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B4. Radical Ecology
Two visions of the US will compete at the World Cup
This article Two visions of the US will compete at the World Cup was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
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As the United States prepares to co-host the 2026 World Cup with Mexico and Canada, the world’s biggest sporting event will unfold in a volatile domestic and international context. Eleven U.S. cities are hosting “the beautiful game” against a backdrop of militarized law enforcement — including over 167,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests in and around the host cities since last January — war with Iran, labor strife, and attacks on civil and political rights. With millions traveling to the region and billions more tuning in, the tournament — coinciding with the U.S.’s 250th anniversary — offers a rare opportunity for diverse sectors to elevate democratic values, expose the Trump administration’s propaganda and make its repression backfire.
Civic leaders in the United States are already capitalizing on this opportunity. A big tent coalition, backed by the Horizons Project that I co-lead — bringing together artists, labor, faith organizations, small businesses, veterans’ groups, legal advocates and youth activists — has launched a No ICE in the Cup campaign to build cross-sector, cross-ideological support for a tournament where all can participate without fear of violence or repression. Other community groups have joined forces on the “Our Copa” campaign, which includes a pledge to stop ICE raids during the World Cup, lift travel bans on Haiti, Iran, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, and let fans celebrate safely.
How autocrats use the World CupGovernments have long used mega-sporting events to bolster legitimacy, nationalist pride and power. Through “sportswashing,” authoritarian regimes in particular exploit the global spectacle to distract from repression and corruption while presenting an image of competence and national greatness.
FIFA, which has an extensive record of corruption and human rights controversies, has often enabled these dynamics.In 1978, Argentina’s military dictatorship used the World Cup to present the country as united and orderly while a “Dirty War” saw tens of thousands disappeared, tortured and killed. The regime invested heavily in propaganda while temporarily pausing repression around stadiums and hotels to avoid international scrutiny. A clandestine torture center operated less than a mile from the national stadium, at the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), where political prisoners could hear cheering crowds during the final match.
Vladimir Putin similarly used the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2018 World Cup to generate nationalist fervor and bolster domestic support for the annexation of Crimea while obscuring repression at home. Ahead of the 2022 World Cup, Qatar spent over $220 billion on infrastructure to polish its image amid blatant human rights abuses, including migrant worker deaths, labor exploitation and restrictions on LGBTQ+ expression.
#newsletter-block_b54bfb04f7e82e4592b06965f70069a7 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_b54bfb04f7e82e4592b06965f70069a7 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterThe Trump administration has also turned to sportswashing. Unlike Qatar’s monarchy or the defunct Argentine junta, however, it is much less concerned with its international reputation. Instead, the World Cup offers a way to distract from the economic impact of the Iran War and build support for the administration’s domestic agenda, including restrictions on voting rights. Its coincidence with Trump’s Christian nationalist “Freedom 250” program advances this agenda, even if the tournament’s global, pluralistic character sits uneasily with MAGA’s more xenophobic elements.
Mega-sporting events thus create a paradox for authoritarian and wannabe authoritarian leaders. On the one hand, they offer an extraordinary opportunity for spectacle, nationalism and financial enrichment. On the other hand, they intensify media scrutiny and pressure from civil society. This creates opportunities for dissent and for movements to mobilize in order to make state propaganda backfire, raising the costs of repression and strengthening democratic forces.
Pro-democracy mobilization at the World CupBecause the World Cup creates a global media spectacle and often becomes all-consuming for host countries, it creates ideal conditions for public dissent. When Brazil hosted the 2014 World Cup, the tournament became a focal point for mass mobilization amid concerns over corruption, inequality and authoritarian policing. Organizers effectively linked lavish stadium spending to failing public services and condemned police violence under President Dilma Rousseff, helping reshape public debate around democratic accountability.
In Argentina, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo mobilized to expose forced disappearances and state terror to domestic and international audiences. They deliberately marched during the tournament near areas frequented by foreign reporters, while human rights groups distributed lists of the disappeared and launched the “Football yes, torture no” campaign.
Recent U.S. football activism has been deeply connected with the politics of authoritarian immigration enforcement. In LA, the Angel City Football Club and Los Angeles Football Club spoke out against ICE during the height of the mass deportations in 2025.
Stadiums and fan spaces as sites of civic powerFootball culture — with its chanting, parody, songs, costumes and memes — has been key to building civic power and undermining authoritarian narratives. While autocrats use the World Cup to fuse patriotism with regime loyalty, football fans, described as the “largest international social movement,” have used joy, humor and spectacle to expose abuses and build forms of civic pride outside of state control. Matches gather entire communities in stadiums — emotionally charged spaces where even small acts of dissent, such as coordinated chants, banners and silence during national anthems — can have cascading effects.
Protesters flood the Seoul Plaza in South Korea during the 2002 World Cup. (Wikimedia)Under martial law in Poland, stadiums became centers of anti-communist resistance during the 1982 World Cup. Fans chanted anti-regime slogans and displayed banners for the banned Solidarność trade union, defying threats that their “hooliganism” would be punished by military courts. Football culture helped sustain the Polish opposition’s morale in the face of repression and contributed to the broader civic infrastructure that supported Poland’s 1989 democratic transition. Similar dynamics were visible in Chile under Augusto Pinochet. In South Korea, which co-hosted the 2002 World Cup, millions of red-clad “Red Devils” took part in street cheering, helping normalize large-scale public assembly after decades of authoritarian rule. Their efforts informed later mobilizations, including the candlelight protests that removed President Park Geun-hye.
American activists have also used humor to mock authoritarian absurdities, such as when President Trump was being awarded the inaugural FIFA peace prize last December in Washington, D.C. In response, residents kicked footballs at a “wall of ICE” while dancers performed nearby.
Although athletes are technically banned from engaging in political speech at the Olympics and World Cup, they have often used their platform to advance social and political causes. Many are familiar with the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, when U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists on the podium to protest racial injustice.
During the Qatar World Cup, European teams attempted to wear “OneLove” armbands supporting LGBTQ+ rights; FIFA’s threats only amplified criticism of the federation and Qatar. Iranian players also remained silent during their national anthem in solidarity with protesters after Mahsa Amini’s killing. Both before and during the 2026 Winter Olympics, multiple Team USA athletes spoke out against ICE policies, including cross-country skiing star and Minnesotan Jessie Diggins, who expressed solidarity with protesters after the killings of Reneé Good and Alex Pretti.
Activating broad coalitionsMega-events depend on vast infrastructure, from construction and transit to hospitality and security. This creates leverage for key “pillars of support,” especially labor and business, whose cooperation is essential for the games to run smoothly. This dependence helps explain why labor and human rights issues have been so central to democratic organizing around the World Cup in Qatar, Russia and South Africa.
No Ice in the Cup organized a soccer tournament on May 31. (Kisha Bari)More generally, mega-events enable the formation of large, diverse coalitions composed of otherwise unlikely allies. Returning to the example of Brazil, in 2014 activists mobilized a big tent of public transit activists, labor unions, students, favela groups, Indigenous activists and anti-police violence organizations. These disparate groups united around their shared opposition to corruption and “crony capitalism.”
Today, the global Dignity 2026 Coalition — comprising over 120 civil society organizations, including the AFL-CIO, the ACLU, Human Rights Watch and the NAACP — is pressuring FIFA and the Trump administration to uphold democratic freedoms during the World Cup. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler called on FIFA leadership to keep DHS and ICE agents out of host cities, while other major unions, such as UNITE Here Local 11 in Los Angeles, have threatened strikes along similar lines. Meanwhile, in partnership with the No ICE in the Cup campaign, local businesses in U.S. host cities have organized a “Welcome Standard” pledge to create safe and welcoming environments for the millions of fans, community members, visitors and workers taking part in the tournament. The active sign-on campaign, which includes legal training and support for local businesses, will channel patrons to participating businesses. Faith groups have also joined the action, with Interfaith Alliance offering “Preach and Teach” resources for pastors, imams, rabbis and other faith leaders to use during the period of the World Cup.
Two visions of the US clashThe Trump administration is using the 2026 World Cup to stage a patriotic spectacle that glorifies the president, promotes his policy agenda and showcases America’s 250th anniversary — even as it demonizes those who love football. Indeed, most host cities are home to large immigrant communities who live in fear of racial profiling, inhumane detention and summary deportation. The present moment thus reflects a clash between two visions of the United States: a narrow, exclusionary vision based on white, Christian identity politics, and an inclusive vision reflected in the World Cup itself, one of a pluralistic society shaped by immigration and diversity.
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DonateThe World Cup has created a major opening for pro-democracy groups across sectors, geographies and ideologies to unite and ensure that it is not weaponized to advance the administration’s propaganda or anti-democratic agenda. In the United States, where football is gaining in popularity and many fans root for both the U.S. team and their countries of origin, the tournament is a time of sportsmanship and camaraderie. It offers an opportunity to remind fans at home and abroad of the power of ordinary people coming together in joyful competition, the central theme of a recent community youth soccer tournament in New York City.
Finally, the World Cup provides an opportunity to connect the dots between militarized law enforcement and efforts to restrict voting rights. These efforts are especially urgent ahead of the midterm elections; the same coalitions mobilizing around the World Cup can help defend states and localities in the face of federal attacks on free and fair elections. More than ever, ordinary people must insist that “fair play” also applies to how Americans choose their leaders. They can harness the energy and enthusiasm surrounding the World Cup and America’s 250th anniversary to imagine and build a more free and democratic United States.
This article Two visions of the US will compete at the World Cup was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
From remunicipalisation to the democracy of the commons
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 commonsSince 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 commonsAt 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).
The post From remunicipalisation to the democracy of the commons appeared first on Undisciplined Environments.
Resistance is only half the equation
This article Resistance is only half the equation was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
We no longer live in a world where courts reliably enforce limits on executive power; where media calls out abuse as abuse or where politicians depend on legitimacy to hold power. These conditions are eroding, and power is becoming more and more centralized.
In the U.S., the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States in 2024 significantly expanded presidential immunity for official acts, raising concerns about accountability. Globally, ruling parties in Hungary and Poland have reshaped judicial systems through court-packing and disciplinary regimes that weaken independent checks on executive authority. And in countries such as India, new laws restrict freedom of the press.
In response, we see a grinding pattern of reaction from pundits and resisters, but the power of centralized authority remains. Trump has retained power despite his involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, as well as his name being all over the Epstein files. Leaders in Turkey and Egypt have been accused repeatedly of inciting democratic backsliding, yet they maintain power. At the same time, ecological, economic, cultural and political crises expand.
This moment demands more than opposition. What is needed is not just resistance against corrupt centralized systems, but to create new, local systems that restructure power so it is dispersed throughout society. Because the problem is not only that those in power abuse it. The problem is that power is concentrated in the first place.
#newsletter-block_63d9dbab8221236ed68f8cf749bded55 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_63d9dbab8221236ed68f8cf749bded55 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterThe work of Gene Sharp stands apart in the field of nonviolent theory for one central reason: his understanding of power. For Sharp, justice, equality, freedom and any meaningful form of democracy do not exist simply as ideals or constitutional rights. They exist only when power is actually dispersed throughout society — embedded in the daily practices, institutions and relationships of ordinary people. Without that dispersion, democracy is little more than a substanceless claim.
Many nonviolent activists and scholars have embraced part of Sharp’s insight. They recognize that governments do not rule by force alone, but by the cooperation and support of institutions, organizations and individuals. From this perspective, power is contingent. If people withdraw their cooperation strategically and nonviolently, regimes can be forced to concede, reform or even collapse. This understanding has shaped movements across the world, from civil resistance campaigns to election protection efforts.
And yet, there is an equally important part of Sharp’s insight they are missing.
The problem of concentrated powerWe are seeing how deeply dependent we have become on centralized systems that do not have our best interests in mind. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how centralized healthcare and supply chains have become, leaving many without timely access to care and essential goods. And recurring, large-scale electrical outages, such as the 2021 Texas power crisis, show how dependent millions are on centralized grids that can fail.
When power is concentrated — whether in governments, corporations or some fusion of the two — corruption is not an accident. It is a structural inevitability. Systems organized around concentrated power will, over time, bend toward the interests of those who hold it. Policies, resources and decision-making processes become oriented toward preserving and expanding that power, often at the expense of the broader population.
Previous CoverageEven the most well-intentioned leaders operate within structures that reward consolidation, control and self-preservation. For example, in an effort to make the U.S. government more efficient and effective, President Barack Obama reinstated presidential authority, ushering in an era of consolidated executive power. The result is an unfortunate recurring pattern: Inequality deepens, accountability weakens and public institutions drift away from the people they are meant to serve.
When decision-making is centralized, the distance between those who hold power and those affected by it widens, often to the point where meaningful feedback becomes filtered, delayed or ignored altogether. Over time, this creates an environment where leaders are not only insulated from consequences, but are also operating with an increasingly distorted understanding of reality. Citizens, in turn, become disengaged or disempowered, sensing that their voices carry little weight within systems designed to concentrate authority rather than distribute it. The result is not just corruption in the traditional sense, but a deeper erosion of responsiveness, adaptability and trust — conditions without which meaningful reform from within is exceedingly difficult.
Activism as external correctionIn response to the erosion of democracy and the increasing inaccessibility of necessities like food, healthcare and housing, activists organize. They build networks to monitor elections, serve as watchdogs on corporate behavior, defend civil rights and provide essential services where governments fail. These efforts are vital. They protect people from immediate harm and at times, win meaningful reforms.
But rather than transforming how power is organized within society, these efforts often function as external correctives. They attempt to restrain abuse, mitigate harm and fill gaps left by failing institutions. In doing so, they implicitly accept the continued existence of centralized power structures, even as they resist their consequences.
This creates a paradox. Activists devote enormous energy to building parallel systems. Yet the underlying structures that concentrate that power remain largely intact.
The burden of endless resistanceOver time, this dynamic places an unsustainable burden on civil society. Activists become responsible for preventing abuse by those in power, holding institutions accountable and providing services that those institutions fail to deliver.
This is, in effect, a permanent state of resistance. It is also a reactive posture. Each new harm requires a new response, a new organization, a new campaign. The work expands endlessly, while the root cause — the concentration of power — remains unaddressed.
One example of this is the environmental justice movement, particularly the coordinated pushback against federal rollbacks. Coalitions such as We Are Still In and the U.S. Climate Alliance mobilize states, municipalities, businesses and civil society to uphold the commitments of the Paris Agreement. Additionally, environmental groups repeatedly challenge deregulation, while states advance their own regulations. This created a multi-level infrastructure of resistance. Yet, even these efforts are forced into a constant defensive posture, expending vast energy to block or mitigate harms rather than dismantling underlying structures that enable federally sanctioned reversals of policy.
While it’s true that it matters who holds office — we know that Trump’s policies are far more harmful to the environment than were Biden’s — this distinction does not resolve the deeper problem. The structure of centralized power remains unchanged, meaning that environmental policy can be rapidly advanced or dismantled with each shift in administration. As a result, even hard-won gains remain fragile. This volatility prevents the kind of long-term, consistent action required to address the climate crisis at scale.
The question that follows is both simple and profound: Why do we accept a system in which people must constantly organize to defend themselves against the very structures meant to serve them?
Reimagining the mainstream structureIf we take Sharp’s theory of power seriously, the answer cannot lie solely in resistance.
Withdrawing cooperation from unjust systems is a vital tool. But it is only half of the equation. The other half is construction: building a society in which power is distributed from the outset, rather than concentrated and then contested.
Previous CoverageThis requires a shift in orientation. Instead of asking how to better monitor and constrain centralized power, we must ask how to redesign the structures that produce it. What would it mean to organize political, economic and social systems so that decision-making authority is broadly shared? So that communities have direct control over the conditions of their lives? So that power is not something granted from above, but something exercised collectively?
In such a system, the need for vast external networks of resistance would diminish. Not because injustice would disappear, but because the mechanisms for addressing it would be built into the fabric of society itself.
And this is key. When power is disbursed throughout society into local communities — for example, when food is grown locally, housing is owned by cooperatives, health care is operated by neighborhood clinics, and so on — then community members can withdraw from or reduce their dependence on centralized, mainstream agribusinesses or real estate corporations or medical institutions. Empowering communities to take care of more and more of their own essential needs is a grassroots process that restructures how power is distributed in society. And the more communities that are empowered by these local initiatives, the more dispersed and decentralized power becomes.
Addressing concerns of centralized powerThe task ahead then is not only to resist concentrated power, but to replace it with distributed forms of governance and organization. To shift from a model of external oversight to one of internal design. In other words, the goal is not merely to challenge power, but to reconfigure it.
Around the world, communities are already doing this. They are realizing Sharp’s theory of decentralized power. By developing community gardens, housing coops and health centers, people can opt out of mainstream institutions and systems, greatly weakening the power those systems have over them. This is not merely an effort to fill in gaps. Instead, it deliberately shifts how power is distributed in society. Because, as dependency decreases, so does the ability of centralized authorities to command compliance. What emerges is not a parallel safety net, but a reconfiguration of power itself, one in which legitimacy flows from local and collective production and governance rather than from those who live far away.
In the examples below, we see communities around the world building local control over essential needs such as housing, food, health care, energy, technology and safety. Each project that enables people to meet these needs locally — rather than through international corporations or federally controlled institutions — is a step toward local empowerment. As more communities adopt this approach, power becomes increasingly distributed across society.
Housing: Community control over land and shelter A Zapatista slogan on a mural in the autonomous town of Marinaleda, Spain, translates “the land belongs to those who work it.” (Turismo de la Provincia de Sevilla)In southern Spain, the town of Marinaleda has created a radically different housing model. Following the election of Mayor Manuel Sánchez Gordillo — a labor leader pivotal to the town’s fight for self-governance — Marinaleda expropriated a significant amount of land from the state and launched a de-commodified housing system. Residents build their homes on collectively owned land; the town supplies construction materials and labor while occupants pay minimal mortgage payments tied to maintenance rather than profit. While operating within a broader national system, the town has effectively removed housing from market forces, placing control in the hands of the community itself.
In Jackson, Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson is working to build a solidarity economy rooted in worker ownership and community land control. Based on the model of Mondragon, Spain, residents are reducing dependence on both state and corporate systems.
Food: Feeding communities without external controlFew examples demonstrate community power more clearly than the Zapatista Autonomous Communities in Chiapas, Mexico. There, Indigenous communities have built autonomous systems of governance and agriculture, producing food collectively on communal land. In food forests, families and collectives farm milpa plots (corn, beans and squash) alongside cooperative coffee production. These systems operate independently of state programs and corporate supply chains, ensuring that communities can feed themselves on their own terms.
Community control goes beyond food. Volunteer medical professionals provide training for locals and help operate small community clinics that provide basic care, vaccinations and maternal support. Local community-run schools provide education that includes Indigenous languages, history and agroecology. And security as well as justice issues are brought before community assemblies.
Power is dispersed by rooting it in the community itself and sustaining it through ongoing practice rather than reliance on institutions organized and controlled far from the people they are meant to serve. This reduces residents’ vulnerability to political shifts, market fluctuations and external control. Participation is embedded into daily life, making autonomy a lived reality rather than an abstract ideal.
Likewise, in India, Navdanya, a woman- and Earth-centered movement to protect biodiversity, supports networks of farmers who preserve and share native seeds, rejecting dependence on corporate-controlled agriculture. Though funded in part by donations from corporate partners, they maintain seed sovereignty, which allows them to retain control over the very foundation of food production.
Health care: Care as a collective practiceAcross many Indigenous communities, healers and midwives operate within community structures where knowledge is passed through generations. Care is often relational, land-based and spiritually integrated. For example, within the Navajo Nation, Diné traditional healing is an active, community-embedded system. And in Maya Ixil regions, comadronas (traditional midwives) guide pregnancy, birth and postpartum care using herbal remedies and spiritual practices. While outside funding supports this work, it nevertheless provides examples of how traditional and alternative healing can replace total dependence on mainstream health care systems.
These health care practices are examples of mutual aid networks — many of which have expanded rapidly in recent years — in which communities can organize care without institutional backing. Funded through direct contributions and relationships of trust, these networks provide medical support, caregiving and essential supplies outside formal systems.
Energy and technology: Infrastructure in community handsEnergy and technology are often treated as inherently centralized, but communities are challenging that assumption. For example, Barefoot College trains local residents in the Global South — often women — to build and maintain solar infrastructure themselves, placing both knowledge and power in community hands.
Digital infrastructure is also being reclaimed. Community-built mesh networks, such as Guifi.net, provide locally owned internet systems governed by its users rather than corporate providers. These networks demonstrate that even complex technological systems can be decentralized and collectively managed.
Safety: Community-based security and governanceIn the Indigenous Mexican town of Cherán, residents expelled external political authorities and established their own system of governance and security. Community patrols replaced state police, and decision-making shifted to local assemblies.
Similarly, within Zapatista communities, systems of justice and conflict resolution are handled collectively, without reliance on external courts or enforcement structures. Safety, in these contexts, emerges from shared responsibility rather than imposed authority.
From meeting needs to redistributing powerIt’s worth noting that not all community-based efforts are entirely self-sufficient. Some, like community land trusts, rely heavily on ongoing government funding. And Germany’s energy democracy movement makes use of public grants and corporate support. Additionally, community safety groups provide programs that interrupt violence and reduce harm, but still depend on local police. Yet, they are models for systems and structures that can and sometimes do transition to total independence.
What unites these examples is not perfection but a desire to reduce their dependence on centralized institutions. They demonstrate that communities can meet essential needs through systems they control. That reduction matters because dependence is the mechanism through which power is maintained.
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DonateA fair critique of decentralizing power is that it can fragment capacity and deepen inequality between communities. Not all localities begin with the same resources, skills or cohesion, and without coordination, decentralization can produce uneven outcomes, duplication of effort or gaps in essential services, especially in moments that require large-scale response. It can also risk exclusion or local capture if decision making is dominated by a few voices.
These are real concerns. But they point to the need for networking, not isolation. They reveal the importance of shared standards, mutual aid across communities and federated structures that allow coordination without recentralizing authority. In this model, power is distributed, but not disconnected. Communities retain control over their systems while participating in broader networks that pool knowledge, redistribute resources and maintain accountability.
When communities no longer rely on governments or corporations for housing, food, energy or care, their participation in those systems diminishes. And their withdrawal is not merely tactical. Rather, it becomes a condition of life that rebuilds societal power structures from the ground up.
And when this is multiplied across communities, something larger begins to emerge: a society in which power is not concentrated and contested, but dispersed and practiced. This is what it means to take Gene Sharp seriously — not only to withdraw cooperation from unjust systems, but to build the capacity to live without them.
This article Resistance is only half the equation was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
The ripple effects of organizing against data centers
This article The ripple effects of organizing against data centers was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Last November, Hrag Balian and Emily Chu were in a group chat on the secure messaging app Signal to monitor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the San Gabriel Valley. Someone sent a message asking if anyone knew about a data center proposal in Monterey Park. No one did, so Balian and Chu, a married couple with backgrounds in technology, set out to do some research.
They read more than a thousand pages of documentation around the proposed data center from the developer, StratCap, some of which they obtained by public record requests, and calculated that the data center would triple the power that the city of 60,000 consumes.
Balian and Chu attended a public hearing on the project and found the council chambers empty. “We needed to raise the alarm because nobody in this community seemed to know anything about this,” Balian said.
#newsletter-block_04c1e09dd828e9dfc59359c8861cb708 { background: #ececec; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_04c1e09dd828e9dfc59359c8861cb708 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterThe couple reached out to long-time local activists at San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action (SGVPA), who helped Balian and Chu start a campaign called No Data Center Monterey Park backed by SGVPA. Joining with community groups, they launched social media campaigns, held dozens of teach-ins, collected thousands of petition signatures and knocked many doors in December and January.
By the next Monterey Park City Council meeting in January, the chambers were filled with more than a hundred residents who wanted to stop the data center from being built. They came with concerns about the data center’s around-the-clock power usage, the 12 million gallons of water per year required to cool down servers, and the potential for air pollution from the diesel generators and groundwater pollution from forever chemicals used in the cooling system.
Monterey Park residents were successful in their opposition: At that meeting, the City Council passed a moratorium on data centers. In March, the council approved a ballot measure to ban them completely. Later that spring, the developer withdrew its proposal.
Monterey Park residents rally outside City Council chambers to protest the proposed data center. (Amy Wong)Now a broader coalition, No Data Centers San Gabriel Valley, is advocating for Monterey Park residents to vote “yes” on the June 2 ballot measure and is working to help the rest of the SGV fight data center proposals.
“We’ve seen not only [Monterey Park] residents be mobilized to come out to these council meetings, but neighbors from other cities joining us in the fight, providing testimony to say we don’t want a data center in Monterey Park and in this region as a whole — in the San Gabriel Valley,” said Amy Wong, co-founder of SGVPA.
Mobilizing community membersThe San Gabriel Valley, which comprises much of eastern Los Angeles County, is the largest majority Asian and Latino region in the United States. Half of the valley’s population are immigrants, and it is home to many festivals, foods, parks and cultural traditions, including equestrian culture rooted in the Mexican tradition of charrería.
Balian believes that developers looking to build data centers in the Los Angeles area targeted the SGV based on racist assumptions.
“I think it’s targeted because this is kind of improperly classified as like a sleepy town or predominantly immigrant community where people just won’t fight,” Balian said.
Founded in 2019 around racial justice organizing and the Black Lives Matter movement, SGVPA decided to take on the data center when it came to members’ attention in November.
“This data center issue has become a platform for people to exercise their activism muscles, because it intersects with so many other social issues in the community,” Wong said. “It touches on land use, environmental justice, public health, infrastructure, quality of life and also this fight against big tech and AI.”
Wong said that the fight against the data center has activated many residents, some of whom attended a City Council meeting for the first time. Organizers canvassed and went door to door, speaking in Spanish and Chinese to reach the diverse community.
“This has been a unifying movement,” Wong said. “We’ve had folks who are organized and who have continued fighting back against different threats in our community since 2020, but we also have a lot of newcomers who are just now engaging in activism.”
Nicholas Rabb, a SGV resident and community organizer, said that SGVPA’s teach-ins gave residents critical guidance on how to fight the data center — one of the largest had about 200 attendees. These events were held in community spaces where organizers informed residents about risks associated with data centers and explained how to submit a public comment at a City Council meeting. The teach-ins included strategizing about how to stop the proposed data center and brainstorming what the space — a vacant business park — could be better used for.
Residents of Monterey Park gather for a community teach-in about a proposed data center. (Amy Wong)No Data Center Monterey Park informed residents about when data centers were on the City Council agenda and encouraged everyone to attend, and once-empty Monterey Park City Council meetings began overflowing. The January meeting ran until 1 a.m. because nearly 100 people had shown up to give comments.
Wong remembers those long meetings fondly. “Some of the meetings went past midnight, but I was so energized hearing residents’ testimonies about why they don’t want a data center, and they were authentic stories as to why,” Wong said. “I think those moments of unity have really been memorable.” She recalled one family who stayed late at the City Council meeting so they could speak about their fears about air and water pollution and their desire to protect wildlife and ensure access to nature. Others said they didn’t want their health negatively impacted by poor air quality. Some were concerned about the impact on equestrian centers, as increased industrial noise, mechanical operations and construction activity can create stress conditions for horses, which are highly sensitive animals.
Wong was also moved by the solidarity from residents of other cities who came to the Monterey Park City Council meetings to show support.
Rabb said that it was after one of those four-hour meetings that Monterey Park Mayor Elizabeth Yang declared her opposition to a data center in the city. Not long after that came the moratorium, then the ballot measure for a permanent ban.
“I think this is a really empowering example of how people can take control of their lives and fight for their community,” Rabb said. “I think this is gonna keep having wins all over the SGV, which would be even more empowering.”
Echoing through the valleyOther cities in the San Gabriel Valley followed Monterey Park’s lead. This spring, Baldwin Park, Montebello and El Monte passed data center moratoriums and Alhambra banned data centers through zoning changes.
Sam Brown Vazquez, an environmental justice advocate in the SGV, has been one of the lead organizers fighting against a data center at the Puente Hills Mall in the City of Industry (made famous as the fictional Twin Pines Mall in “Back to the Future.”) The data center hasn’t been formally approved yet, although a battery center that organizers assume will power the data center has already been approved, after zoning changes.
Inspired by the way No Data Center Monterey Park’s teach-ins raised awareness and created a public forum, Brown Vazquez conducted one to alert residents about the proposed City of Industry data center. He also took inspiration from No Data Center Monterey Park’s information table and lawn signs outside City Council meetings. He began holding “art builds” where those fighting against the City of Industry data center could gather with art supplies to create lawn signs, posters and buttons.
He said that No Data Centers Monterey Park has been supportive. “They gave us some of the first blank signs that we had, and then they gave us our first stencil that we used, because everything’s been very DIY,” Brown Vazquez said.
No Data Center Monterey Park tabling outside City Council chambers to petition against the proposed data center. (Nicholas Rabb)Brown Vazquez said that in a larger sense, No Data Center Monterey Park’s victory has been significant in proving that the organizers can be successful in banning data centers.
“I think that there’s a sort of theory that AI data centers are inevitable and that this is the future, and that there’s nothing we can do to stop it, but I think that working with No Data Center Monterey Park has shown me that really we should be challenging the notion of AI hyperscale data centers being a part of our urban infrastructure,” Brown said.
One barrier organizers must overcome is that some cities in the San Gabriel Valley are unincorporated, meaning they do not have a city council to pass a ban. Rabb says that this underscores the need to keep the momentum going and organizing at the county level, where an ordinance can prevent data centers in unincorporated areas.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors discussed a moratorium at its April meeting but did not have enough support to pass it. Instead, the board approved a motion for an environmental and health report on data centers, and noted that a ban was not off the table.
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DonateWong said it is important for people organizing against data centers to stay engaged, vocal and strategize: “It’s really about understanding who your targets are and then deploying different strategies to ensure that you’re effective.”
She said she hopes that Monterey Park residents will vote to ban data centers on the June ballot, and that the space will instead go to something where the city’s cultures can be embraced. She sees the coalition continuing to build throughout the SGV.
“I’m really hopeful and optimistic that this movement will continue to inspire folks to fight against data centers,” Wong said. “I hope folks stay engaged and that we continue building regional solidarity and power in working class communities in the San Gabriel Valley, because we deserve better. This fight is just one of many that I foresee us having.”
This article The ripple effects of organizing against data centers was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Pro-Palestine activists arrested blocking New Jersey port
This article Pro-Palestine activists arrested blocking New Jersey port was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
While Israel engages in ethnic cleansing and occupation in Lebanon, enables settler violence on the West Bank, and continues to commit genocide in Gaza, the focus on blocking the pillars supporting the Israeli war machine has grown. This has resulted in protests against the shipment of weapons and weapons components to Israel at ports in France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Oakland, Calif.
Israel could not conduct its repeated exercises in mass slaughter without U.S. arms and aid. My colleague Stephen Semler estimates that the U.S. has provided Israel with $350 billion in military aid (adjusted for inflation) since its founding. And I determined that during the first year of Israel’s attacks on Gaza, U.S. aid to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) increased fourfold, to over $18 billion. Israel’s entire inventory of combat aircrafts consists of U.S.-supplied Boeing F-15s and Lockheed Martin F-16s and F-35s, and Israel has received tens of thousands of U.S. bombs and missiles since the start of the war on Gaza.
Given this reality, stopping new sales to Israel, as Bernie Sanders has tried to do with several resolutions of disapproval in the Senate, is only part of the story. It is also necessary to stop U.S. actions that help Israel sustain its current arsenal. That’s where the port protests come in.
#newsletter-block_f1f5a6d3c828a6810e88aabdeafaa7dc { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_f1f5a6d3c828a6810e88aabdeafaa7dc #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterThe latest port action occurred on May 22, when activists were arrested in Elizabeth, New Jersey trying to block an arms shipment to Israel from the Maher Terminals of the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, which is routinely used by Maersk and the Israeli-owned company Zim to load and transport tons of weapons and weapons spare parts to Israel.
The protesters chanted “Zim and Maersk you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!,” and called on the International Longshoreman’s Association, which represents North American dockworkers, to refuse to load Zim ships destined for Israel, as has happened in Italy and other ports around the world.
Last year, activists in Oakland attempted to blockade the Port of Oakland and called on city officials to stop military cargo shipments out of the city’s airport, which is run by the port. A report by the Palestinian Youth Movement documented at least 280 shipments of military equipment to Israel in calendar year 2025 routed through the Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport, mostly via FedEx. Shipping documents showed that the shipments appeared to include parts for U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets, which Israel has used in aerial bombardments in Gaza.
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DonateAlthough neither effort achieved the immediate objective of blocking one specific arms shipment, they underscore the degree to which actions enabling genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon are firmly embedded in the routine operations of ports and warehouses throughout the U.S. and the world.
Similar actions during the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and 1980s were integral to the fight to impose comprehensive sanctions on the South African regime, which passed in the U.S. in 1986, overcoming a veto threat from Ronald Reagan. It was a long struggle, but it helped accelerate the demise of the apartheid regime, in support of on-the-ground action by the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement inside South Africa.
No single action brought down South African apartheid, just as no single action will end U.S. support for the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon. But the port action in Elizabeth is a strong link in a chain of events that can bring an end to U.S. support for the mass slaughter inflicted every day by the IDF.
This article Pro-Palestine activists arrested blocking New Jersey port was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
An ethically honest Memorial Day
This article An ethically honest Memorial Day was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
On Memorial Day, it is my family’s practice to remember and honor all those who have died in war — including but not limited to those who have served in our country’s military. This broader act of memorialization is both truer to the history of Memorial Day, and more responsive to the moral imperative that all humans — and especially U.S. citizens — face as a result of the suffering and risk that organized violence causes throughout the world.
Like Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day has been gradually co-opted as an opportunity to show unquestioning, blank-check support for the U.S. military. We think participating in these commemorations is just being a good citizen, but in truth by participating we are adding our voice to a highly organized political message that speaks very loudly to the rest of the world. The political message we help send is that we value the lives of U.S. military personnel thousands upon thousands of times more than we value the lives of all others.
This is not my family’s belief, and therefore we cannot participate in Memorial Day in this way.
Historically, like Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day started as an expression of the strength of human desire for peace and respect for all life. The roots of the holiday began in the days following the end of the Civil War by those wanting to honor the fallen in the name of preserving the peace which had been achieved. Formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina held perhaps the first documented memorial day on May 1, 1865. While focused on honoring those who served as soldiers for the Union, these early commemorations also remembered and mourned all who died in the fighting, including civilians on both sides and soldiers for the South. So strong was this tendency to name and recognize the harm on both sides that some historians have critiqued these early Memorial Days as having the effect of whitewashing the moral battle that did take place as each person chose which side they were on in that critical time.
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This is a deep error and our souls know it. Every single person who dies in any war is a human being with a family. Every single loss rips a hole in the hearts of those that loved them. For each soul lost there is unfathomable pain that can never be fully understood or articulated.
But it can and should be recognized. To remember, to memorialize, does help.
Yesterday, Ms. magazine published an article that points to this need for a broader understanding of Memorial Day. It specifically named the women and children whose deaths and suffering in war are often invisibilized. In particular, they name the horrifying deaths of the 165 Iranian girls who were killed when our military, in an apparent but as of yet unacknowledged error, bombed their school. To hold an ethically honest Memorial Day, we could start by naming these children, these innocents – and turning our eyes and our hearts to the unfathomable suffering of their mothers.
Veterans for Peace has also consistently lifted up a call for Memorial Day to acknowledge the full cost of war and affirm the strength of our desire for peace. In their 2025 statement, they include a quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a World War II veteran: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
The will of the peopleI believe that a huge number of Americans hold a similar opinion of war, even those who participate in Memorial Day commemorations. Despite decades of efforts to bake blank-check militarism into U.S. culture, most people are implicitly aware that the entire game serves the interests of the political elite and the very rich, while demanding sacrifice mainly from working class people. Research shows that antiwar sentiment was one of the primary motivations of a subset of Trump voters. A decisive number of voters withheld votes from Kamala Harris due to horror at the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Neither group of voters has seen their will expressed.
I myself feel agonizingly helpless by the current news, and I can only imagine how a peace-motivated Trump voter must feel. Far from holding to his antiwar plank, Trump has acutely escalated both the culture and the practice of endless war. He renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War and has run it in a way that eviscerates all subtlety and respect for human rights. Far from resolving the genocide in Gaza, he has escalated it into a regional conflict that could easily lead to nuclear war. Trump has made numerous horrifying threats, including “that a whole civilization will die,” which is the definition of genocide. He is implementing automatic draft registration for our sons ages 18 to 26, so none can refuse to register as an act of conscientious objection. One is reminded of God’s warning through the prophet Samuel: “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.”
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DonateIn the midst of this, we are all being encouraged to accept these escalations as normal and continue to join in and march and smile and show unquestioning respect and approval of such behavior. No! We must forge a better way.
What we need is an ethically honest Memorial Day. What the human spirit needs is a Memorial Day infused with heart and thoughtfulness, a Memorial Day that harnesses the power of our remembrance toward our deep desire for peace and well being for all. We can start by naming all those we know who have died in war — including soldiers and civilians who were killed in visible, recognized wars; soldiers and civilians who were killed in small conflicts; unofficial military actions that don’t make the news; and all victims of organized violence. We can name each soul whose names we know, and light candles for them.
But we should not stop there. We should also name in some way the unnameable. We should all visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in our hearts, and in doing so consider consciously not just those on “our side,” but all the loss of life that our global community has suffered because of war and organized violence. We can mark those uncountable deaths whose names we don’t know, but of whom we are aware. Doing so is an act of psychological honesty; it gives voice to our soul’s knowledge that their lives and their deaths do matter. In doing this we may not change anything outwardly, but we do change the rhythm of our own awareness, and the power of such a shift should not be underestimated.
Art by CODEPINK
This article An ethically honest Memorial Day was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
The quiet resistance of working-class women in Egypt
This article The quiet resistance of working-class women in Egypt was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'oQWkHhNdSN5nkY_EyiYvfQ',sig:'aVBki77CFZWQubHw-xP6EnRzEFFdiC0sxQSiQydzqhg=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'2256170514',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});When public dissent is risky or impossible, resistance does not disappear. It often becomes quieter, more practical and harder to recognize. For many working-class women in Egypt, it takes shape not in slogans or demonstrations, but in the daily tactics they use to protect income, reduce dependence, share care work and move more safely through public space.
Samah, a worker in Cairo, offers one example. (The women featured in this article are identified by their first names only, with surnames omitted to protect their privacy.) On her way to work, she buys vegetables for dinner and carries them with her in a plastic bag. During breaks, she and her coworkers prepare the meal together, saving time later when she returns home to cook for her family. The routine is simple and may be entirely overlooked, but it helps her resist the exhaustion, time pressure and economic strain created by the double burden of paid work and unpaid domestic labor in a system that treats both as her sole responsibility.
Simple everyday acts of financial self-protection, mutual support and safer mobility can become forms of resistance when taking public action carries too high a cost or is out of reach. They are subtle, almost invisible in their execution, and precisely for that reason, they endure.
The invisible politics — and why invisibility is strategicWhat Samah and her coworkers are doing can be easily dismissed as mere coping. Yet they belong to what political scientist James C. Scott describes as “everyday forms of resistance.” In contexts where openly confronting authority can be risky, costly or simply unthinkable, resistance rarely appears as dramatic dissent. It shows up instead as small, repeatable practices that shift how constraint is managed and how power is negotiated in ordinary life.
This resistance is not always directed at the state directly. More often, it operates within the wider informal systems through which domination is organized and reproduced, where women’s spending, mobility and respectability is routinely monitored and policed. For working-class women under scrutiny from employers, supervisors and family, overt confrontation can carry economic, reputational or physical costs. Autonomy is easily recast as deviance; small gains in money, time or independence can be questioned, moralized or withdrawn. Discretion, then, becomes both protection and strategy. By staying within the ordinary rather than stepping outside it, women carve out narrow margins of autonomy that are difficult to punish without revealing the very mechanisms of control that sustain them.
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Financial autonomy as resistanceAt 23-years-old, Shahd works as a nail technician in a small salon. Her main financial challenge is not low income, but limited control over it once it enters the household. Her wages quickly enter a shared economy of obligation where groceries, utilities and family needs take priority and personal spending is weighed against collective responsibility.
“I once wanted to buy a jacket with my own money,” Shahd recalled. “I had the cash, but my father asked if it was really necessary when we still had other obligations, like my little brother’s lessons, so I gave the money to my mother instead.” Control is rarely dramatic. It works through quiet moral accounting that makes self-spending feel like something you have to justify, until you start policing yourself in advance. Visibility is where it tightens most. “If I leave cash in my wallet, it will disappear overnight. That’s normal,” she said, a reminder that cash is not treated as private savings so much as household money that can be absorbed without confrontation.
Previous CoverageHer response is not refusal, but reconfiguration. Instead of keeping savings in visible cash or relying solely on bank transfers that are easily monitored, she quietly diverts small amounts into a separate Vodafone Cash — a secure e-wallet service — account that only she manages. It’s easy to set up, requires little documentation and leaves fewer household-facing traces than bank transfers. “I move small amounts somewhere no one thinks to check before they ultimately disappear,” Shahd said. The sums are modest, but they create a private margin with real consequences. It gives her a small reserve to cover needs as they arise, and even unused, it eases constraint by keeping options open and giving her a sense of control. “I’m not saving for something dramatic; I’m saving so I don’t have to depend on anyone,” she added.
The impact is less about dramatic transformation than about a gradual widening of what becomes doable under pressure. As these tactics spread, institutions begin to mirror them. For example, Vodafone Cash launched the Maaki initiative in July 2025 to train one million women in Upper Egypt in digital and technological skills. Likewise, the Central Bank of Egypt’s report that women’s financial inclusion reached 70 percent as of June 2025 points to a broader expansion in access to formal tools, and to the growing significance of mechanisms that women can deploy on their own terms.
This is what financial autonomy looks like as resistance, because it breaks the link between earning and control. Even small, privately-held reserves reduce dependence, widen what is possible under pressure and protect the ability to act without permission.
Networks as resistanceAt 32-years-old, Noura works as an office secretary and raises her child alone. Her biggest challenge is not always money, but what happens when time and responsibility collide. A late meeting, a sick day, a school call can unravel the whole day if there is no one to hand things to.
So, she relies on an informal infrastructure of women who operate like an always-on relay. Someone steps in for pickup, another covers an hour, another brings food, another comes along to a clinic, another makes the calls and finds the workaround. Most of it is coordinated through WhatsApp, a steady stream of voice notes and quick asks that keep the day from falling apart. “I don’t have the option of doing everything alone,” she said. “If I try, I lose something, the job, the child or my mind.” This is not occasional help. It is a shared system of coverage that turns potential crises into manageable problems.
Money runs through the network too, and for Noura the gam‘eya is at its center, a rotating savings circle where women pay in monthly and take turns receiving a lump sum. Because it is predictable, she can plan for fees, rent gaps or emergencies without asking the wrong person at the wrong moment. “The gam‘eya is what saves us,” she said. “I know my date. And if an emergency hits early, the girls start a new one and I take the money first.”
Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'pu48GFnBSN5CT7DDow7oLQ',sig:'NuiIeRsAlJxDJeoyU8BxwYmH3LO1qfyWkqOgbJumW3w=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'143421088',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});Outside the circle, the urgent need for money can come with predatory lenders that require wosolat amana (trust receipts), which easily turn a missed payment into a legal threat. “You sign one paper and suddenly it’s not just debt, it’s a knife to your throat,” she said. “If you’re late once, you can end up in jail.” The gam‘eya keeps her out of that trap. For her, it is not about getting rich, it is about not being cornered.
Information moves too, with price intelligence, job leads, warnings and quiet knowledge-sharing that helps women navigate risk without generating a visible target. Through these overlapping exchanges, the network becomes a low-visibility welfare system, one that redistributes resources, absorbs shocks and builds a form of collective capacity.
The impact of this kind of networked resistance is quiet but immediate. It resists the everyday power that scarcity creates for those who control access, whether that is employers who can punish absence, intermediaries who profit from inflated prices and informal credit, or household dynamics that enforce dependence by making women ask, explain and wait.
These systems have been increasingly formalized in digital form, where platforms like MoneyFellows digitize gam‘eyat into app-based “money circles,” and initiatives like Tahweesha are designed to formalize women’s group savings and link them to banking services for rural women. These formalizations show that these circles are not a cultural leftover. They are an essential infrastructure that women built long before institutions learned how to name it.
Mobility as resistanceAt 25-years-old, Salma works in an all-women clothes factory, and her shift ends at the hour when the city’s social contract quietly changes. Getting home is not a neutral transition between places so much as a second shift of calculation, where the price of a commute is not only time, but also attention, where routes are chosen for lighting and exits, and where a woman’s presence in public space is treated as negotiable. “The job finishes,” Salma said, “but the day doesn’t end until I close my door.”
To navigate that pressure, Salma relies on tactics designed to look ordinary enough to survive scrutiny. She makes herself “known” on purpose, greeting the building porter by name, buying small things from the same kiosk so the shopkeeper recognizes her, choosing drivers she trusts when she can, and arranging check-ins that last until she is indoors. “If something happens,” she said, “I don’t want to be a stranger in the street.” This is the steady refusal to disappear.
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Much of it is collective, because safety becomes sturdier when it is shared. Around the time the factory releases them, a WhatsApp thread starts moving with the kind of messages that sound casual until you realize they are building a distributed escort system with systemic check-ups. Meanwhile, a friend stays on the phone as Salma walks, a coworker waits for the double-check.
What they are producing is more than reassurance. It is witness, the small social infrastructure that makes harm costlier because a woman is less isolated even when she is physically alone. In a country where a U.N. Women study found that 99.3 percent of women and girls surveyed reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment, this web of recognition is not paranoia. It is adaptation under constraint.
While she is in transit, Salma also uses her phone to make her movements more visible to others and to create a record if something goes wrong. Sometimes she fakes a call and speaks loudly enough to imply that someone is tracking her route and expecting her; other times she quietly records, not to go viral but to make denial harder. “It’s not for drama, it’s so the person knows there will be a trace,” she said. In early 2026, when an Egyptian commuter filmed a man harassing her on a public bus and confronted him on camera, the clip went viral nationwide. Women watched, shared and repeated the lesson, turning filming into peer-to-peer knowledge and making harassment harder to erase.
The circulation of “self-protection hacks” on social media follows the same logic. In one widely shared TikTok, an Egyptian woman holds up a small spray bottle and explains that because pepper spray can be hard to obtain in Egypt, she carries a homemade substitute made from ordinary kitchen and cleaning items. The point is less the bottle than the reality it exposes: When formal protection is inaccessible, women improvise deterrence from whatever is already within reach and circulate that knowledge peer-to-peer.
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DonateThis is why it counts as resistance. Salma is not only protecting herself. She is pushing back against the normalization of women’s vulnerability and the impunity that comes with it. She is refusing the idea that safety is an individual responsibility solved through silence, avoidance or self-blame. Through small, repeatable tactics, women like Salma convert safety into collective power, embedding themselves in networks of recognition so that harassment becomes riskier for the perpetrator than for the woman trying to get home.
Hope is a shared systemShahd creates a private margin inside a monitored household economy, Noura builds welfare through women’s mutual infrastructure, and Salma creates more accountability in public space by staying connected to others and making harassment harder to deny. Their tactics do not overthrow systems in one decisive moment, but they alter the terms on which those systems extract, police and intimidate. The victories are modest and often temporary, yet they accumulate into something sturdier than they appear, a set of survival infrastructures that keep women moving, working, feeding their families and claiming space.
This article The quiet resistance of working-class women in Egypt was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
The “Hitler question” should never justify war
This article The “Hitler question” should never justify war was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'YPdje40rReR0u8NZrledcQ',sig:'d49bMKZ3OJIwzIJyjRJ2S7qv4WhCYAmxWkj4ozZAKsY=',w:'594px',h:'466px',items:'1515017735',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});Proponents of war and militarization often invoke common memories of Hitler and World War II to argue that we are now in a similar moment. Whether it is with Saddam Hussein in 2003, al Qaeda during the “war on terrorism,” Iran’s Supreme Leader in 2017, or Putin since 2022, a classic trope is to compare enemy leaders to the Nazis. In the lead-up to the Iran War this February, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham likened Iran’s religious leaders to Hitler and argued for regime change by any means.
It is only a matter of time before Hitler is invoked again to justify yet another war or yet more militarization. How can those who are uneasy with war and militarism prepare to counter such arguments?
The “Hitler question” — what would you do if faced with Nazi aggression? — has certainly long functioned as a rhetorical trump card against pacifism and nonviolence. It is usually posed as a trap. If pacifists concede violence might be necessary, their principles are revealed as hollow. If they reject violence even then, they are exposed as naive or morally indifferent.
#newsletter-block_cab7c98a5eb7f14481080aa2a87caad1 { background: #ececec; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_cab7c98a5eb7f14481080aa2a87caad1 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterLook closer, however, and it turns out that this framing rests on shaky assumptions and questionable simplifications. Even on as serious a challenge as the “Hitler question,” pacifism and nonviolence offer far more serious and practical insights than usually given credit for.
As I examine in greater depth in a recent academic journal article, there are 10 ways in which the conventional assumptions behind the “Hitler question” can be challenged.
Resisting the NazisOn the specific historical context of the Nazi question, first, framing the question in 1939, with war underway or imminent, bypasses or ignores the decades of political choices, structural violence, and missed opportunities that made that crisis so acute.
From the punitive settlement after World War I, to the nationalist backlash and wider repercussions of the 1929 economic collapse, to imperial rivalries and militarized politics across Europe, decisions were made and particular paths were chosen. Different choices might have prevented the rise of Nazism in the first place. The crisis by 1939 was not caused by pacifism, but by decades of violence and militarism that helped create the conditions in which Hitler thrived.
Second, even if one accepts that war ultimately contributed to defeating Nazi Germany, an honest account would include a more critical look at what violence did — and did not — achieve. Military force did not prevent Hitler’s rise, nor did it stop the early expansion of Nazi power.
War also did not protect Europe’s Jews from genocide; in fact, the Holocaust escalated under the cover and brutality of wartime conditions. Nor was the Allied war effort primarily motivated by a desire to stop genocide. Strategic priorities focused on territorial and political competition, and opportunities to disrupt the machinery of mass murder were often not taken.
This complicates the popular narrative of World War II as a clear-cut moral triumph. The same states that defeated Hitler tolerated or ignored other atrocities before and after the war (Gaza providing a recent example). Moreover, the conflict itself involved massive civilian casualties, indiscriminate bombing and forms of collective punishment that blur the line between justice and destruction. War may have brought down the Nazi regime, but it did so at enormous human cost and without eradicating the underlying ideologies of fascism and militarism, which persist in various forms and have become particularly revitalized and threatening in recent years.
Third, violent resistance was not the only form of resistance that ultimately defeated the Nazis. Nonviolent resistance contributed, too. Across occupied Europe, ordinary people and institutions engaged in acts of civil defiance, including strikes, bureaucratic obstruction, clandestine publishing, education boycotts, and networks that hid and protected Jews. In countries like Denmark and Bulgaria, public solidarity helped save large numbers of Jewish lives. Even within Germany, protests such as the Rosenstrasse demonstration, where non-Jewish wives secured the release of their Jewish husbands, forced concessions from the regime. (Incidentally, examples of nonviolent resistance and defense can be found in the current Ukraine war, too.)
Previous CoverageThese efforts were rarely coordinated on a large scale, and they did not defeat Nazism on their own. But their contribution challenges the idea that nonviolence was absent or irrelevant. Such examples, however, were also largely spontaneous (as they have been in Ukraine since 2022). The populations that resisted nonviolently have not benefited from systematic training and investment in such methods. Yet, just as military success depends on training, resources and coordination, so too does effective nonviolent resistance.
Fourth, as we know from plenty of recent scholarship and hundreds of examples, nonviolence operates differently from violence. Rather than seeking to overpower an opponent physically, it aims to undermine the social and political foundations of their power. Authoritarian regimes — even brutal ones — depend on compliance, legitimacy and the participation of ordinary people. When those forms of support are withdrawn, the regime’s capacity to function erodes. Nonviolent resistance can also create what is often called a “backfire effect,” exposing the injustice of repression and turning it against the oppressor by mobilizing public opinion.
Even the Nazi regime was not immune to these dynamics. It paid attention to public sentiment and adjusted policies when backlash threatened stability. The visibility of violence mattered: After the widely condemned brutality of Kristallnacht, antisemitic policies were implemented more discreetly. Nazi authorities went out of their way to hide practical elements of the “final solution” from public view. Where Jewish communities were less isolated and enjoyed broader solidarity, such as in Denmark and Bulgaria, survival rates were higher. These examples suggest that public opinion and social ties were not irrelevant, even under totalitarian rule.
Fifth, World War II is often remembered as being against “the Germans,” as a total war pitting entire populations against each other, as if all Germans were equally guilty. This obscures the fact that many non-Nazi Germans were victims of Nazism, too — such as civilians, conscripts and dissidents. Military conflict tends to turn entire nations into enemies. War dehumanizes, reinforcing binary identities and legitimizing large-scale destruction (as the genocide in Gaza illustrates all too clearly). Pacifism and nonviolence, by contrast, insist on recognizing the humanity of all involved, even while resisting injustice.
Resisting warBeyond the specifics of the Nazi context, it is worth also interrogating some of the assumptions with which the “Hitler question” tends to be asked. Five challenges to conventional wisdom emerge here, too.
First, pacifism is often over-caricatured and misunderstood. For one, it is often assumed that pacifism is a single, absolutist doctrine that rejects all forms of violence under any circumstances. Yet pacifist thought is diverse. Some strands are principled, others pragmatic; some oppose all war, while others argue that specifically modern warfare — especially in the nuclear age — is too destructive to justify. Many pacifists engage deeply with questions of strategy, effectiveness and political responsibility.
Another misconception is that pacifism equates to passivity. To the contrary, nonviolent action often involves risk, disruption and courage. It can include strikes, civil disobedience, boycotts and other forms of active resistance that challenge power structures directly. Far from being passive, such actions often require significant organization and personal sacrifice.
Second, nonviolence is more effective than its detractors often seem to assume. Studies have found that nonviolent campaigns have historically been more successful than violent ones, even against authoritarian regimes, and that they tend to produce more democratic and stable outcomes. While these findings have attracted some debate and certainly do not guarantee success in every case, they undermine the assumption that violence is inherently more effective.
There is, admittedly, no clear historical example of a society successfully defending itself against a full-scale invasion using only nonviolent methods. However, cases can be found of civilian resistance to occupation and authoritarian rule, suggesting that nonviolent defense could function as an extension of these practices. The idea of “civilian-based defense” involves preparing entire populations to resist through non-cooperation, making occupation difficult or unsustainable. This approach has never been systematically implemented, making it difficult to evaluate — but its potential cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Third, the “constitutive” impact of war is also not to be neglected. Violence, even when effective, does not simply achieve objectives; it reshapes societies (as evident with those countries affected by the Ukraine war, and in Israel and Palestine). War strengthens militarized institutions, normalizes hierarchy and cultivates cultures that are more accepting of violence. It leaves deep psychological and social scars, and it often fuels future conflicts. The economic and political systems built to support war — arms industries, military alliances, security infrastructures — take on a life of their own.
This raises a different kind of question: not just whether violence can defeat a particular enemy, but what kind of world it creates in the process. If war fosters the very conditions — militarism, dehumanization, authoritarianism — that enable regimes like Nazi Germany, then relying on it as a solution may be self-defeating.
Fourth, any assumption that violence can be controlled is also questionable. War is often imagined as a precise instrument, but in practice it is chaotic and unpredictable. It escalates, generates unintended consequences and often exceeds the intentions of those who initiate it, as we’re seeing with the ongoing U.S. and Israeli war on Iran. Civilian casualties, environmental destruction and long-term instability are not anomalies but recurring features. Once unleashed, violence is difficult to contain.
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DonateFifth, it is worth reflecting on the cultural and political uses of the “Hitler question.” It is often invoked not only in historical debates but in contemporary conflicts, where enemy leaders are recurrently cast as yet “another Hitler” to justify yet another military intervention. This framing simplifies complex situations and encourages a moral narrative in which violence appears as the only responsible choice. It also reflects a particular perspective, rooted in Western experiences and dominant memories of World War II, that obscures other histories and viewpoints, such as those of conscientious objectors, dissidents, women, racial minorities or colonized people.
As a result, a romanticized vision of war as a moment of heroic and hypermasculine struggle against evil, where violence is regrettable but necessary, gets reproduced. This narrative overlooks the broader consequences of war and the voices of those who experience its costs most directly — civilians, marginalized communities and those outside the centers of power.
All this is not to say that nonviolence would certainly have stopped Hitler or that all wars are avoidable. What I do mean to say, however, is that the “Hitler question” is not as decisive an argument against pacifism and in favor of the next war as those who ask it often seem to think. By examining its assumptions and revisiting the historical record, the choice between violence and nonviolence emerges as more complex than the question tends to allow. Pacifism and nonviolence offer not a simplistic rejection of force, but a set of critical tools for thinking about power, resistance and the long-term consequences of political action.
In a world where calls for war continue to be justified by invoking existential threats and moral urgency, advocates of pacifism and nonviolence should not feel disarmed by the “Hitler question.” The challenge is not to provide easy answers, but to broaden the conversation — to consider alternatives, question assumptions and invite to take seriously the possibility that resisting violence does not always require more of it.
This article The “Hitler question” should never justify war was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Notes on Isla Grande: Figurations of Environmental Violence and Beauty in the Colombian Caribbean
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.
DOCKSLa 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.
LOGISTICSThe 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.
MATERIALSExcavations 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.
ORIKARight 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.
UNBOUNDEDNESSSunset 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.
ROOTSMangrove 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.
DRIFTThere 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.
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