B4. Radical Ecology

2024 Impact Report https://youtu.be/T4Oah3NvAo8?feature=shared In 2024, the Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP) achieved remarkable milestones in its mission to protect forests and defend the rights of Indigenous and forest-dependent communities worldwide. From amplifying the struggles of the Mapuche people in Chile to mobilizing against genetically engineered (GE) trees at international forums, GJEP’s work demonstrates the […]

In our latest, Scott talks with Yannis, an activist on the ground in southern Arizona, about the tree-sit that launched this week to block construction of Trump’s border wall as…

This article What India’s Cockroach Party won — and what’s next was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Thirty-six days after a joke about “cockroaches” became a youth movement, India’s education minister was gone. On July 25, Dharmendra Pradhan resigned after weeks of protests over failures in the public examination system and demands for political accountability. The Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, declared victory — “Cockroaches won. Democracy won.”

For a movement that began online in May and grown into a nationwide agitation, forcing a cabinet minister from office was an unmistakable political concession. But almost as soon as the protesters packed up, the meaning of that victory became less certain.

Three days later, the movement was already threatening to return to the streets. The CJP said over 100 protesters been arrested nationwide, with cases filed in the states of Delhi, Assam, West Bengal and Bihar, despite assurances that demonstrators would not face punitive action. CJP spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka warned that the agitation could resume if those arrested were not released.

Bihar police announced that the protesters had been released and would face no adverse legal action. But the assurance did not hold in other states, like West Bengal and Assam, where more than a dozen are still being detained.

Removing a minister was a visible symbol of accountability; ensuring that other promises made to end the protests were actually honored would require something harder — sustained organization after the crowds had gone home.

A movement that couldn’t be decapitated

When Delhi last saw a mass youth mobilization, over the citizenship law in 2020, the state answered by naming the organizers in a conspiracy chargesheet: Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam have now been held for more than five years under India’s 1967 anti-terror law and were refused bail again on July 4, 16 days before the cockroaches marched on Parliament.

It began as a joke. Amidst a youth uproar over invalidated examination results, during which India’s highest judge referred to the nation’s youth as “cockroaches,” a Boston-based student from India, Abhijeet Dipke, posted on X, “What if the cockroaches marched?”

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The joke carried a serious message: The protesters who turned out in response, under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party, saw themselves as people the political system had stopped listening to.

But the Cockroach Janta Party — a parody of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, the Hindu right-wing party that has governed India since 2014 — had few of the trappings of a serious political party. There was a website where people could sign up; there was an Instagram account that had grown rapidly; and there was Dipke. By July, he was leading the sit-ins and the marches from a stage in Central Delhi — a founder the movement had acquired without ever electing one, and who insisted, along with everybody else there, that the CJP had no leader.

For five weeks, Delhi Police dealt with a protest that offered nothing conventional to target. There was no office to raid and no membership list to seize — the two things that allowed police to quell earlier movements.

So on the morning of July 18, police went for the one man everyone knew.

Sonam Wangchuk, an engineer and education reformer from the Indian Himalayas, is 59 years old and was 20 days into a hunger strike. He had lost more than 18 pounds. Police carried him from the protest site and took him to hospital.

Wangchuk had become the most recognizable face in a movement that insisted it had no leader. He runs a school in the region of Ladakh for children who struggle in India’s examination system and is a recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, often described as Asia’s Nobel.

Delhi Police said they acted on a High Court order and medical advice. Protesters tried to stop officers from taking Wangchuk away, leading to what police described as a “slight commotion.”

But the police statement did not end with Wangchuk’s health. It also asked the remaining protesters to leave. They did not.

Taking a man 20 days into a hunger strike to a hospital could be explained as a medical decision. Asking everyone else to clear the square was something different.

By that afternoon the square was fuller than it had been all month, with people packed under sheets of black plastic strung between trees, facing a stage with nobody on it. The banner behind the empty platform still read “Hunger Strike.” Removing the hunger striker had doubled his audience.

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And that was the problem the Cockroach Janta Party exposed: How do you shut down a protest when there is no leader to remove, no organization to dismantle and no one person whose arrest can make the crowd disappear?

Two million children, one exam, 89 leaks

The packed square is Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory of huge stone sundials about half a mile from India’s Parliament, and the only place in central Delhi where a demonstration is permitted at all. For five weeks it was a tent city of students, parents who had spent their savings on high-stakes test coaching, teachers, lawyers, a few farmers’ unions and a great many people in their 20s who had never protested before.

What brought them there was an examination. Every year more than two million Indian teenagers sit the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, or NEET, for fewer than 130,000 undergraduate medical seats. Whole towns exist to coach children for it — Kota, in Rajasthan, held around 250,000 aspirants at its peak and still houses roughly 85,000 to 100,000 in hostels and cram schools built for nothing else. In May, nine days after the exam, the government cancelled the results over an alleged paper leak and told two million candidates to take it a second time. Several students died by suicide in the weeks that followed.

On May 15, the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, while hearing a case about fraudulent degrees, turned to unemployed young Indians and called them cockroaches who attack everyone because they have nowhere to go. He said afterward he had been misunderstood.

But Dipke, a 30-year-old political strategist watching from Boston, had already asked on X what would happen if all the cockroaches came together. Rinku Kumar was one of the millions who answered. He is a 23-year-old English teacher at a coaching center in Nawada, in the poor eastern state of Bihar, India — nobody’s stereotype of an activist. He traveled to Delhi because a protest he had been watching on his phone had begun describing his own life back to him.

For decades a protest in Delhi became a national event only if television decided it was one. At Jantar Mantar that assumption had visibly broken: Some protesters did not want mainstream TV crews at the site at all. Instead of waiting for prime time, they filmed everything themselves, livestreamed speeches, circulated their own footage of the police lines and followed independent reporters directly. The grievance had become a meme, the meme a crowd, and the crowd had built its own distribution network. Part of what the CJP was winning was the account of itself.

That is how a coach from Nawada ended up in the same square as Ashutosh Ranka — an Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur graduate with a degree from the London School of Economics and a stint at McKinsey behind him. In June, Ranka was named one of the movement’s three spokespeople, alongside the investigative journalist Saurav Das and the researcher and filmmaker Vijeta Dahiya. Their life paths had nothing in common, but the protest had handed them the same vocabulary of jobs, exams and accountability.

A leaflet circulating that week wondered whether India was still a democracy or had become a “deMOCKracy,” then graded the government in its own vocabulary, saying it flunked this lesson.

The day the internet went off and 10,000 people walked anyway

The CJP called a mile-long march to Parliament House for July 20, the opening day of the monsoon session and of Parliament, but permission was refused. Instead, the state prepared by switching off mobile internet around the site, closing metro stations and putting up barricades.

More than 10,000 marched anyway, the turnout swollen by anger at Wangchuk’s removal.

The placards had stopped asking politely. One carried Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s photograph with “Resign” across his face and a performance review printed beside it: “You are a government servant, you work for us, we pay your salary, we the people of India fire you.” Two balloons tied to the same hand read “Grow a pair.”

A satirical placard on the march to Parliament, demanding accountability from the education minister. (WNV/Shruthi Manjula Mohan)

Delhi Police denied using violence, though NPR watched officers fire tear gas and hit demonstrators with sticks. I witnessed it, too. The tear gas came in from the Parliament Street side and the crowd did not run so much as fold and re-form 100 feet back.

Nearly 180 protesters injured and 70 detained. Several videos show police attacking marchers; none has surfaced showing the reverse.

Pradhan, who had spent June dismissing the protesters as disruptive elements, upgraded them that week to a “B-team of terrorists” trying to “divide the country.”

That kind of rhetoric has been effective in the past, according to Tanuj Gaurav, a doctoral researcher at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the campus that has been the center of Indian left student politics for decades and a standing target of this government. “The moment you raise a question, you’re linked to the enemy,” he told me. “After that, nobody wants to ask questions anymore.”

Then, on the same day it called them terrorists, the government invited Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka two of them to meet Health Minister J.P. Nadda. Dipke announced the invitation from the stage. Shortly afterward he was reportedly detained.

They stopped waiting for television to notice them

Here is the test the movement passed twice in three days. On July 18 the state removed the famous man; on July 20 it removed the founder. Neither removal stuck. Wangchuk went on issuing statements from his hospital bed and was part of the talks that followed. Dipke was released within hours and was back on the stage by then. The protest did not pause or splinter, but it also never had to find out what would happen if either man stayed gone.

The next day it stopped marching altogether, while keeping the sit-in going. “We will not march again because the police will hurt the youth again,” Dipke said.

A volunteer used art as a medium of dissent at Jantar Mantar. His stall became one of the site’s biggest draws, with visitors joining him to paint, sketch and draw in support of the CJP’s demands for accountability and reform of the examination system. (WNV/Shruthi Manjula Mohan)

The discipline was visible on the tarmac on July 20. One volunteer had turned a stretch of road into a gallery row of watercolors weighted against the wind. They depicted cockroaches marching on Parliament, a government drawn blind, mute and deaf. A handwritten sign invited strangers to sit and add their own; another asked people not to touch the pictures, only to photograph them. It read as a rule about wet paint, and it was, but it also described how the whole movement worked: Make the thing, let everyone copy it, keep no object anybody could be arrested for holding.

Thirty-six days after a joke, a cabinet minister was gone

On July 24 Wangchuk broke his 26-day fast after written assurances on exam accountability.

His decision, however, did not settle the central political demand driving the wider movement: Pradhan’s resignation. Wangchuk said his immediate priority was protecting students from further violence and legal action, and suggested that Pradhan’s departure could still follow. The youth-led CJP, meanwhile, continued protesting, refusing to accept the government’s attempts at compromise.

The next day Pradhan resigned, saying he deeply respected the aspirations of the country’s youth — a respect that had taken 36 days and a hospitalization to locate.

With demonstrations persisting despite the government’s attempts at compromise, Pradhan’s resignation became the concession capable of bringing the confrontation to an end.

Hours later, CJP spokespeople sat beside two ministers at a joint news conference. “All our demands have been accepted,” said Ranka, asking everyone to go home. The party posted four words: “Cockroaches won. Democracy won.”

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a political theorist and one of India’s most widely read columnists, wrote in the Indian Express that the resignation alone changes little, but that a generation failed by its elders had made a government drunk on its own power look small and had shown it can be moved.

The state had gone looking for the movement’s head and failed. The movement, which had none, had taken down a minister.

Now watch the demands get smaller

In June, they wanted a minister gone. On July 13 they wanted a law. The CJP’s voluntary tech team published a five-point charter for rebuilding how India runs public examinations — closer to draft legislation than to grievance. It asked for a new Public Examinations Act and for the National Testing Agency that runs the exams to be dissolved and rebuilt as a statutory body with permanent staff and compulsory audits. It called for an independent ombudsman, a judicial inquiry opening automatically under a retired judge after every leak, refunds and compensation turned from favors into legal entitlements, and a permanent parliamentary committee to keep watching after the cameras left.

After July 20 they added two more demands: Don’t prosecute us, and apologize for hitting us.

They began by asking the government to fix an examination that two million children sit. They ended by asking it not to arrest them for asking.

What they were given was the minister and very little else. On compensation, the government agreed it would pay “whatever maximum possible” under existing rules for each of the more than 20 families of students who died by suicide, not the $105,000 each that the CJP demanded.

On criminal cases, protesters won a promise that nobody would be pursued in states the BJP governs — and because India’s police answer to state governments, that covered only part of the country. Since then 11 people have been arrested in West Bengal, 10 of them Muslim, six in Assam, and three protesters were injured when police opened fire in Bihar.

On the apology, the movement received nothing at all.

The CJP says it will now identify officers from protest footage and take them to court; the cameras pointed at that crowd for five weeks will become an evidence file.

But footage works both ways: A 36-second clip on a protester’s phone identified a senior officer by his own badge as he struck a woman standing at the roadside. Police accepted he had lost his composure and took him off protest duty, but he has not been suspended and no case has been registered. In other words, a protester’s phone named an officer within 48 hours, and the state answered with a change of desk.

A committee to look into what the last committee said

And the charter? On July 26 Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a task force to make the examination system reliable and transparent. It will be headed by Nandan Nilekani, who cofounded the software giant Infosys and built Aadhaar, the biometric identity system now held by more than a billion Indians.

New anti-leak legislation went to Parliament the next day. Pralhad Joshi, the head of two cabinet ministries, was handed the education ministry on top of his other responsibilities.

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A task force is not nothing, but it is not new either. After the 2024 NEET leak, the government appointed a committee under K. Radhakrishnan, the former head of India’s space agency, to make the exams fair. Jairam Ramesh of the opposition Congress Party answered the announcement on July 26 by asking what became of it, noting that the government has still not finished implementing that committee’s 101 recommendations.

So the cockroaches asked for a statute and were handed a committee — a second committee, set up to consider what the first committee’s 101 recommendations were supposed to have fixed. A minister is only a head, a statute would have been a structure, and a task force is mostly a way of agreeing that something ought to happen later.

When the street is the only place left to complain

India’s cockroaches are the newest arrivals in a global wave more than two years old — youth movements organized online, often under the skull-and-straw-hat flag borrowed from the manga “One Piece,” that have shaken governments from Nepal and Peru to Morocco, Madagascar and Kenya since Bangladesh’s students brought down Sheikh Hasina in 2024.

Their records should be read as a warning rather than a template. Nepal’s movement carried the rapper and Kathmandu mayor Balendra Shah to the prime ministership in March, and three and a half months later he had shown no visible progress on the inequality and unemployment that carried him there. On July 9, a 25-year-old Dalit man running a motorcycle taxi set himself on fire over a six-dollar parking fine, triggering new protests. In Madagascar, the president fled and the army installed a colonel.

What researchers keep finding is the trap the CJP now sits inside: movements built online can be remarkably effective at forcing political change, but often struggle to turn that momentum into democratic governments that remain accountable and responsive to the people who brought them to power. But the deeper problem is not how the movement was built; it is what it was built around. Mehta, the political theorist, believes that India has run out of institutional ways to lodge a complaint or make anyone answer it. “The street is our only channel,” he wrote.

That is why the cockroaches were organized the way they were. Leaderlessness was a choice, not a default — one many movements have made since the committees, the regulators and the courts stopped functioning as places where a complaint could be filed. It buys speed and makes a movement hard to decapitate. It also leaves no one authorised to sign anything.

It is also exactly why the charter has nowhere to go. There is nobody obliged to read it, and nobody left at Jantar Mantar to ask why nobody has. Every quality that made this movement impossible to stop — no leader to arrest, no office, no list — is the same quality that makes it impossible for anyone to hold the government to a promise, which is to say: The armor has led to paralysis.

The walls at Jantar Mantar have been painted over. Rinku Kumar has gone back to Nawada to teach English. The charter sits in a drawer in a ministry whose minister has resigned, and a new task force will report in due course on what the last task force recommended.

Somebody has to still be standing there in six months to ask what became of any of it. That is the one job a movement without standing structure cannot do.

The cockroaches were never short of leaders — Dipke had a stage, and the government found two names to summon within the hour. What they never built was anything that would outlive the people holding the microphone. A leader can be detained on a Monday afternoon, and Dipke was. The concessions came fast because the crowd was large. But the crowd will not likely be large in December.

Shruthi Manjula Mohan, a young professional based in New Delhi, contributed reporting and visual support to this story.

This article What India’s Cockroach Party won — and what’s next was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Indigenous women already have the climate solutions was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

“I didn’t enter activism through theory,” explained activist Hillary Semeyan Lenantoiye in an email. “I entered through lived experience.”  

When Lenantoiye was growing up in northern Kenya’s Samburu County, the rain became less and less frequent. The river ran dry and the livestock, the lifeblood of her Indigenous pastoralist community, shrunk to bone. For the Samburu, cycles of drought, which have intensified with climate change, drive food scarcity and foster conflict and violence as people struggle with fewer economic resources. Families are forced to migrate, girls drop out of school due to household duties and the pressure to marry early, and women, who walk longer and longer distances for water and firewood, bear the weight of an entire family’s survival.

Over the years, Lenantoiye realized that while Indigenous peoples were often researched, spoken of and targeted by climate mitigation programs, they were not included in sharing possible solutions or accessing resources to support those solutions. This lack of meaningful inclusion led Lenantoiye to found the Inclusive Culture Action Network, or ICAN, — a Samburu-led climate and human rights organization with an emphasis on women, youth and traditional Indigenous knowledge. 

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“Indigenous communities already have the solutions,” she wrote in an email to Waging Nonviolence. “They just need to be trusted, empowered and included.”

In 2025, Lenantoiye joined the Nobel Women’s Initiative’s Sister-to-Sister Young Feminist Leadership Program. Through the initiative, which fosters solidarity and support among emerging feminist leaders focused on peace-building, human rights and climate justice, Lenantoiye has been connected with young leaders from around the world, including Karen Bailón, an Ecuadorian climate and gender justice activist and Daniela Alba, an Indigenous activist originally from Bogotá, Colombia. Though each of the three comes from a unique background, they agree on a central principle: the importance of empowering women, youth and Indigenous peoples in climate action and mitigation efforts both locally and internationally. 

On centering intergenerational impact and equity

Karen Bailón came to climate activism via feminism. 

Raised by a single mother in Ecuador’s Manabí Province, where female-headed households are common, Bailón saw the challenges women faced and became involved in spaces dedicated to empowering young women. It wasn’t until college, she wrote in an email, that studying of environmental defenders — and the violence often perpetuated against them — revealed how protecting nature and protecting people are one and the same struggle. 

“It was through that understanding that gender and climate became inseparable for me,” she wrote. “Especially as Indigenous women are disproportionately affected by both.”

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Ecuador voted to stop drilling in the Amazon — a year later they are still trying to kick the oil industry out

In particular, she cites the story of Indigenous environmental defender, Alicia Cahuiya, founder and president of the Association of Waorani Women of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Despite threats, Cahuiya not only helped Waorani women have a bigger stake in decision making but led a resistance against oil exploration and extraction in Yasuní — one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. At the center of this resistance, Bailón describes, has been Cahuiya’s journey to “recognizing herself as a political subject with the right to demand water, food, education and a living forest for her children.” 

One thing Bailón has taken from Ecuador’s Indigenous communities is the importance of centering intergenerational conversation — something she has found lacking in larger forums around climate solutions. 

In 2024, when Bailón attended the sixteenth Convention on Biological Diversity as a delegate from Latin America and the Caribbean, she realized that the increasing participation of youth in the climate justice movement hadn’t translated into a real voice at the international level. Despite references to “intergenerational equity” in official documents, young people, much like women and Indigenous peoples, continued to be excluded from spaces where binding decisions are made. 

Ecuadoran youth climate activist Karen Bailón attends the Convention on Biological Diversity as a delegate.

“Young people are not mere observers,” she wrote. “We are the generation that will live with the consequences of today’s decisions.”

This understanding led Bailón to begin working with GreenCheck, a youth-led nonprofit that redistributes resources to community-led climate initiatives around the world. Through her work, Bailón has connected and co-created climate solutions with more than 200 young people across climate-impacted Global South communities. It is a role she finds “deeply meaningful,” as it helps those closest to the climate crisis to lead the response.  

“What we call ‘climate solutions’ in the realm of international politics often already exists, in practice, within Indigenous and local communities,” Bailón wrote. “They simply haven’t been recognized.” 

On resisting tokenism

For Daniela Alba, another young leader in the Nobel Women’s Initiative’s Sister-to-Sister Young Feminist Leadership Program, climate justice is grounded in her upbringing in Bogotá, Colombia, and in the teachings of her Indigenous Muisca grandmother and the cosmology of her people. For the Muisca, she explained, Mother Earth and Bachué, the creator of water, are the first spirits you encounter in life. 

“It is not then that the land belongs to us,” she said. “It is that we belong to her.” 

As an Indigenous woman and a survivor of gender-based violence and forced displacement, Alba’s vision of climate justice has not only been shaped by indigeneity and ancestral knowledge but also the “deeply wrapped and intertwined” scars of both personal trauma and colonial violence, she said. It is these multiple truths, often contradictory to Western binary thinking, that not only underpin her activism but have led to her work as the advocacy coordinator for Social Justice and Ecology Secretariat, a Rome-based Jesuit organization. 

Tracing the Roman Catholic Church’s long and brutal history of violence, capitalism and colonization, Alba described her focus on the faith-based sector as a step toward reconciliation for historical and institutional acts of violence undertaken with so-called good intentions.

“The harm that causes reverberates throughout many, many centuries,” she said. “So I honor the sacrifices my ancestors made so someone like myself, against all odds, could exist in these spaces.”

But institutional harms, Alba noted, persist today.

In November 2025, Alba attended the 12-day COP30 conference in Belém, Brazil — the first such climate conference in the Amazon. Outside the “blue zone,” where official negotiations take place, she witnessed how despite peaceful protests, Indigenous peoples were denied both entry and dialogue with Brazil’s President and were instead barred by security and military personnel. Meanwhile, during the events themselves, Alba felt there was a level of tokenism she described as “out of hand.”

Alba has seen this contradiction across multiple conferences, organizations and institutions. The voices of Indigenous peoples, women and other marginalized groups are often promoted for press briefings before being “tossed to the side,” she said. Given her relative access to a powerful institution, Alba has worked to counter this erasure by centering the voices of local communities in her work as well as her approach to climate justice. 

“My duty is not to speak for them,” she said. “But to listen to their voices and from that, create momentum within faith-based organizations at an international level.”

Indigenous ecofeminist activist Daniela Alba (center) stands with leaders of the Nobel Women’s Initiative at the Rooted and Rising Convening in Nairobi.

At COP30, against the backdrop of state violence and marginalization, when many people, Alba said, were “sick and tired” of witnessing the same thing happen again and again. Nature, she felt, had other plans. In the Amazon, and in Belém, in particular, the rain often fell with such intensity that delegates could barely hear one another above the roar. As Alba sat on a panel, the group debating whether to postpone the event, she explained that she would cede her time to listening to the Earth.

“There’s nothing I can tell you that she won’t,” she said. “But do you know how to listen?”

On Indigenous knowledge for contemporary climate solutions

Five years ago, when Lenantoiye founded her organization, ICAN, she knew the best approach to climate action in Samburu County would be community-led, practical and grounded in response to the realities of pastoralist communities. Since then, ICAN programs have included promoting sustainable rangeland management through Indigenous grazing systems, using local knowledge of weather patterns to foster climate awareness, and facilitating more than 100 intergenerational community dialogues. 

“Rather than replacing traditional systems, we build on them,” Lenantoiye wrote,  “integrating Indigenous knowledge with modern climate solutions to create approaches that are both culturally relevant and sustainable.”

Hilary Lenantoiye (center) stands with Samburu participants in her climate action and empowerment organization, ICAN.

Lenantoiye’s work has also focused extensively on Samburu women.

Across the region and globally, drought, conflict and resource scarcity not only impact women economically but can increase their risk of gender-based violence. A 2018 study, for example, found that during a heat wave, the risk of intimate partner femicide can rise by as much as 40 percent. Similarly, in drought-stricken Samburu county, women face increased risk of violence as limited resources place additional stress on families, Lenantoiye said.

Addressing environmental challenges without considering gender dynamics only risks reinforcing existing inequalities, Lenantoiye wrote. Within the Samburu community, ICAN has supported women, who are often excluded from decisions about land and resources, to organize savings groups and start small businesses.

“I have witnessed once invisible women and youth now speaking up about land, livelihoods and climate solutions,” Lenantoiye wrote. “The resilience and determination of young girls in my community continues to inspire me.”

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For Lenantoiye, the same goes for Samburu youth. 

Much like women, young people bear many of the consequences of climate change and extreme weather. Boys guarding livestock are often placed on the frontlines of resource violence while girls, due to decreased food and income, are at higher risk of child marriage. This increased vulnerability prompted Lenantoiye to involve youth in tree planting, rangeland restoration and cultural storytelling. 

To date, ICAN has mobilized over 2,000 youth on climate action, governance, culture and socioeconomic empowerment. These projects have included establishing high school environmental peace clubs, offering community radio training opportunities, and facilitating intercultural and intergenerational forums focused on climate adaptation and peacebuilding. Involvement in local climate action, Lenantoiye believes, not only gives young people a voice in their community, but helps shape a different kind of climate leadership. 

“When women and youth are given space, knowledge and opportunities, they don’t just adapt,” she said. “They lead transformation.”

This article Indigenous women already have the climate solutions was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Announcing the first Waging Nonviolence Fellowship was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The Waging Nonviolence Fellowship is a five-month journalistic training program that offers the opportunity to work closely with experienced editors and generate a body of clips on an undercovered movement beat. Fellows will each write five monthly feature articles (at least 1,500 words long) for Waging Nonviolence over the course of the program. 

This is a remote (U.S.-based) position with a flexible, self-determined schedule. Fellows will receive an initial stipend of $500, and then $250 per published story.

With mentorship from senior editor Jessica Stites and editor-in-chief Eric Stoner, participants will fine-tune their ability to pitch, report and write compelling movement stories. Fellows will have an initial meeting with the editors and additional meetings as needed throughout the program. 

Fellows are expected to take initiative in seeking out stories, reliably meet deadlines and respond quickly over email while working on a piece.

This is an opportunity to pursue stories of true substance (not clickbait) that are read by leading movement thinkers, organizers and activists. Our writers have gone on to write and work for Democracy Now!, Vox, The Guardian, The Intercept, The New Republic, Rolling Stone and elsewhere.

Requirements

• Experience in reporting or reported analysis on social movements
• Excellent writing skills; ability to turn in clean copy
• Passionate about movements organizing for peace and justice

Preferred

• Established connections to groups, activists and communities at the forefront of today’s social movements, such as racial justice, labor or democracy defense.
• Knowledgeable on the history, theories, strategies and tactics of civil resistance/nonviolent action.

Waging Nonviolence welcomes people of all backgrounds and encourages people from groups that are underrepresented in media to apply. 

How to apply

We are now accepting applications for the Fall 2026 fellowship. Resume/CV not required. To apply, please fill out this form by August 10, 2026. 

Who we are

Since our founding in 2009, Waging Nonviolence has become the leading source for news, analysis and original reporting on social movements around the world. 

We tell in-depth, compelling stories about how ordinary people are fighting for a broad range of social, economic, racial and environmental justice issues — and challenging authoritarians around the world. To demystify the work of social change, we get behind-the-scenes with organizers to unpack the strategies and tactics they use to build a more just world. While most media focus on why protests are happening, our stories seek to uncover the how.

We have been called “an indispensable platform for exploring creative and strategic resistance” by journalist Naomi Klein, and “the essential journalistic resource on civil resistance” by Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth.

This article Announcing the first Waging Nonviolence Fellowship was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

By Vanessa Mascia Turri

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

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

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

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

From water struggles to the democracy of the commons

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Participation and the limits of the commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remunicipalisation without democratisation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Gracia Ramirez and David Vergara-Moreno

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

DOCKS

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

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

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

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

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

LOGISTICS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MATERIALS

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

Coral grounds. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

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

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

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

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

Wooden house. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

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

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

Seashell. Photo by David Vergara.

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

ORIKA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNBOUNDEDNESS

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

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

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

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

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

ROOTS

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

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

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

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

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

DRIFT

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

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

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

Plastic and vegetable waste. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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