agents deployed in Memphis, while the military occupation of Washington, D.C., doubled from 2,500 to 5,000 troops. For comparison, the massive ICE operation in Minneapolis deployed 3,000 federal agents, creating immense harm. Faced with this reality, we refuse to give in to fear. To protect our people, we prepare and we build.

Sharing the vision

A local coffeehouse owner said, “Of course, we will sign on. I’m an immigrant, and when we are in solidarity with each other, we are stronger. What do we have to lose?”

She immediately offered the coffeehouse as a meeting space. We are now talking to business owners and church leaders about holding sessions that allow folks to share policies and practices that support protections for workers, patrons and community members.

The invitation to Sanctuary Zones is to join a larger vision: a coordinated network of sites that can be proactive and generative in times of crisis rather than reactive. These spaces are one step toward reducing our reliance on policing, which so often produces harm instead of safety. They create a concrete invitation for people beyond the usual movement circles to resist this regime through collective noncooperation. Sanctuary Zones prioritize safety over surveillance and solidarity over fear.

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As we move out of the heat of summer and into the fall, the ATL Get Ready Team intends to keep building. Project South will facilitate Community Responder Trainings to strengthen the capacity of community members to assess emergencies, intervene and address medical situations without calling the police. The Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights will continue offering ICE tracker and legal trainings so businesses and faith institutions understand their rights and know how to prevent ICE raids.

Together, we will invite Sanctuary Zone partners to run drills and continue practicing preparedness plans that can be adapted to many kinds of crises — whether climate disasters, economic instability or state violence. Preparation is infrastructure, and in times of disaster or crisis, infrastructure is power.

Sharing the lessons

Below are a few lessons to share with groups working on similar projects: 

1. Differences are not deterrents: We can acknowledge differences and tensions but still work together towards a common vision of preventing criminalization and protecting our communities. Differences can be a strength because sharing knowledge from divergent perspectives gives us a fuller picture of the threats and opportunities to respond. 

2. Connections make our strategies stronger: We can connect ICE, policing and surveillance — an important political intervention that ensures movements to protect our immigrant neighbors are inseparable from movements to protect our Black neighbors from deadly policing. Both are connected to the growing struggles against data centers, surveillance technologies and cameras in our public spaces. We can connect daily, local police harassment to federal agents roaming our streets and to the executive orders and legislation that is targeting trans people and anyone who dissents.

3. Focused strategies are winning strategies: Collaborating around a shared strategy to name and resist the criminalization of people, poverty and protest is an important path forward. Bars, independent businesses and other community spaces want to participate in this moment, they simply need accessible ways to do so. One commitment, one poster, one campaign gives them a concrete way to say yes to noncooperation with institutions of harm, and yes to the work of creating proactive protections and solutions.

4. Local knowledge and national ripples: Rooting in local knowledge, relationships and histories is critical to building long-lasting infrastructure that engages people from diverse backgrounds. Careful reconnaissance to identify canvassing targets, direct follow-up with people with trusted relationships at neighborhood barbershops or churches, elders working with young people to engage sites from different angles, and clear recognition of local cultures and tensions make campaigns like this stronger and allow more people to participate. 

Each of our locations requires different tactics, but if we can coordinate across places and learn from one another as we have learned from Ferguson to Los Angeles, Chicago to Minneapolis, Washington, D.C. to Memphis to Atlanta, we can confront this daunting machine with greater strength, deeper solidarity and more collective power.

As Rehana Lerandeau of Critical Resistance said, “We have to make our practices and our stories fresh, radical and irresistible.” In a time of so much danger and despair, sanctuary is a practice and a vision for how we want to be together in community. This campaign invited people across a diverse range of communities in Atlanta into their own courage, and they have overwhelmingly said yes. 

This article Atlanta offers a model for building sanctuary was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article What we learned from a US bus tour of judges was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Over four days in July, roughly 30 judges, sitting and retired, state and federal, climbed on and off a bus at courthouses, coffee shops, a Cracker Barrel, and community centers and libraries from Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to Grosse Pointe, Michigan. The goal was straightforward — to visit with people in their communities to talk about why the rule of law matters in their everyday lives. They engaged one on one, in small groups and in front of large audiences. 

The tour was called Justice in Motion, and was created and run by our organization, Democracy Rising Collaborative, together with Keep Our Republic. We borrowed the model from judges in Poland, who figured out, the hard way, how to defend an independent judiciary when the traditional tools weren’t enough.

We think that borrowed playbook is worth explaining, because we’re planning to use it again, and we encourage you to take similar bold action during this perilous time.

Where the idea came from

Last October, The Carter Center’s Rule of Law Program brought a delegation of U.S. lawyers to Warsaw for a study tour, to sit down directly with the Polish judges and lawyers who had spent the better part of a decade defending their courts. They were joined by democracy leaders from Georgia, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary, as well as the Hungarian Helsinki Committee. 

Participating in that trip was where we first heard in detail how the judges in Poland decided to come out of their courtrooms to march through the streets of Warsaw in support of their judicial independence. They then organized themselves to visit citizens in villages and towns across the country to talk about why the rule of law and an independent judiciary mattered to everyone.

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The tour’s lessons were later written up by two of its organizers — Leanne Webster of the Carter Center’s Rule of Law Program and Melissa Hooper of the German Marshall Fund — in a Harvard Social Impact Review essay, “Turning Back the Tide of Authoritarianism.”

Starting in 2015, Poland’s governing party moved methodically to bring the judiciary under its control: it took over the Constitutional Tribunal, restructured the body that selects judges so that the ruling party effectively chose its members, and created a disciplinary chamber that could punish judges for rulings the government disliked. These tools were used against judges the Carter team met with, to fire them for speaking up for the judiciary or raising questions about judicial appointments, and to replace them with loyalists. All of these actions were framed as democratic accountability rather than capture.

What we found instructive wasn’t the attack — that pattern is familiar by now — it was the response. Polish judges organized through relationship-building, proactive media relations and organizations like Iustitia, a Polish independent judges association, and Themis, another group of judges supporting an independent judiciary. Both were instrumental in mobilizing judges in Poland. 

That work built toward the iconic March of a Thousand Robes on Jan. 11, 2020. Judges, prosecutors and lawyers from roughly 20 countries walked in silence from Poland’s Supreme Court to its parliament building, even passing by the President’s office. Most of them wore their judicial robes, and they were joined by thousands of ordinary Poles lining the route. City officials estimated the crowd at 30,000. They were joined by their judicial brethren from across Europe — a judicial tour de force, judges standing and walking together in a tremendous demonstration of the power of collective action. 

About a year later, judges got into vans, traveling from town to town into places where a sitting judge was someone you might never see. Judges set up in town squares and school auditoriums to hand out pocket copies of the Polish constitution and walk residents through what it actually said. 

Judges who had been forced off the bench did some of the heaviest lifting, since they had nothing left to lose professionally by talking to reporters and shopkeepers. They spoke about what due process meant and why courts weren’t supposed to answer to whichever party held power that year. One of them, suspended from his own courtroom, relentlessly toured the country.

Poland’s governing party lost power in 2023, and most analysts who study the period believe the judiciary’s years-long campaign, including both the vans and the march, was a meaningful part of why.

Why we borrowed this model

Until the last few years, the idea that federal judges in the United States would need to speak to the public beyond the walls of their courtrooms or the words of their opinions was frowned upon, other than periodic school civics classes or university lecture halls. State judges have had more latitude, given that in many states they are elected to office.

But it has become increasingly clear in the U.S. that the role of the independent judiciary — to fairly resolve disputes and act as a check on the other branches of government — is unclear to many Americans. According to Gallup, trust in the judiciary has fallen to 48 percent — down from more than 60 percent before 2022. The Supreme Court’s 33 percent approval rating in July was the lowest since the early 2000s. 

Previous Coverage

How movements can make courts play their role in defending democracy

Furthermore, threats to judges, their families and their staff have risen sharply in recent years. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently testified on Capitol Hill about the surge — the U.S. Marshals Service recorded 564 threats against federal judges in the last fiscal year, up from 509 the year before.

We knew from our own experience the power of visiting communities to listen, learn and engage in dialogue. This same instinct was behind Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s bus trips across the country in 1992. (Steve, one of the co-authors of this article, traveled on each of the 10 bus trips as Al Gore’s deputy press secretary.) Ross Perot’s cross-country “United We Stand” tour drew on the same instinct, as did, decades later, the Tea Party Express. Whatever the cause, the impulse was the same: get off the stage, get on the road and meet people where they live, in their communities and neighborhoods. Engage in dialogue. Listen carefully. Answer questions.

As we launched our organization, Democracy Rising Collaborative, to educate, organize and mobilize lawyers, retired judges and civic leaders for collective action, the idea of a bus trip as a kind of listening tour began to take hold. We drafted a concept paper and shared it with a few trusted colleagues in the pro-democracy space, including colleagues who had been on the Warsaw trip. The feedback was universally positive. Before long, we were talking about actually doing a judges’ bus tour with our tremendous partner Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan civic education organization committed to the vitality of U.S. democracy by promoting trust in elections, the rule of law and constitutional checks and balances.

Lessons from Poland, brought to the Great Lakes

1. Organizing matters. One judge speaking out is easy to dismiss as an outlier. Some 30 judges from different states, different courts and both parties, appearing together under one banner, are much harder to write off. That’s when the message stops sounding like an opinion and starts sounding like the profession itself telling you something.

2. Creativity is essential. We owe this one first to Romania’s Funky Citizens, whose team told the delegation that civic engagement has to be joyful and shareable, or it never leaves the room it happened in. Earnestness alone doesn’t travel. We built Justice in Motion as a way to connect with ordinary Americans in their own communities, while keeping in mind that we needed the story of the trip to travel far and wide. 

Communications was key — but getting the experience right for the participants themselves mattered just as much. The judges did this by stopping at a donut shop in Wheeling, West Virginia instead of a podium, and holding purple roses — an international symbol of judicial independence — outside courthouses. These clips spread on social media well past the reporters who were actually there. None of that was decoration. That was the point.

Judges meeting with people in front of the Louis Stokes Federal Courthouse in Cleveland on July 9. (Democracy Rising Collaborative/Keep Our Republic)

We also borrowed from an organizer’s account of the Tour de Konstytucja, Poland’s own cross-country Constitution Tour, and its four rules: citizens at the center, no party politics, no party funds, no politicians on stage. Their judges showed up in jeans and T-shirts, with cake, rock music and a reading of the constitutional preamble at every stop. They wore white T-shirts emblazoned with “Konstytucja,” or “Constitution” in Polish — a clear and simple statement of what they stood for.

As the delegation heard, authoritarian power feeds on alienation and division, and so the project was about rebuilding that connection. We didn’t replicate every element, but the instinct showed up in our events — meant to feel like conversations rather than hearings — and in the purple roses our own judges carried instead of pins, a small visual signature of their own.

3. Locality makes the difference. We didn’t want one press conference in a state capital. We wanted a bus tour through big cities and small towns: a coffee shop and courthouse in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, the LeMoyne Community Center in Washington, Pennsylvania, a barbecue in Cleveland, a nearly 100-year-old bakery in Toledo, Ohio and the Grosse Pointe Public Library in Michigan.

That’s where the Polish campaign actually did its work — not in Warsaw, but in the towns national reporters usually didn’t visit. The delegation came back with the same warning we kept in mind while building our route: democracy defense that stays in a handful of big cities never reaches the people who most need to hear the case for independent courts, because they’re the ones least likely to encounter it otherwise. 

Our Wooster, Ohio meet-and-greet drew about 150 residents to a town square on a very hot Wednesday afternoon. Judicial independence stays an abstraction until someone explains it to you, in a room you’re already in, and patiently answers your questions.

4. Solidarity, solidarity, solidarity. In Poland, solidarity wasn’t just a slogan, it involved taking action. It meant having each other’s backs and showing up, over and over. Lawyers sitting in the gallery at hearings for judges under attack, bar associations funding judges whose salaries had been suspended, campaigns telling the public that people were watching and that no judge stood alone. Judges gathered outside their courthouses on the 18th of every month; supporters mailed postcards that read, in effect, I’ve got your back. 

Justice in Motion tried to build that same solidarity in reverse: Rather than waiting for a judge to come under attack and then rallying to defend them, we sent retired and sitting judges out first to build the civic relationships and public trust that make solidarity possible before it’s ever tested. 

Judges meeting with people at the Third Space Action Lab in Cleveland on July 9. (Democracy Rising Collaborative/Keep Our Republic)

That meant making sure judges weren’t the only ones standing at the front of the room. We mobilized local bar associations at many of our stops — including the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association — so the message came from the legal community as a whole and not just the bench. Attorneys Rachel Cohen and Brenna Trout Frey joined the tour for the same reason: so that judges weren’t out there on their own, but stood with allies who had been through their own reckoning. The business community showed up too, including Leadership Now’s Richard Stoff in Columbus, Ohio, because an independent judiciary isn’t a legal abstraction to employers and local economies; it’s part of what makes a place stable enough to invest in. 

None of this was incidental. It was the same lesson from Poland: no one advocating for courts should stand alone.

5. Remember history. One of the delegation’s hosts pressed a question built for this moment: what freedom-fighting story does America already have on hand and why aren’t we using it? He pointed to the country’s own revolutionary founding, Black civil rights leaders, disability rights advocates and union organizers, who made the case for fairness to people who started off unconvinced. 

Our judges took that instruction literally. At every stop, they didn’t talk about constitutional doctrine; they talked about a longer American habit of ordinary people insisting that the rules apply to everyone — and they did it in a year built for exactly that story, the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.

6. Documentation is power. In Warsaw, we heard how much a short, well-made film can do that a press release can’t. Free Courts (“Wolne Sady” in Polish) was formed by Polish lawyers focused on providing information about the importance of a free and independent judiciary. It had learned it the hard way: their first video of lawyers earnestly explaining the constitution went nowhere. Then they reshot the idea as a soccer match where one team simply stops following the rules and starts attacking the referees. That one traveled. 

A good film gets shared person to person and gives people something to sit with after the news cycle has moved on. We took the lesson seriously enough to put a documentary team on the bus for the entire tour, and we’re now producing a 10-minute film of the trip: the stops, the conversations, the judges themselves explaining, in their own words, why they got on the bus. It’s meant to do after the fact what the tour did in person — reach people who never had the chance to see us live.

What the tour actually did

On the ground, we reached several thousand people directly, meeting them where they already were to talk about why the rule of law matters to their own lives: how your money is there when you go to the bank, how the medicine you buy at the pharmacy is safe — or will be recalled if it isn’t. Turnout exceeded even our best expectations, which told us there’s real appetite for this conversation and that it resonates more coming from someone standing in front of you than from a headline. 

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Pairing sitting judges with retired ones, and keeping every stop strictly nonpartisan, also created a permission structure: judges still bound by codes of conduct could show up and participate without crossing an ethical line.

That local work ultimately translated into a much larger reach. Sarah Wire of USA Today asked if she could join us for the whole trip. Putting a reporter on the bus for four days carried some risk, but it paid off — with a strong story online and then the front page, above the fold, a few days later. 

Justice in Motion also drew coverage from NPR, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and local outlets in every state we visited — along with footage of judges in their robes, holding purple roses outside courthouses that went viral on social media. Altogether we reached millions of Americans, including plenty who don’t follow politics closely, and mobilized local bar associations and legal communities in each location to help carry the message forward.

We can’t yet claim that those four days changed public opinion about the judiciary — no more than the March of a Thousand Robes did on its own in 2020. What that campaign did was compound, over years, into a public that understood enough to act when it mattered. That’s the model we’re building toward. Justice in Motion was our first stop, not our last, and we’re already planning the next route.

This article What we learned from a US bus tour of judges was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

After decades organizing from within the labor establishment, Joe Uehlein realized that winning real climate and economic justice meant moving beyond the limits of traditional labor and environmentalism. As former…

By Vanessa Mascia Turri

Naples became one of Europe’s most ambitious experiments in democratic water governance after Italy’s 2011 referendum against water privatisation. Yet bringing water back into public hands did not necessarily redistribute power over how water itself would be governed.

In 2011, after the Italian referendum against water privatisation, Naples became one of the most ambitious experiments in remunicipalised water governance in Europe. The city transformed its water utility into ABC Napoli (Acqua Bene Comune Napoli), a publicly owned entity presented not simply as a return to public management, but as an attempt to implement the “democracy of the commons” theorised by the Italian Forum of Water Movements.

Within this perspective, water was understood not only as a public service, but as a common good whose governance should involve the direct participation of citizens and social movements.

Over the following decade, Naples became a testing ground for a broader political question that has emerged across many remunicipalisation struggles: what happens when the language and practices of the commons enter public institutions? The Neapolitan experience shows that bringing water back into public hands does not automatically democratise its governance. Instead, participation became continuously negotiated and reshaped through political conflict, financial pressures and struggles over who should control public resources.

From water struggles to the democracy of the commons

Since the early 2000s, struggles against water privatisation have connected local mobilisations to broader debates around the commons. Struggles against water privatisation in Europe have often gone beyond opposition to market reforms and increasingly connected demands for public ownership with broader claims around the commons and direct democracy, as explored throughout the Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water series. In many countries, water movements have challenged not only privatisation, but also the idea that essential services should be governed through technocratic and top-down forms of management, increasingly linking water struggles to broader claims around the commons and direct democracy, as discussed in Transforming capitalism? The role of the commons and direct democracy in struggles against water privatisation in Europe.

In Italy, these debates converged in the Italian Forum of Water Movements, one of the broadest water movements in Europe. As broader discussions around the commons in Italy have shown, these debates extended well beyond water itself and raised wider questions about collective resources, democracy and institutional change. Under the slogan “si scrive acqua, si legge democrazia” (“it is written water, it is read democracy”), the movement argued that remunicipalisation should involve not only public ownership, but also direct civic participation in water governance.

Naples became the most ambitious attempt to translate this political vision into institutional practice.

 

Poster from the 2011 Italian referendum campaign against water privatization reading “Water is not for sale.” Image courtesy of the Forum Italiano dei Movimenti per l’Acqua.

Naples became the most ambitious attempt to translate this political vision into institutional practice.

Yet public and academic debates on remunicipalisation have often focused on privatisation conflicts and legal transitions, paying far less attention to what happens afterwards. How are participatory mechanisms actually organised inside remunicipalised utilities? How much power are institutions willing to share with social movements and citizens once remunicipalisation has taken place?

My article From theory to practice: evaluating civic participation in Naples’ remunicipalised water service examines these questions through the case of ABC Napoli, reconstructing how participation was progressively organised, contested and reshaped during the decade following remunicipalisation.

Participation and the limits of the commons

At the moment of remunicipalisation, Naples faced deteriorated infrastructures, chronic underinvestment and a massive municipal public debt. For many activists of the Neapolitan water movement, remunicipalisation was therefore not only about public ownership, but also about transforming the priorities of water governance through ecological restoration, infrastructural investment and more equitable access to water.

Over the following decade, ABC Napoli experimented with different forms of civic participation. Initially, the municipal government opened the board of directors to representatives linked to the Italian Forum of Water Movements and to environmental associations. Yet local activists who had led the mobilisation against privatisation were largely excluded from these arrangements, generating immediate tensions over who had the legitimacy to participate in the governance of the utility.

The most ambitious participatory experiment emerged with the creation of the Civic Council, a public assembly open to citizens, activists and ABC workers. Meetings were held directly inside the company and addressed issues such as tariffs, infrastructure maintenance, hiring policies and investment priorities. Delegates from the assemblies also participated in discussions with the board of directors, creating one of the most advanced attempts in Europe to institutionalise direct civic participation inside a remunicipalised water utility.

However, participation became far more conflictual once these assemblies started intervening in concrete political and economic questions. Members of the Civic Council promoted long-term infrastructural investments and the recruitment of specialised personnel while defending the financial stability of the utility. According to several interviewees, these priorities increasingly clashed with those of the municipal government, which was more focused on short-term employment policies and the management of public-sector jobs within a broader context marked by debt, unemployment and political pressures surrounding public employment.

These tensions ultimately led to the removal of the board of directors and to the progressive weakening of participatory governance. In the following years, participation increasingly shifted towards weak consultative mechanisms with limited influence over decision-making processes. Many activists gradually distanced themselves from the experiment, while severe financial constraints continued to limit investments in infrastructures and ecological renewal.

Rather than evolving towards deeper forms of democratic governance, the Neapolitan experience progressively revealed the difficulties of institutionalising the “democracy of the commons” within existing municipal structures and political priorities.

Remunicipalisation without democratisation?

Poster from the Italian public water movement following the 2011 referendum campaign, emphasising water as a public right rather than a source of profit. Image courtesy of the Forum Italiano dei Movimenti per l’Acqua.

The experience of ABC Napoli complicates many celebratory narratives surrounding remunicipalisation. Bringing water back into public hands did not automatically redistribute power inside public governance. On the contrary, the Neapolitan case shows how quickly the language of the commons can become absorbed into existing institutional structures once participation starts challenging concrete political and economic interests.

The weakening of participatory governance inside ABC Napoli did not result from a lack of civic mobilisation or technical expertise. Quite the opposite: activists involved in the water movement developed increasingly detailed proposals on tariffs, infrastructures and long-term investments, becoming capable of intervening directly in the governance of the utility. Participation became problematic precisely when it stopped being symbolic and started questioning how public resources, infrastructures and employment should be managed.

In Naples, these tensions unfolded within a broader context marked by public debt, deteriorated infrastructures, unemployment and long-standing systems of political mediation surrounding public-sector employment. Under these conditions, the “democracy of the commons” increasingly collided with the political and administrative logics shaping municipal governance.

More broadly, the Neapolitan experience suggests that remunicipalisation alone cannot democratise essential services without a real willingness from public institutions to share decision-making power. Commons become politically difficult when they move beyond participation as consultation and start demanding participation as co-governance.

Rather than offering a linear model of democratic transformation, Naples reveals the unresolved tensions that emerge when social movements attempt to institutionalise the commons inside existing state structures. The question, then, is not simply whether remunicipalisation is possible, but whether public institutions are truly willing to democratise the power through which public resources are governed.

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Featured image: Protest sign reading “Public water, public management. Clear?” during a demonstration of the Italian water movement. Photo courtesy of the Forum Italiano dei Movimenti per l’Acqua (acquabenecomune.org).

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By Gracia Ramirez and David Vergara-Moreno

This photo essay looks at Isla Grande, the largest coralline island of Nuestra Señora del Rosario Archipelago, which is part of the Parque Nacional Natural Corales del Rosario y de San Bernardo, in the Colombian Caribbean. The essay considers the environmental beauty and the violence that underpin Black lives on the island, and the ways in which they have resisted as a community to go forward into the future.

DOCKS

La Bodeguita dock in Cartagena de Indias is the tourists’ gateway to the promised paradise of white-sand beaches and turquoise waters of the Rosario Islands. The docks and other hard boundaries of the port witness an encounter with the polluted waters around Cartagena. This port is responsible for 70% of the country’s maritime trade and has been categorized as the third most efficient port in the world.

Although rarely mentioned by the early chroniclers, it is reasonable to infer that —prior to and during the early centuries of colonization— Cartagena’s Bay was a lush mosaic of abundant coral reefs, dense mangrove forests, and towering tropical dry forest trees.

Today, however, the bay reveals another face: murky waters, laden with sediments, polluted by centuries of maritime traffic, urban and industrial waste, and dredging works that have radically transformed its ecological cycles.

While the departure of tourism to the islands is mainly managed from La Bodeguita dock, the journey out of the bay and into the sea allows visual contact with other docks along the coast.

This is a layered cartography of memories, economies, and spatial regimes: tourist piers, logistical cargo yards, shipyards, naval bases, and private marinas. The bay is not merely a coastal landscape, it is a friction zone between multiple socio-economic and political logics: tourism, military operations, goods trade, and the communities whose ways of life are subordinated to those regimes. This is a liquid frontier: a place of circulation, exclusion, and resistance.

LOGISTICS

The archipelago of the Rosario Islands is connected not just to the Atlantic but also to another body of water, the Canal del Dique. The Spanish colonizers began its construction in the 16th century using enslaved Indigenous and African labor, with the goal of linking the Magdalena River —the nation’s main fluvial artery— with the Cartagena Bay.

Map of the Northern part of Bolívar Department, Republic of Colombia 1886-1903 (Edward Stanford, 1899, cropped). It is possible to see Cartagena de Indias, Barú island below, the Canal del Dique and the Calamar-Cartagena Railway (red line). Source: Mapoteca Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

Since then, the Canal has played a strategic role in both domestic and foreign transport and trade, evolving from wooden barges in the 17th century, to the advent of steam-powered boats in the 19th century.

For over three centuries, the Magdalena River and its canal were the only connection between Colombia’s Caribbean and its Andean provinces, linking a nation divided by three mountain ranges and a wide variety of thermal floors and ecosystems. Socially, the Canal became the route to freedom, as many runaway enslaved people (cimarrones) followed its waterways and founded Maroons communities (palenques) in the surrounding wetlands and hills during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Until the late 19th century, the Dique was merely a narrow, shallow ditch less than 15 meters wide, which was impossible to navigate during droughts. But throughout the 20th century, the canal was radically transformed. U.S. companies carried out major dredging and straightening projects that widened it to 100 meters, reducing its original 270 meanders to only 55, dramatically increasing its flow and sediment loads, altering the ecological balance of Cartagena and Barbacoas Bays and surroundings.

Despite these efforts, the canal became almost obsolete after the construction of two major highways that linked the Caribbean to the Andean region of the country in the 1950s. However, around the same time, Colombia’s largest oil refineries were established in Barrancabermeja and Cartagena.

As human geographer Austin Zeiderman argues, such infrastructures articulate geo-racial regimes and hierarchies of white and black, urban and peripheral, central and insular, that become sedimented into both Cartagenian landscapes and bodies.

MATERIALS

Excavations on the ground reveal the coralline stone, compacted after centuries of pressure and erosion. Isla Grande is a coral reef fossil itself. Coral reefs are vital ecosystems: they protect shorelines from storms, sustain local fisheries, support biodiversity, and form the ecological backbone of a tourism industry that underpins much of Cartagena city’s economy. Yet their very skeletons have been quarried and consumed. Entire islets were built for elite leisure by filling the sea with broken coral, the moneyed class literally manufacturing new islands from the bones of the reef.

Coral grounds. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

The Canal del Dique continues this slow and silent violence. Each rainy season, it expels plumes of sediment-laden freshwater that spread across several square kilometers, covering turquoise waters with brown stains. These pulses reduce salinity and block light, suffocating photosynthesis and interrupting coral reproduction cycles that coincide with the wet months. In fact, the deposits of sediment have turned the formerly island of Barú into a peninsula, following the interventions of USA engineering companies in the twentieth century.

The history of Isla Grande is intimately linked to that of Barú. Around the time of the Spanish colonization, these territories were called Bahaire after the indigenous chief that ruled them before the conquest. The Spaniards used enslaved labour to excavate quarries in Barú and Tierra Bomba, extracting coralline stone used in Cartagena’s colonial architecture. They also built kilns to burn coral stone, producing mortar for the city’s fortifications and lime for its characteristics whitewashed walls.

In the eighteenth century, the nearby island of Barú became a strategic point for cimarrones and Dutch and English smugglers who used enslaved workforce for the logistics related to trafficking. Some enslaved workers, in turn, were secretly saving money to buy their freedom to their masters –mostly Spaniards–.

Over the nineteenth century, with the crisis of slavery and the independence wars, Barú became an instance of a horizontal community formed mostly by cimarrones, freed slaves and mestizos. Their economy was based on subsistence agriculture, fishing, bartering and mutual support.

Wooden house. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

On June 7 of 1850, groups of neighbours from Barú bought an old hacienda to its then owner for 1.200 COP and finished their payment on May 19, 1851. Just two days later, the abolition of slavery was signed in the country. Thus, Barú become a Black community with collective property before the establishment of the modern-day Republican State. Coconut became the main crop and some families from Barú moved to the neighbouring Rosario Islands to extend the plantations.

Islander dwellings echo this layered material history. Traditional houses rely on wooden boards and palm-thatched roofs, fragile yet renewable. Modern constructions import thin red bricks and cement from the mainland, materials that, as they degrade, seep into the calcareous soil and alter its composition.

Seashell. Photo by David Vergara.

Cement itself is ambivalent: it raises luxury resorts that displace the community, yet it also fortifies schools and homes through collective labor. In their very texture, these materials tell two stories at once—of extraction and restriction, but also of resilience and re-creation.

ORIKA

Right at the centre of Isla Grande is now the town of Orika. An old rubber tree guards the town’s square and provides shelter from the sun. The Cultural House is the gathering place where local council meetings (juntas) take place. The story of Orika is one of socioecological struggle and resistance.

Over the twentieth century, Barú started supplying agricultural goods to the growing Cartagena population, shifting toward intensive production of coconut, fish and mangrove charcoal. Up until the 1950s –when roads were constructed to connect Cartagena with other inland cities– the Rosario islands and Barú were the main providers of food sold at the city’s Getsemani market.

Rubber Tree in Benkos Biohó Square, Orika, Isla Grande, PNNCRSB. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

The first tourists were members of Cartagena’s urban elite. They arrived at the Rosario Islands between the 1930s and 1940s and started building recreational homes. While tourist infrastructure was consolidating around Cartagena and the islands, a beetle plague destroyed the coconut plantations in the 1950s.

In order to “protect” the islands, the government declared them National Natural Park in 1977, but the National Park mainly considered the sea, not the ground islands themselves. The decree sought to “conserve flora, fauna, landscapes, and historical and cultural manifestations with scientific, recreative or aesthetic goals”, but omitted any mention of the Blacks communities that already inhabited the territory (Rosario Islands, Barú, Santa Ana and Ararca).

New prohibitionist environmental policies, coupled with the rise of tourism, relegated local families to the hinterlands of Isla Grande and to the backs of hotels and resorts, where they worked as subordinate labor.

In the 1980s, the government declared the Rosario Islands to be State-owned vacant lands, unrecognising the community as a “organized population” for the use of land but allowing other economical uses such as tourism and recreation. This enabled a wave of land grabs by private investors that further marginalised the community. However, the 1991 Constitution and the ensuing law 70 of Black Communities of 1993 provided legal tools to transform the memory of dispossession into a fight for recognition.

The community used environmental education programs to strengthen social organizations and articulate their historical demands into a juridical argument. In 2001, after years of legal limbo, the Colombian state began the land restitution process.

Fearing expulsion from the territory, the families decided to establish a new village in the center of Isla Grande: Orika, in honor of the daughter of Benkos Biohó, a cimarron leader and hero of San Basilio de Palenque, the first Black free village in the Americas (1714). In just two months, the community cleared the land and built their houses, a gesture of dignity and memory, affirming their right to exist as a Black community in their ancestral territory. After collecting evidence and going through endless administrative hurdles, in 2014 the Constitutional Court recognized the collective deed title for the Black community of Isla Grande, becoming the only community having achieved that so far within the national park.

UNBOUNDEDNESS

Sunset horizons and native trees may meet the tourist’s gaze as landscapes ready for easy consumption— postcards of “untouched nature.” Yet the town of Orika unsettles this commodified view. Its soundscape resists containment: sound systems (picós) blasting loud music reverberates from the main square, echoing through every coralline ground cavity, vibrating as much in bodies as in stone.

In language, too, survival leaves its trace. The word Dios circulates as the name of the Christian god, but within it hides the untranslatable presence of African spirits, invoked yet unconfined by letters. This is not syncretism as tourist folklore, but the deep mimicry of African cosmologies that persisted beneath colonial surveillance.

In the Colombian Caribbean, enslaved Africans lived not in the vast monocultures of the sugar plantations of Brazil or Cuba, but in smaller, multiethnic communities tied to haciendas, cattle ranches, mines, and urban centres under the close watch of the Inquisition tribunal of Cartagena.

Cut off early from eighteen century renewed arrivals of African captives, these populations developed distinctive spiritual practices, an instance of what Sylvia Wynter called “black indigenization”— that in intertwining African, indigenous, and Christian forms, found ways of being human when colonial hegemony ruled otherwise.

Orika inhabits this layered spiritual geography. It is not simply a village bounded by its streets, but a porous space where music, light, and faith exceed enclosure—an unlimited terrain of survival, memory, and reinvention.

ROOTS

Mangrove forests form the living roots of Isla Grande. They are among the most resilient trees on Earth—thriving where others would perish. Their bodies adapt to saline soils and shifting tides, standing firm where land is not yet land.

Propagules germinate while still attached to the parent tree, dropping into the water as living seedlings that drift across lagoons and channels, anchoring themselves wherever conditions allow. Each root is a promise of survival, each forest a nursery that shelters fish, crabs, and birds in any of their stages of life. Mangroves breathe through aerial roots that rise above the mud, searching for oxygen in conditions too harsh for most species. Always green, they embody endurance.

The mangrove is never alone. Its leaves, roots, and fallen branches decompose into nutrients that sustain fish and crustaceans; its tangled roots interlace with seagrass meadows and coral reefs in a single inter-ecosystemic web. Together, these systems form the ecological triangle of the Caribbean coast: corals buffer waves, seagrasses filter and stabilize sediments, mangroves hold the shoreline while feeding both sea and land. In Isla Grande, these roots not only prevent erosion but also connect the island’s fragile ecology to Cartagena’s coastal mangroves, weaving life across waters.

For Orika, the mangrove is more than ecology—it is a metaphor for community. Like the red mangrove that elevates itself above its roots, the people rise from centuries of exclusion, rooted yet expansive. Their history drifts like propagules, carried by tides of resistance until finding ground to grow.

The mangrove teaches resilience, interconnection, and renewal: lessons for a community that continues to defend its territory while imagining futures where culture and ecology flourish together. Roots here are not only in soil, but in memory and struggle, anchoring Orika to both the Caribbean Sea and to its own unfolding horizon.

DRIFT

There are no roads in Isla Grande, only sandy footpaths weaving through the tropical dry forest and the mangroves. No motorized vehicles circulate within the island, people walk or ride bicycles, while boats and yachts, arriving from Cartagena, leave trails of oil shimmering over the turquoise surface.

Caribbean Sea water around Isla Grande. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

Plastic bottles and rubbish drift ashore, carried by tides that remember more than the islanders would wish. Drift here is both material and historical: traces of empire, slavery, tourism, and extraction wash against the reef, staining waters once clear. The islands themselves are a coral body in constant erosion and recomposition, a living drift of stone, memory, and survival.

Plastic and vegetable waste. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

Yet drift is not only decline—it is also possibility. Orika, born out of dispossession, has become a node of reorganization and creativity. The community council anchors collective life, negotiating with agencies and hotels that now contribute resources for communal projects.

Every weekend, and on national and local holidays, happiness brightens the whole town in shared spaces like the main Plaza (Benkos Biohó Plaza), the picós, the cockpits, houses and the Casa Cultural. A new foundation works with children and youth, teaching them to stage traditional dances and music, reweaving ancestral ties to the palenques and to African rhythms long suppressed.

Ecotourism initiatives, led by younger generations, form alliances with older community projects, offering alternatives that value culture and ecology together.

Buildings around Benkos Biohó Square in Orika. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

Drift, then, also gestures toward a different horizon. In Orika, the tides carry not only the weight of history but also the seeds of futures yet to come. The Rosario Islands are a historical drift still evolving—where coral, memory, and community recombine into new forms of life.

 

The post Notes on Isla Grande: Figurations of Environmental Violence and Beauty in the Colombian Caribbean appeared first on Undisciplined Environments.