How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth

It's a great time to be an oligarch! If you have accumulated a great fortune and wish to put whatever great crime lies behind it behind you, there is an army of fixers, lickspittles, thugs, reputation-launderers, procurers, henchmen, and other enablers who have turnkey solutions for laundering your reputation and keeping the unwashed from building a guillotine outside the gates of your compound.

The field of International Relations has studied the enemies of the Klept in detail: the Transnational Activist Network is a well-documented phenomenon. But far more poorly understood is the Transnational Uncivil Society Network, who will polish any turd of sufficient wealth to a high, professional gloss.

These TUSNs are the subject of a new, timely scholarly paper by Alexander Cooley, John Heathershaw and Ricard Soares de Oliveira: "Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism," published in last month's European Journal of International Relations:

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5e5a3052-c693-4991-a7cc-bc2b47134467/download_file?file_format=application%2Fpdf&safe_filename=Cooley_et_al_2023_transnational_uncivil_society.pdf&type_of_work=Journal+article

The authors document how a collection of institutions – some coercive, others organized around good works – allow kleptocrats to take power, keep power, and use power. This includes "wealth managers, company providers, accounting firms, and international bankers" who create the complex financial structures that obscure the klept's wealth. It also includes "second citizenship managers and lawyers" that facilitate the klept's transnational nature, both to provide access to un-looted, prosperous places to visit, and boltholes to escape to in the face of coup or reform. It includes the real-estate brokers and other asset facilitators, who turn whole precincts of the world's greatest cities into empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, while ensuring that footlose criminal elites always have a penthouse to perch in when they take a break from the desiccated husks they've drained dry back home.

Of course, it also includes the PR managers and philanthropic ventures that allow the klept to launder their reputation, to make themselves synonymous with good deeds rather than mass murder. Think here of how the Sacklers used charity to turn their family name into a synonym for culture and fine art, rather than death by opioid overdose:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

Beyond providing comfort to "Politically Exposed Persons" and "High Net-Worth Individuals," TUSNs are concerned with neutralizing TANs. Activists in these transnational networks play an inside-outside game: in-country activists will recruit peers abroad to bring attention to the crimes of their local kleptocrats. These overseas partners target the klept in the places they go to play and spend, spoiling their fun – and if they succeed in getting corrupt leaders censured abroad, then in-country activists can leverage that bad press to fight the klept at home.

To fight this "Boomerang Effect," TUSNs seek to burnish corrupt officials' reputations abroad, getting their names on humanitarian prizes, beloved sports teams, cultural institutions and great universities. They seek to capture international governance institutions that might wrong-foot kleptocrats, co-opting them to enable and even celebrate looters.

When it comes to elite philanthropy, TUSNs are necessarily selective. Kleptocrats' foundations don't fund anti-kleptocratic groups – they stick to "education, public health, the environment and the arts." These domains steer clear of human rights questions that might implicate their benefactors. Russian oligarchs love children's charities and disability rights – provided they don't target the Russian state.

If charitable giving is reputation laundering's carrot, then "reputation management" is the laundry's stick. Think of organized copyfraudsters who clone websites that have criticized their clients, then backdate the articles, then accuse the originals of infringing copyright in order to get them de-listed from Google or taken offline altogether:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

Reputation managers also spend a lot of time in court. In the UK – the world's leader in libel tourism, thanks to a legal system designed to let posh monsters sue muckraking journalists into silence – Russian oligarchs have perfected the art of forcing their critics to shut up and go away:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/04/londongrad/#enablers

Indeed, London is a one-stop shop for the global klept, a place were forelock-tugging Renfields will buy you a Mayfair mansion under cover of a numbered company, sue your critics into silence, funnel your money into an anonymous Channel Islands account:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/07/the-klept/#pep

They'll sell you whole galleriesworth of "fine art" that you can have relocated to a climate-controlled container in a Swiss or Irish freeport:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#moneylab

They'll give your thick-as-pigshit progeny a PhD and never check to see whether he wrote his thesis himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE%E2%80%93Gaddafi_affair

Then they'll hook you up with a cyber-arms dealer to hunt your enemies by capturing their devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

But don't let Brexit stop you from shopping for bargains on the continent. The Golden Passports of the EU – available in a variety of flavors, from Maltese to Cypriot to Portuguese – offer the discerning failson access to the luxury good shops and fleshpots of 27 advanced economies, making it a favorite of the Khmer Riche – the junior klept of Cambodia's ruling faction:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/cambodia-hunsen-wealth/

But golden passports are for amateurs. Skilled klepts travel on diplomatic passports, which offer the twin benefits of free movement and consequence-free criminality, thanks to diplomatic immunity. The former Kazakh dictator's son-in-law enjoyed a freewheeling diplomatic life in Vienna; one daughters of the dictator of Tajikistan had a jolly time as an envoy to DC; another, to London (where else?).

All this globetrotting serves a second purpose: when rival elites seize power back home and force the old guard into exile, those ex-monsters can show up in the lands they called their second homes and apply for asylum. It turns out that even bomb-the-boats UK will welcome any asylum seeker who enters via the private jet terminal at City Airport (to be fair, these "refugees" have extensive properties in Zone 1 and country places in the Home Counties, so they won't need housing).

This stuff works. After Kazakh state goons murdered at least 14 protesters at a Zhanaozen oil facility in 2011, human rights groups around the world took up the cause. But they were effectively neutralized by TUSNs, with former UK PM Tony Blair writing on behalf of the Kazakh government to the EU condemning any kind of international investigation into the mass killings (add "former Prime Ministers" to the list of commodities for sale in the UK to sufficiently well-resourced murderer).

The authors close their paper with two case-studies. The first is of the daughters of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, Gulnara and Lola. And President Karimov was indeed a dictator: he trapped his population within his borders, forced them to use unconvertible scrip in place of money, and ordered the murder of hundreds of peaceful protesters, plunging the country into international isolation.

But while Uzbeks were sealed within their borders, Gulnara Karimov became an international player, running a complex network of businesses that mixed the products of the nation's oilfields with her family's fortune. She solicited – and received – bribes from Teliasonera, MTS and Vimpelcom, who were all vying for the contract to provide service in Uzbekistan. All told, she extracted more than $1b in bribes, laundering them through Latvia, Hong Kong and New York. She acquired real-estate in France and Switzerland, and her spree continued until her father collaborated with Uzbek security to seize her assets and place her under house-arrest.

Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva was Gulnara's estranged younger sister. She and her husband Timur Tillyaev ran the Dubai-based SecureTrade, which did extensive business with "opaque Scottish Limited Partnerships," laundering more than $127m in a single year to offshore accounts in the UAE and Switzerland. They acquired many luxe assets – a jet, a Californian villa, and an LA perfumier.

Lola styled herself as the face of the Karimovas abroad, a "philanthropist and cultural ambassador." She was a UNESCO ambassador and commissioned works of monumental art – and also sued the shit out of news outlets that reported factual matters about her family repressive activity at home. She organized AIDS charities in the name of Uzbekistan – even as her father was imprisoning a writer for publishing a book explaining how to have safer sex.

The second case-study is on Isabel dos Santos, "Africa's richest woman," daughter of Angolan dictator Jose Eduardo dos Santos. Isabel's vast fortune stemmed from her personal capture of vast swathes of the third-largest economy in Africa: "telecommunications, banking, diamonds, real estate and cement, among many others." Isabel enjoyed seemingly limitless access to state credit and co-investment, and was given first crack at newly deregulated industries. Foreign firms that invested in Angola were required to "partner" with Isabel's businesses.

Isabel claimed to be a "self-made woman" – a claim credulously parroted by the western press, including the FT. She used her homegrown fortune to become a major player abroad, especially in Portugal, where she was represented by the leading Portuguese law-firm PLMJ. Her enablers are who's who of corruption-loving lickspittles: McKinsey, Ernst and Young, Boston Consulting Group, and the Spanish BigLaw firm Uri Menendez.

Isabel cultivated a public facade of philanthropic giving and public spirited activism, serving as head of the Angolan Red Cross. She attended Davos and spoke at the LSE (she was also invited to Oxford, but her invitation was subsequently rescinded). On social media, she dismissed critics of her wealth and corruption as "colonialists," decrying their "racism" and "prejudice."

Isabel dos Santos's corrupt sources of wealth were finally, irrefutably exposed through the Luanda Leaks, in which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists mapped the network of "top banks, management consultants and legal firms that were central to dos Santos’s operations."

Both case studies shed light on the network of brilliant, driven enablers and procurers without whom the world's greatest monsters would falter. It's a rare window on a secretive world, one that is poorly understood even by its inhabitants. As Michael Mechanic wrote in Jackpot, his 2021 book on vast, intergenerational fortunes, the winners of the lucky orifice lottery often lack any real understanding of how The Money is structured, grown and protected:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#affluenza

This point was reiterated by Abigail Disney, in a brave piece on what it's like to grow up subject to the oversight of these millionaires who babysit the children of billionaires:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

This is an important contribution to the literature. We naturally focus on the ultrawealthy individuals whose reputations and fortunes are the subject of so much attention, but without the TUSNs, they would be largely helpless.

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/24/launderers-enforcers-bagmen/#procurers

Image: Sam Valadi (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/17086570218/

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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Colin (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palace_of_Westminster_from_the_dome_on_Methodist_Central_Hall_(cropped).jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

Kurdish ecology. Indigenous seeds and food heritage. Palestinian edible plant archive. Ezidi foods and reverence for landscapes. The narratives of “exiled foods.” Suryani, Zaza, Kurdish, and Armenian displacement. Okra and mustard greens. Dispossession and native plants in  Anatolia and the Mediterranean. Imagining alternative worlds and affirmative care structures. Landscapes breathing in slow, deep time. Seed exchanges and “entanglement of solidarity” across regions in defiance of military surveillance, industrial monoculture, and extraction. “Homeland is not where you were born, it is where you are fed.”

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Okra is strong and can survive the precarity of exile and migration: it can be found in a Bangladeshi vegetable stand in Rome, an Ezidi camp in Diyarbakır, or a guerilla garden along the highway in Kowloon. Okra is one of the world’s oldest cultivated crops, spread by the processes of colonization and the slave trade from Africa and India to the Mediterranean and westward to the new world. Its versatility makes it well suited for states of dispossession and survival. [...] The colonization and standardization of landscapes is always rooted in controlling the cultivation and erasure of localities. [...] Today, the same region [Anatolia and the Mediterranean] is inundated with wars and oppressions that destroy not only biodiversity but also the intangible heritage of ingredients and their narratives across our earth.

“Survival-with” and “through” is something of an entangled kinship that can be described as migrating ingredients, refugee seeds, and exiled foods. Works by artists Seçkin Aydın and Gülsün Karamustafa deal with forced eviction and exile from their homelands in different historical periods in the last century in Anatolia. Aydın is a Zaza minority from an evicted Kurdish town called Kulp (Diyarbakır Province). His work I can’t carry my grandma, i can also not eat her or wear her (2015) uses the metaphor of Aydın’s grandma keeping small fruits in his pocket during their journey of exile when he was a child. [...]

Karamustafa’s work Heimat Ist Wo Mann Isst (1994) depicts three spoons wrapped in an old cloth. The title means “Homeland is not where you were born, it is where you are fed,” which refers to cross-Balkan and Anatolian transnational migration.

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Practices of collecting and archiving heirloom seeds are a form of solidarity and resistance against extractive capitalism and industrialized agriculture. Such projects protect and aim to restore natural habitats and biodiversity. They are critical of dominant monocultural approaches [...]. How can we consider a more-than-human ethics around seed and seed heritage? How can we collect cross-narrative assemblages of seed heritage? [...]

Indigenous phenomenologies are essential for tracing food heritage and the ingredients that are tightly connected to local communities of Zazas, Ezidis, Armenians, Suryanis, Kurds, and others who are continuously exiled by force in the ongoing extracted landscapes of the Tigris. Often with colleagues we find ourselves discussing, for example, the giyayê xerdelê (mustard greens) that can be easily foraged in the hills of Heskîf, a millennia-old archeological heritage site that has almost been destroyed by the nearby Ilisu Dam, which justifies the expropriation of lands from Kurdish villages and from many nomadic shepherds who were forced to leave. Military surveillance of farmers and of the common grazing grounds of Ezidi, Suryani, and Kurdish villages leads to a loss of the network [...].

Kurdish ecology activists Bişar İçli and Zeki Kanay, who were banned from their municipality and their university positions by the Turkish government in 2017, started an agro-ecological solidarity commune in Diyarbakır. They archive, exchange, and create networks of seeds around the Tigris River basin, producing an entanglement of solidarity infrastructure among Kurdish communities against military surveillance and capitalism-led extraction in this region.

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Cineria, an Ezidi village near Batman, Turkey, was nearly emptied out in the 1980s due to conflict in the region between the Kurdish movement and the Turkish state. [...] Soil, stone, rocks, caves, and water are fundamental cosmological elements of Ezidi cultural practice connecting the past, present, and future. Each year the village hosts semi-nomadic Zaza shepherds who migrate from another southeastern Turkish city, Bitlis [...]. The Ezidis accommodate the shepherds for six to seven months in Cineria; both communities communicate using the Kurmanji language. [...]

Long walks through landscapes are a basic practice of Ezidi women, where they learn about the land and the cultivation cycle connected to Ezidi cosmology, which is about keeping and protecting ingredients, seeds, and healthy soil. Honouring nonhuman elements is fundamental to Ezidi cosmology. As Ezidi women walk through the landscape, they tell stories of dispossession, mourn for lost soil and seeds, and whisper continously: “av, agîr, erd, ba, roj.” [...]

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Palestinian geographer Omar Tesdell, who created the Palestinian edible plants archive, tells us that landscapes move in slow, deep time, and that all wild plants, seeds, and healthy soil are our heritages. These heritages will not only support our precarious societies but may create an ethical, responsible entanglement of resilient coexistences for our collective future. [...]

Following an okra plant through narratives, infrastructures, forgotten languages, and entangled exiles is not a metaphor. As artist Jumana Manna writes, we strive toward “imagining alternative/affirmative care structures that remain, within and beyond the current reality, aligned towards plant and human life alike.” Navigating through migrating ingredients, refugee seeds, and exiled foods, we witness and learn about extractive strategies, state-making, and slow violence.

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Text by: Pelin Tan. “Entangled Exiles.” e-flux (journal). Issue 131. November 2022. [Italicized first paragraph/heading added by me.]

Hi there! I'm writing this in hopes that you'll have some advice. Lately I've been struggling a lot with concern for climate change. Mainly because I fear that I won't have a future, that when I'm older I'll live in a planet where you can't even go out because of the heat and everything is completely destroyed. And it's been affecting my day-to-day life. And no matter how much I try to avoid bad news they'll show up to me and I relapse into the anxiety and lose all the progress I made.

The bad news and the things that are happening (for example this thing going around of flowers growing in cold places, the one that probably worries me the most) make me feel like maybe the good things won't be enough and I won't have a future, no matter how much I hope. All I want is to be certain I'll have a life and things will get better

Do you have any advice to stop feeling this way? Thank you in advance!

Hi there. So firstly, thanks for reaching out. Anxiety can make us want to isolate ourselves and so you’ve taken a brave first step in seeking connection. I felt like you feel for a long time, and still do sometimes. It can feel like the change is so huge, so rapid, so irreversible, and human responses so weak, so slow, so apathetic. But I’m here to tell you that however reasonable being frightened is, it doesn’t have to be the end of the journey. Grief and fear are a good start for your environmental affect, because it means you’re keyed in and you care. But stopping there will only paralyse you.

I know the good things feel small, which is why it’s important to bombard yourself with them so you get a sense of just how much momentum we are building in the movement right now. I regularly check out Positive News and the Good News Network, and follow Sam Bentley and lots of ‘weekly earth win’ type accounts. When you see how much plastic people are clearing out of the ocean, how much solar and wind prices have come down, how Paris is now full of cyclists and London’s deaths from air pollution are reducing, how Europe is slowly rewilding and land is being returned to indigenous people, you realise that quietly, determinedly, good is happening in the background. And you aren’t always not seeing it just because it’s smaller or less important - bear in mind that the media sells on engagement, so attention-grabbing disasters will always hit front page news. It’s hard to quantify people who are alive who wouldn’t otherwise be, oil in the ground because people stopped a pipeline. Justice is often less hypervisible and sudden than injustice.

For me personally, taking action and spending time with others who are doing the same is the single biggest thing that cured a lot of my anxiety. Depending on your age, income, profession and health, I would recommend doing whatever is accessible to you of eating as much plant-based food as possible, reducing your use of aeroplanes and cars to as close to zero as is reasonable, making sure your stove, heating and hot water is being powered by electricity, switching to a renewable tariff, attending regular activist meetings and the protests and public debates these will lead you into, buying fewer clothes, single-use plastic items and other non-essentials, lobbying for change at your workplace, your university or your school, and bringing the subject up as often as you can with friends and family, so discussing climate change becomes more of a cultural norm. (I always find with these conversations though that scaring people is deeply counterintuitive and encourages them to get angry with you and bury their heads deeper in the sand. Why not start a conversation about how much healthier you feel when you eat lentils, or how transnational rail is making a comeback, or how exciting it is what they can do with solar and battery storage these days, or the amazing flood prevention benefits of reintroducing beavers?) I saw a tweet once that said ‘I bet 80% of your climate anxiety will disappear if you work full time on climate.’ Now I don’t work in that sphere yet, but I’m currently retraining, and I have to say a lot of my anxiety has quietened knowing that I am doing all I can and will continue to do so for the rest of my working life. And don’t feel like your skills or educational/professional background hold you back either: solving this crisis isn’t just for scientists and can’t be left to only one sector of society. I was an English Lit grad - now I’m hoping to work in campaigning, comms or social policy to make positive change for the better around climate. If it’s possible for you, I’d recommend starting to consider entering the green sector full time. Just watch out for corporate greenwash!

I know that changing your individual lifestyle isn’t going to save the planet, but it might just save you. Once you feel you have done everything you can in your personal life, it might embolden you to show up in activist spaces, to connect with other people who care, and to remember that as terrifying and agonising as the changes we are causing and witnessing are, there is always still hope, and it is easy to create and nurture that hope if you only keep hold of the right narratives and connect with the right people.

I’ve answered some similar asks on this sort of topic, so I’d recommend scrolling back through my blog and reading them, and also following as many solarpunks as you can across all of social media. Solarpunk Presents podcast does a good job of drawing your attention to the good stuff already happening now. Stay safe, take care of yourself and remember you have so much to offer. We were all born at the most pivotal time in human history. That is a burden, but it’s also a gift. We can have the most impactful and meaningful lives to date, and I think we will. But the fight has to start now, and that means we have to be ready for it. You can’t strive for a better tomorrow if you can’t imagine it, so take some time to look after you and really douse yourself in hope and optimism - it’s out there waiting to be found, if you only look in the right places.

Putin's destruction of the Kakhovska dam in Ukraine adds to the climate emergency. Too much coverage of it ignores the environmental aspects of this act of desperation.

Overall, Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not just a genocidal act of aggression by an imperialist power headed by an unbalanced dictator. The invasion is an ongoing act of environmental war against Planet Earth.

The destruction of the Kakhovska dam has caused massive damage, flooding homes and habitats, killing animals, plants and insects en masse. It has contaminated water, washed away landmines and other explosive weapons, and posed a new threat to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. So far, evidence points strongly in favour of an explosion. The flooding has also impacted protected areas that are part of the transnational Emerald Network, including several national nature parks: Velykyi Luh (which remains illegally occupied by Russia), Kam’ianska Sich and Nyzhniodniprovskyi. This will severely damage biodiversity in Ukraine and contribute to the sixth mass extinction of species globally.

Ecocide is not yet an established part of international law. But it is part of Ukrainian law.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court does not list ecocide as an international crime, but it is part of Ukraine’s criminal code – and Ukraine can set an international precedent by holding Russia accountable for environmental harm.

We need to speak out more about the environmental calamity of Putin's invasion.

Environmental organisations globally must take urgent action in support of Ukraine and against Russian colonial violence. It is not enough to just lobby against fossil fuel extraction; we must recognise that the end of Russian imperialism is key to the struggle for climate justice. Ukrainian environmental activists have spoken about the increase in CO2 emissions caused by the Russian invasion. If climate emergency initiatives only remember Ukraine in relation to the global food crisis and crop shortages (the destruction of the Kakhovska dam has further damaged the country’s agricultural sector) or the impact the war has had on the global fossil fuel economy, but remain silent and inactive when Ukrainians are killed by flooding and shelling, they are complicit in Russia’s invasion.

While there's not yet a specific international law on ecocide, there are currently some aspects of the law which could hold Putin and his henchmen accountable for several acts which have affected the environment.

Here is Article 56 (Sections 1 & 2) of Protocol I of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions 1949.

Clearly the destruction of the dam at Kakhovka is covered. So is the vandalism, theft, and destruction at the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Though it's likely that some of the Russian occupiers who camped out at Chernobyl last year may have already died of radiation sickness. Yes, Moscow has had a hand in Europe's two worst environmental disasters of the past 40 years.

Although the culprits may currently be inaccessible, there's plenty of evidence to launch investigations prior to prosecution. Putin and his accomplices must never again be able to live normal lives.

Chapter 4. Environment

What about global environmental problems, like climate change?

Anarchists do not yet have experience dealing with global problems because our successes so far have only been local and temporary. Stateless, anarchic societies once covered the world, but this was long before the existence of global environmental problems like those created by capitalism. Today, members of many of these indigenous societies are at the forefront of global resistance to the ecological destruction caused by governments and corporations.

Anarchists also coordinate resistance globally. They organize international protests against major polluters and their state backers, such as the mobilizations during the G8 summits that have convened hundreds of thousands of people from dozens of countries to demonstrate against the states most responsible for global warming and other problems. In response to the global activity of transnational corporations, ecologically-minded anarchists share information globally. In this manner, activists around the world can coordinate simultaneous actions against corporations, targeting a polluting factory or mine on one continent, retail stores on another continent, and an international headquarters or shareholders’ meeting on another continent.

For example, major protests, boycotts, and acts of sabotage against Shell Oil were coordinated among people in Nigeria, Europe, and the North America throughout the 1980s and ’90s. In 1986, autonomists in Denmark carried out multiple simultaneous fire bombings of Shell stations across the country during a worldwide boycott to punish Shell for supporting the government responsible for apartheid in South Africa. In the Netherlands, the clandestine anti-authoritarian group RARA (Revolutionary Anti-Racist Action) carried out a campaign of nonlethal bombings against Shell Oil, playing a crucial role in forcing Shell to pull out of South Africa. In 1995, when Shell wanted to dump an old oil rig in the North Sea, it was forced to abandon its plans by protests in Denmark and the UK, an occupation of the oil rig by Greenpeace activists, and a fire bombing and a shooting attack against Shell stations in two different cities in Germany as well as a boycott that lowered sales by ten percent in that country.[67] Efforts such as these prefigure the decentralized global networks that could protect the environment in an anarchist future. If we succeed in abolishing capitalism and the state, we will have removed the greatest systemic ravagers of the environment as well as the structural barriers that currently impede popular action in defense of nature.

There are historical examples of stateless societies responding to large scale, collective environmental problems through decentralized networks. Though the problems were not global, the relative distances they faced — with information traveling at a pedestrian’s pace — were perhaps greater than the distances that mark today’s world, in which people can communicate instantaneously even if they live on opposite sides of the planet.

Tonga is a Pacific archipelago settled by Polynesian peoples. Before colonization, it had a centralized political system with a hereditary leader, but the system was far less centralized than a state, and the leader’s coercive powers were limited. For 3,200 years, the people of Tonga were able to maintain sustainable practices over an archipelago of 288 square miles with tens of thousands of inhabitants.[68] There was no communications technology, so information travelled slowly. Tonga is too large for a single farmer to have knowledge of all the islands or even all of any of its large islands. The leader was traditionally able to guide and ensure sustainable practices not through recourse to force, but because he had access to information from the entire territory, just as a federation or general assembly would if the islanders organized themselves in that way. It was up to the individuals who made up the society to implement particular practices and support the idea of sustainability.

The fact that a large population can protect the environment in a diffuse or decentralized manner, without leadership, is amply demonstrated by the aforementioned New Guinea highlanders. Agriculture usually leads to deforestation as land is cleared for fields, and deforestation can kill the soil. Many societies respond by clearing more land to compensate for lower soil productivity, thus aggravating the problem. Numerous civilizations have collapsed because they destroyed their soil through deforestation. The danger of soil erosion is accentuated in mountainous terrain, such as the New Guinea highlands, where heavy rains can wash away denuded soil en masse. A more intelligent practice, which the farmers in New Guinea perfected, is silvaculture: integrating trees with the other crops, combining orchard, field, and forest to protect the soil and create symbiotic chemical cycles between the various cultivated plants.

The people of the highlands developed special anti-erosion techniques to keep from losing the soil of their steep mountain valleys. Any particular farmer might have gained a quick advantage by taking shortcuts that would eventually cause erosion and rob future generations of healthy soil, yet sustainable techniques were used universally at the time of colonization. Anti-erosion techniques were spread and reinforced using exclusively collective and decentralized means. The highlanders did not need experts to come up with these environmental and gardening technologies and they did not need bureaucrats to ensure that everyone was using them. Instead, they relied on a culture that valued experimentation, individual freedom, social responsibility, collective stewardship of the land, and free communication. Effective innovations developed in one area spread quickly and freely from valley to valley. Lacking telephones, radio, or internet, and separated by steep mountains, each valley community was like a country unto itself. Hundreds of languages are spoken within the New Guinea highlands, changing from one community to the next. Within this miniature world, no one community could make sure that other communities were not destroying their environment — yet their decentralized approach to protecting the environment worked. Over thousands of years, they protected their soil and supported a population of millions of people living at such a high population density that the first Europeans to fly overhead saw a country they likened to the Netherlands.

Water management in that lowland northern country in the 12th and 13th centuries provides another example of bottom-up solutions to environmental problems. Since much of the Netherlands is below sea level and nearly all of it is in danger of flooding, farmers had to work constantly to maintain and improve the water management system. The protections against flooding were a common infrastructure that benefited everybody, yet they also required everyone to invest in the good of the collective to maintain them: an individual farmer stood to gain by shirking water management duties, but the entire society would lose if there were a flood. This example is especially significant because Dutch society lacked the anarchistic values common in indigenous societies. The area had long been converted to Christianity and indoctrinated in its ecocidal, hierarchical values; for hundreds of years it had been under the control of a state, though the empire had fallen apart and in the 12th and 13th centuries the Netherlands were effectively stateless. Central authority in the form of church officials, feudal lords, and guilds remained strong in Holland and Zeeland, where capitalism would eventually originate, but in northern regions such as Friesland society was largely decentralized and horizontal.

At that time, contact between towns dozens of miles apart — several days’ travel — could be more challenging than global communication in the present day. Despite this difficulty, farming communities, towns, and villages managed to build and maintain extensive infrastructure to reclaim land from the sea and protect against flooding amid fluctuating sea levels. Neighborhood councils, by organizing cooperative work bands or dividing duties between communities, built and maintained the dykes, canals, sluices, and drainage systems necessary to protect the entire society; it was “a joint approach from the bottom-up, from the local communities, that found their protection through organizing themselves in such a way.”[69] Spontaneous horizontal organizing even played a major role in the feudal areas such as Holland and Zeeland, and it is doubtful that the weak authorities who did exist in those parts could have managed the necessary water works by themselves, given their limited power. Though the authorities always take credit for the creativity of the masses, spontaneous self-organization persists even in the shadow of the state.

Amid Robert Rundo’s Extradition, the White Supremacist Active Clubs Network Remains a Threat

Robert Rundo, co-founder of the white supremacist Rise Above Movement, is back in the United States, extradited to California from Romania to once again face federal rioting charges. Rundo, who left the United States for southeastern Europe after his criminal case was briefly dismissed in 2019, remained an active participant in the transnational white supremacist movement during his time abroad. Rundo’s time in Europe was characterized by his emergence as a prominent white supremacist leader, driven by his development of “white nationalism 3.0.” 

This decentralized model has resulted in the creation of localized white supremacist Active Clubs, which promote fraternity and a so-called white “warrior spirit,” while also engaging in physical training for what members perceive to be an impending race war. Rundo also established a propaganda arm, Media2Rise, and an online merchandising entity, Will2Rise, to create a white supremacist brand that could expand Active Club messaging and deepen connections between Active Clubs and other white supremacist groups like Patriot Front.

As Rundo returns to the United States to face federal charges five years after his initial arrest, the Active Club network, now the latest iteration of his white supremacist movement, represents an enduring threat and legacy that will persist long after the founder’s potential incarceration.

The Rise of the Rise Above Movement

Rundo co-founded the Rise Above Movement (RAM) in 2017, alongside fellow white supremacist Ben Daley. RAM quickly established itself in the Southern California white supremacist scene, growing from a small crew of right-wing gym enthusiasts to roughly 50 active members. Rundo’s strategic messaging in the early years of RAM played a key role in the group’s initial success, establishing the organization’s brand as the “premier MMA club of the Alt-Right.” As part of this branding, RAM focused on mixed martial arts (MMA), race-based physical fitness, and transforming keyboard warriors into real-world street fighters. Rundo and Daley’s framing allowed the organization to expand its influence beyond the borders of the United States and network with a growing white nationalist fight scene in Europe.

From its inception, RAM sought to act as the “violent vanguard” of the white supremacist movement, taking the mantle from the prominent skinhead gangs of the 1980’s and 1990’s. RAM members functioned as street fighters who wanted to commit acts of violence against those they regarded as their adversaries. They positioned themselves as white patriotic crusaders who were fighting against the perceived threat posed by “communists” or antifa and advocated on behalf of a perceived victimized white population in the United States. 

In 2017, RAM members were part of a series of violent clashes at rallies in Berkeley and Huntington Beach, California. On April 15 of that year, a fight broke out between white supremacists and anti-fascist activists at a rally near UC Berkeley, which resulted in 20 arrests and at least 11 injuries. Rundo was arrested during the event on suspicion of battery of a police officer. Though these charges were later dropped, he celebrated the violence of the day — which became known by white supremacists as the “The Battle of Berkeley” — remarking that the event signaled an “awakening in the White American consciousness.” In August 2017, RAM members also traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia to take part in the deadly “Unite the Right” rally. Three RAM members would later be charged and sentenced for provoking and engaging in fights as part of their conspiracy to riot.

On October 24, 2018, Rundo was taken into custody after he and three fellow RAM members were charged with planning and intentionally engaging in violent attacks and assaults against counter-protesters at various political events in Huntington Beach, San Bernardino, Berkeley, and more. In 2019, the case was temporarily dismissed because the judge ruled parts of the 1968 Federal Riot Act unconstitutional. An appellate court subsequently overturned that ruling.

The de facto Leader of a Decentralized International White Supremacist Network

Rundo fled to Europe soon after his criminal case was temporarily dismissed. While living outside the United States, he reportedly lived a transient lifestyle in eastern Europe. During this period, Rundo sought to maintain relevance within the U.S. white supremacist scene, as well as secure means to finance further extremist activities.

Starting in late 2020, Rundo began to shift his focus towards creating a decentralized international white brotherhood, called “Active Clubs.” Rundo explained this shift in a December 2020 essay, calling it “White Nationalism 3.0.” Rundo imagined a movement of small white supremacist cells that would focus on local-level engagement, making it harder for researchers and law enforcement to identify and shut down their operations.

White Nationalism 3.0 was a departure from many of the traditional white supremacist groups of the past. The model also distanced Rundo from the movement, making it difficult to tie him to any one crew’s illicit activity but allowing him to serve as a de facto leader from afar. The Active Club network reflects a larger trend driving the current white supremacist landscape: replacing hierarchical organizations with decentralized and localized cells. Local regional crews will carry out the group’s core goals while simultaneously pursuing their own local objectives. This “do-it-yourself” white supremacist activity has grown in prominence in recent years, largely in response to federal law enforcement actions targeting hierarchical white supremacist movements like Atomwaffen Division and The Base.

Active Clubs are largely the ideological successor of RAM. They promote a white supremacist worldview that is inspired by the prominent “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, advocate for raising “white racial consciousness,” and train so-called white “warriors” for an ongoing war against a system that they claim is deliberately plotting against their race. These Active Clubs are deeply rooted in physical fitness and influenced by Rundo’s time in the European MMA-ultranationalist scene. According to Rundo, the Active Club network was meant to “fill the gap” among American white supremacist groups. This decentralized network of European-styled MMA athletic clubs represented a clear organizational shift. RAM was limited to Southern California, but the decentralized Active Club network has now established new nodes across the United States and even abroad. 

In addition to launching the Active Club model, Rundo wanted to build a white supremacist brand empire that would allow him to raise money for his activities abroad, while also bringing the white supremacist community together under stylized optics. Rundo launched Media2Rise in the summer of 2020, a media production arm that serves as a white supremacist news platform. Media2Rise crafts stylized documentaries covering white nationalist events and leadership, such as those by the white supremacist Patriot Front or the National Justice Party. In 2021, Rundo founded Will2Rise, a far-right merchandise company selling everything from clothing, stickers, and even soap sporting white supremacist slogans. The clothing line has since become a staple among white supremacists, regularly being worn by members of groups like Patriot Front, the National Justice Party, and, of course, Active Clubs.

Looking Ahead

Acutely aware of the threat of criminal trial, Rundo set out to create a community resilient enough to withstand any potential arrests of key leadership, including himself. As of August 2023, ADL data shows that Active Clubs claim to maintain an active presence in at least 33 states, including Arizona, California, Montana, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. In addition, Active Clubs continue to emerge abroad, in countries like Lithuania, France, Estonia, the Netherlands, and Croatia. While the true extent of Active Club membership is opaque, it is unlikely that any resulting prison time for Rundo, or further arrests of key leadership, will significantly stymie this growing decentralized network.

Rundo’s arrest and extradition have become a rallying cry within the international white supremacist landscape, who view the legal process against him as an injustice. “Free Rundo” stencils, stickers, banners, and graffiti have been distributed across the United States and Europe, framing Rundo as a political prisoner facing “federal hoax charges.” Immediately following Rundo’s arrest, individuals associated with Will2Rise and Media2Rise released a public statement: “We can assure you that although one of our movement’s most dedicated activists has been detained, our struggle still continues.” Will2Rise is now crowdfunding for Rundo’s legal fees and brand empire. “Free Rundo” demonstrations have been held in Russia, Sweden, Canada, and more, illustrating the degree to which his influence has expanded.

Regardless of the outcome of Rundo’s trial, new Active Clubs continue to form in both the United States and abroad, while the Will2Rise and Media2Rise franchises remain active nodes for the white supremacist ecosystem. The Active Club network in the United States continues to be one of the most active elements of the white supremacist landscape, regularly organizing fight nights, distributing propaganda, and hosting demonstrations. Perhaps most concerningly, Active Clubs are increasingly targeting LGBTQ+ events in their offline activities. Recent incidents in Montana, Wyoming, Washington, and Oregon have seen local Active Club members protesting drag queen story hours and Pride festivals. As anti-LGBTQ+ narratives and conspiracies continue to serve as potent drivers for extremist mobilization and violence across the United States, the addition of Active Club members seeking to return to the violent origins of RAM only further increases the risk of extremist-related violence within the United States.

European nations are doing too little to address the Chinese Communist Party's secret police stations—which human-rights groups say are being used to monitor diaspora communities and target suspected criminals outside of local due process. This is according to a leading watchdog documenting Beijing's foreign network.

Safeguard Defenders, a Spain-based rights group, has uncovered more than 100 police contact points in over 50 countries. These are operated by public security bureaus from several coastal Chinese cities. A Newsweek investigation has verified a number of the secret facilities in the U.S., thought to operate as part of the CCP's United Front Work Department.

Chinese officials have repeatedly dismissed reports of secret police stations. Responding to Safeguard Defenders' report in December, Beijing's mission in France said: "China has always firmly opposed long-arm jurisdiction, strictly abides by international law, respects the judicial sovereignty of all countries, and has not carried out any law enforcement activities through 'overseas service stations.'"

U.S. authorities are seeking to address the issue, with the Justice Department this month filing the first-known criminal charges related to secret CCP police facilities abroad.

However, Laura Harth, the campaign director at Safeguard Defenders, told Newsweek that America's European allies are lagging behind.

"The U.S. obviously had a bit of a head start, not on the police stations per se, but on investigations and prosecutions of transnational repression coming from the People's Republic of China [PRC]," Harth said. American investigators, she added, have been able to adopt a cross-departmental approach that has so far proven elusive in Europe.

European nations, already playing catch-up, must do more to address broader CCP influence operations, Harth said, of which the secret police stations are just "the tip of the iceberg."

'Brazen and Sensational'

Safeguard Defenders has identified almost 50 stations spread across Europe, with a particularly large CCP footprint in Spain (nine stations), France (four), and Italy (11).

"In Europe, the Netherlands seems to be doing very well, Germany quite well," Harth said. "I would say the U.K.—from what I can see so far, and I do have hopes that things will change a bit in the coming weeks—is middling, not too great so far. But still better than what we're seeing in France, Spain, Italy, southern Europe."

"There are likely to be a few that we may not have found," Harth said, though she added: "The stations are only one of the proxies that the PRC authorities are using to go after people abroad.

"They're only a very, let's say, brazen and sensational way the authorities in China have gone about it, but it's reflective of what's going on in general," she added.

"This reiterates this big emphasis we've seen since President Xi Jinping came into power, both on internal control but also controlling the overseas communities, the importance of those overseas communities for the 'great rejuvenation of the nation.'"

The police stations have a broader brief than simply going after criminals—among them dissidents. "We find that the main task of the stations is really controlling, if you will, those larger overseas communities, those very silent communities where dissidents might be brewing, but not the people that we in the West would think of as activists," Harth said.

Earlier this month, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin hit out at the U.S. arrests of two Chinese Americans suspected of working out of a clandestine CCP facility in New York.

"China firmly opposes the U.S.'s slander and smears, its political manipulation, the false narrative of 'transnational repression,' and blatant prosecution of Chinese law enforcement and cyber administration officials," Wang said.

Harth said Beijing looks unlikely to draw down its foreign operations. "They've been doing a host of things and they're not showing any sign of wanting to stop. All the language they're using suggests they will increase these kinds of operations. They will not be called 'police stations.' I think they'll be that smart. But the activities will continue unabated, if not increase."

European 'Embarrassment'

The police stations are an arm of the United Front Work Department. This is a sprawling, de-centralized and opaque organization dedicated to advancing CCP influence in domestic industry and civil society. It also seeks to shape public opinion abroad and monitor the activities of the Chinese diaspora.

The recent U.S. charges have revived attention on the issue in Europe. French and German officials told Newsweek this month that they are investigating reports of covert Chinese police sites in their nations.

However, Harth said Europe's response to Chinese overreach must consider the entire United Front ecosystem. "One thing we're telling all authorities is that they should start mapping all the United Front organizations in their countries," she explained. "Even that's not going to cut it. That's, again, not the whole picture. But then you will already have a better idea of how many groups may be involved in this, and these groups are all involved in influence activities, interference activities, repressive activities, and so on."

"I can't really say why there is reluctance, in general, to take on these kinds of issues," Harth said of the European nations seemingly hesitant to address the issue head-on as the American authorities do. "To be honest, I find it quite staggering, especially when it comes to things such as the police stations.

"It's true that, on the one hand, you're dealing with transnational repression, which in and of itself would require a strong response. But we all know that governments are not necessarily moved by human rights. But the same kinds of organizations, the exact same people that are running the stations and United Front people, are involved in influence activities and other interference activities.

"The embarrassment is just going to keep growing over this, because we know these people have been cozying up to local politicians, law enforcement, academics and so on, for years, if not decades," Harth added.

"It's about tackling transnational repression, but it's also about protecting your institutions. It's about educating basically your entire establishment. It's about countering foreign interference. So, it beats me why governments are not more proactive. I really don't get it."

Newsweek has contacted the Chinese Foreign Ministry by email to request comment.

In the 1950s, a commitment to democratic socialism connected networks of intellectuals, activists and political operators in both Europe and Asia. Many of these were women, who built informal and intimate networks of solidarity that underpinned the movement. The rich set of correspondence between European and Asian socialist women speaks to their role as connectors of global and local civil society within international socialist circuits. It also indicates the importance of friendship, mobility and hospitality as a crucial factor in sustaining such networks, as well as building the trust that facilitated the exchange of subversive information. While Asia was seen as the great hope of international socialism in the 1950s, by the middle of the 1960s, many of its socialist parties had imploded, pointing to the limits of international socialism for Asian women amidst global anti-communism and the rise of authoritarian states. Transnational socialist networks nonetheless helped further both European and Asian women’s campaigns for gender equality, development and democratic socialism in decolonizing Asia, adding vital new dimensions to the history of internationalism.

Some Lesbian/”Lesbian” Perspectives from 1980s India

Selection from “Rescaling Transnational “Queerdom”: Lesbian and “Lesbian” Identitary-Positionalities in Delhi in the 1980s,” by  Paola Bacchetta, in Antipode Special Issue, "Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International", Vol. 34, No. 5, November 2002.

The following selection gives an overview of three Indian lesbian/"lesbian” activists and writers who were active in the 1980s, looking at their perspectives on oppression, the history of lesbianism in India, and political identities. (The author puts “lesbian” in quotations to refer to women who love women but don’t necessarily identify as lesbian.)

The section on the last woman, Abha, discusses the political identity “single women,” which was “designed to be inclusive of all women who have ruptured with the heterosexual matrix: "lesbians"; celibates; ascetics; unmarried women; divorced women; widows.”

Kanchana

In the 1980s, Kanchana situated herself politically in the Delhi Group, as a lesbian, and as a critical academic specialized in religions. She engaged in activism across scale: she harbored individual lesbians escaping familial repression, intervened against anti-lesbian attacks in a high school, and attended the first Asian Lesbian Network conference in Bangkok in 1991.

From early challenges to male authority on women in Hindu texts, in the 1980s Kanchana‘s focus became gender and lesbianism in sacred and secular texts across religions. At the time, she circulated her work among friends. There was no other audience. Unfortunately the bulk of her work remains unpublished today.

To understand something of Kanchana‘s engagement, it is important to know that she has been a practicing Hindu since her childhood. She was born into a (non-elite-class) Brahmin family, began learning Sanskrit as a child, and gradually added other Indian languages throughout her adulthood. Totally uninterested in any form of monolithic inscription of identity or "religious community," though her specialization is Sanskrit texts, she extended herself to work with Urdu texts, with Christian literatures, and with secular creative writing in several languages. Unlike other lesbian interrogations of the period, her project is not directly oppositional to Hindu nationalism‘s polarization of normative/anormative gender and sexuality. Though she does deconstruct this polarization, her project is primarily beyond the indigenous/alien, tradition/modernity binaries. Kanchana conceptualizes the texts she works with as a living corpus outside linear conceptions of temporality, a corpus usable here and now for her multifaceted liberation project, which both includes and moves beyond sexuality: "I clearly don‘t want myself to be reduced to a mere sexual being. Freedom in a larger sense is what I need, and such freedom would naturally entail the achievement of sexual freedom also. I also need economic, political, spiritual, and other kinds of freedom” (Kanchana 1986:13 – 14).

From an early period, Kanchana took a both/and stance in relation to lesbians and "lesbians" in Delhi, and her work foregrounds both erotic and nonerotic bonding among women. She felt

“kinship with the single women. I have not rejected the word lesbian in English, or words in any other language that mean women who love women. I have identified with lesbians and single women who live and organize independently from men (gay or heterosexual). I am a feminist and a political lesbian. I am a political lesbian and not a social lesbian.The social lesbian does not see herself as political; she just sees herself as a person who sleeps with women.” (Personal communication, 1998)

Integral to Kanchana‘s work is her denunciation of economic and political domination across scale: from colonialist, to nationalist elitist, to internal queer misogynarchal, to internal lesbian and "lesbian" forms. For example, her 1980s critique of "class, caste, religious, linguistic and north/south divisions among lesbians" in India provoked much discussion by the 1990s (Kanchana 1998a). At issue for her today is representation and representability--who speaks for whom about what, and in what type of forum. She feels that "Westernized Indian lesbians" are trying to represent Indian lesbianism for the West and are doing so erroneously. (In that sense, she understands them as internalizing and enacting what Spivak refers to as parliamentary representation).

Kanchana‘s contributions to debates in the 1980s often shifted their very terms. When some lesbian friends lamented that sexuality was invisible in India, Kanchana maintained that "[S]uch ideas come from a colonial state of mind.” For her, ancient texts are "obsessed" with women‘s sexuality: for example, Dharma Shastras, Arthashastra, Kama Sutra, Moksha Sastra (Kanchana 1986:16). If, in some Hindu texts, woman's sexuality is viewed as an obstacle to male spiritual realization (she distracts him from his spiritual path), in others it is celebrated. In the latter, women are "the main source not only of generative power of sexuality, but also of the feeling of sexuality which is called in Tamil women’s feeling. There is no ‘silence' on the issue of women's sexuality" (Kanchana 1986:5-6).

For Kanchana, it is not the texts that silence lesbianism, but rather their colonial-orientalist reconfiguration (see Chakravarti 1989; Said 1978;Sprinkler 1992) into a Great versus Little Tradition and their inaccessibility to most middle-class subjects. Great Tradition texts often present lesbianism in a negative light. For example, the epic Vyasa’s Mahabharata (800 to 500 BC) refers to two women having sex and condemns them. In Valmiki’s Ramayana (200 BC to 200 AD), the god Hanuman spots two women making love in Lanka and reads it as a sign of a corrupt society. In many ancient law books, lesbianism is a punishable crime (cf Manusmirti, 200 AD). In other Great Tradition texts, lesbianism is acceptable, but not on its own terms. For example, in his Kamasutra (fourth to fifth century AD), in chapter 4 (entitled “Auparishtaka," or "The Oral Congress"), Vatsyana presents royal harem women using penis-shaped objects with each other because their husband cannot satisfy so many wives. Kanchana (1986) critiques Vatsyana's heterosexist, phallocentric "rationale for bonding amongst women” but adds that "this information itself is valuable" as evidence of early lesbianism. In yet other texts, lesbianism is without "taboo or stigma attached" and is procreative (Kanchana 1986). For example, in the eighth-century Charaka Samhita (3.2.47), two women produce a child together. For Kanchana (1986:10-11), regardless of its connotations, women's "sexual bonding must have been prevalent, and more or less widely practiced before men could take note of it."

In the mid-1980s, Kanchana drew links between ancient and contemporary women ascetics who circumvent heterosexual marriage and lesbians. She did not find a wider audience until the 1990s, and her current reception is ambiguous. In 1997, when she read a fictional piece at an Indian university about a married woman who encounters a woman ascetic and leaves domestic life to join her, lesbian activists welcomed this, but some otherwise queer-friendly heterosexual Marxist feminists critiqued its solution as opting out (personal communication 1998). Kanchana responded that opting out of heterosexuality to bond with women is a valid mode of resistance to heteronormativity.

Today, searches for historical sources have been critiqued for reproducing the Hindu nationalist, exclusionary "Hindu=Indian" equation (see Puar‘s well-argued 1998 analysis). Thus, it must be noted that from the 1980s Kanchana expressly sought materials outside of Hinduism. The problem is the inaccessibility of her work beyond a restricted circle. To provide just one example, in an as-yet-unpublished article written in 1986(12) in the midst of the Babri Masjid and Shah Bano polarizations, Kanchana determinedly retrieved Islamic sources, such as this lesbian love poem by Muslim Urdu poet Bahu Begum dating from between 1855 and 1865:

All night when we met I wished to gaze at her   She who is envied even by the moon! Another this fear arose Ah she is delicate She may be crushed By the burden of my adoring looks.

Giti Thadani Giti Thadani is India‘s earliest public, intellectual, out lesbian in this wave of lesbian organizing. In the 1980s, she wrote editorials against lesbophobic reporting on lesbian marriages and suicides (see reprint in Thadani and Anu 1993:8-84). She also published the first book in the current wave of queer organizing in India on lesbianism, entitled Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India (1996). Her controversial work, discussed below, directly confronts xenophobiclesbophobic nationalist discourses (left, right, and center) that designate Indian lesbians as "not Indian."

Giti was a founding member of the Delhi Group, Sakhi, and the Red Rose Rendezvous Group. She self-defines as a lesbian feminist and khush (gay, happy, referring to both lesbians and gay men), and has revived multiple Hindi and Sanskrit terms (see below). For her, the term “lesbian"'s association with Sappho "provides for a symbolic continuum" which "does not come from a 'Westernized' position but rather from a position of erotic desire (akarshan) and love for the 'feminine' as feminine which may be lived out on many planes: the sexual, cosmogonic, psychic and kinship" (Thadani 1996: 9).

For Giti, khush is useful for some unificatory practices, but inadequate because it effaces patriarchy. She sought other Hindi and Sanskrit lesbian designations, but concluded (1996:78) that earlier terms "have lost their former sexual, cosmosocial meanings and are simply translated as 'sister' and 'woman friend'.” She (1996) thus reinvested terms to create: sakhi, bhagini (vaginal sisters), jami (twin, homosexual), and yuvati (ageless woman, in the dual form expressive of a lover relationship, related to the root yuj, to renew).

Giti’s views differ considerably from Kanchana’s on single women and the feminist movement. She (1996:90) supports single women's "effort of building a space allowed to women outside marriage," but feels that "the term 'single women’ again conjures up a victim image, that of loneliness and not having the 'privilege' of a husband. It also fits with the paternalistic model that men should provide for deprived women." (Single women "lesbians" disagree; see below.) 

For Giti (1996:88), in the 1980s, the IWM [Indian Women’s Movement] sent the message that “lesbian rights express the needs of only a few 'Westernized', individualistic, and economically independent women," while other issues (poverty, illiteracy, right-wing movements, etc) are more important. She (1994:5) feels these are vital issues, but are "all linked to ideologies and structures of compulsory heterosexuality." For her, IWM single women confine lesbianism to a personal choice, while her own work posits lesbianism as political.

Beginning in the 1980s, Giti spent ten years learning Sanskrit, reading ancient texts and traveling to temples throughout India in her own truck. She (1996:10) states: "My aim is to excavate layers of erotic memories and thus recreate historical continuums from the location of the present context of lesbian invisibility" which began with the Rg Veda. Parallel non-patriarchal "Vedas" were "lost", but the Rg Veda itself contains elements that "have been derived, appropriated and manipulated from the earlier feminine cosmogonies and function as a palimpsest" (Thadani1996:17). Giti (1996:18, 21, 28 –29) explores "gynofocal traces" through the "dual feminine," in deities such as Dyava or duel mothers as jami, in Usha and Nakta, and in nonbiological-kinship mother-daughter relations that include "eroticization of the breasts" and "revelation of the body" as “part of the erotic economy." Beyond the Rg Veda, Giti has examined many other sources. She found lesbian iconography in temples in two forms: anthropomorphic (Khajuraho carvings depicting lesbian lovemaking) and symbolic (two triangles or two lotuses [vaginal symbols] touching). Giti (1996:93) links current Indian lesbians "with older pre-patriarchal cosmological figures or with the latter Kali spectrum of goddesses and Amazon warrior figures." She has shared her work widely since the 1980s by conducting workshops on lesbianism in urban and village settings and giving talks and slide shows both inside and outside India (in, eg, Germany, Britain, France, the US, and Holland).

Academic, activist, Indian, Indian diasporic, and international audiences have received Giti’s work differently. For many in India, from one setting to another, her slides have opened discussions of lesbianism for the first time. This continues today. For example, her photos were used to provoke discussion in the first official workshop entitled “Lesbianism" at an annual IWM conference, in Bihar in 1998.

For some lesbian academics/activists in India, however, Giti‘s work is historically inaccurate (see Natarajan‘s 1998 critique). As a non-Sanskritist, I will not take a position on this. Rather, I center Giti's claim to be "actively re-creating the past" (see her intervention in Parmar‘s film Khush). The process of active re-creation can be understood as a lesbian strategic creative revivalist move, directly responsive to 1980s lesbophobic exilings (which continue today). I use the term "revivalist" in Farquhar‘s (1967) sense, to mean conscious reinterpretation of existing materials in a spirit of political resistance. Revivalism privileges self-appropriation of history over historical accuracy. As Chakrabarty (1997:383) reminds us, "[A]nti-historical constructions of the past often provided very powerful forms of collective memory" that were mobilized in anticolonial struggle. Accordingly, lesbian strategic creative revivalist work might most productively be understood, not in terms of highly positioned academic criteria of historic precision/imprecision, but rather on its own terms, in its political activist significance.

The political significance of Giti‘s work has also been critiqued. For some it reinstalls Hindu nationalist "Indian=Hindu" exclusions. For others (eg Natarajan 1998), it reproduces the Hindu nationalist homogenization, demonization, and exile of Indian Islam. Giti (1996:93) does globalize Indian Islam as an "external invasion" responsible for Hinduism‘s heteropatriarchalization including through (lesbian) temple destruction, and this does echo elements of Hindu nationalist discourse. Irreducibly, paradoxically, her work also challenges Hindu nationalism and provides material for deconstructing dominant-West-based patriarchal-neo-orientalist cults with (white) lesbian members. For example, for Giti, the transformation to patriarchy begins within Hinduism, with the militarized upper-caste Hinduism that Hindu nationalists exalt. She (1996:38) points to Usha‘s rape by the warrior god Indra in the Rg Veda. For Giti (1996:71 – 72), the heterocouple Radha-Krishna (the center of dominant-West-based Hari Krishnas, who financially contribute to Hindu nationalism in India) rose through marginalizing the Radhavallabhi sect, which is centered on a female divinity and whose "visual traditions often have very explicit lesbian depictions of Radha‘s sakhis erotically playing together in water." Giti critiques representations of the male-god Shiva (found within several dominant-Western cults) as Shiv-shaktior ardhanarishwara (half male,half female). For Giti, Shiv-shakti represents, not Shiva‘s androgyny, but rather his misogyny. His shakti incorporation neutralizes feminine subjectivity; elsewhere, shakti stands independently. 

Abha Abha positions herself politically as a single woman. In the 1980s, she had been living with a woman for over ten years. She has been an IWM activist since the inception of this wave. She was briefly in the Delhi Group, but her main work has been with IWM single women across classes and religions.

According to Abha (personal communication, 13 February 1998), during the 1980s events outlined above, in the context of IWM organizing:

“[W]e were raising the issue of women’s status outside the heterosexual institution of marriage and family. As we went along, we were not only able to form strong collectives of single women but also explore a whole range of erotic, sexual, affectionate interaction between women. I have, along with basti (urban slum settlement) women, resisted the definitions and prescriptions that homogenize women's sexual expressions and experiences. Naming a group of people or the issue is a political act.” 

The term "single woman" was formulated in the context of building broad alliances across classes, religions, castes, regions, and now sexualities and asexualities. It was designed to be inclusive of all women who have ruptured with the heterosexual matrix: "lesbians"; celibates; ascetics; unmarried women; divorced women; widows. For Abha, single women disrupt patriarchal genealogies while establishing lineage with women within and outside their families who may or may not have been “lesbian": "an unmarried aunt; unmarried activists in movements; ascetics or nuns" (Interview with Abha). This autonomous, non-sanguinal female connection disempowers male sanguinal kin who might otherwise expect to exercise control over no-longer married or unmarried women kin, including through corporal/ erotic policing.

Abha feels that the term lesbian, while enabling in the West, is not politically useful to her struggles. Most of the women she works with have little access to English and have never heard the word "lesbian." For Abha, what constitutes woman-to-woman relations and the notion of visibility itself signify disjointedly in "Western" and Indian contexts. She feels the "gender segregation" that is normative in India paradoxically has historically both concealed same-sex love and provided a space for its expression in multiple forms. Announcing woman-to-woman sexuality (as lesbian or in other terms) would isolate sexuality from its wider erotic/affective continuum, thereby reducing it while constituting a threat to the space of its expression. For Abha, giving up that female-only space would be counterproductive. Further, introducing the English term “lesbian" would unnecessarily impose diversionary debates about Westernization. It would mean grappling with the national/alien binary--with lesbophobic exile--instead of getting on with the work of construction of autonomous female collectivity.

The term "single woman" inadvertently interrogates the place reserved for "lesbians" in the hetero/homo binary: as part of a separate, bounded category; forcibly assigned what Martin (1993) terms a "totalizing identification"; as condemned to be a numerical minority. The term “single woman" positions "lesbians" elsewhere: beyond a totalizeable sexual identity, within an autonomous female potential majority that could destabilize the binary‘s dominant term by shrinking it (even heterosexually married women can divorce or become widows). Under the rubric of "single women," lesbianism is not isolatable; the "lesbian" potential in all women‘s relations can be recognized.

In her praxis, Abha links the classed, gendered, and sexuated spatiopolitics of the basti to single women's struggles for total autonomy. As an urban territory spontaneously squatted, often by subaltern rural exodussed subjects, a basti is vulnerable to landowner and state invasions and evictions; it is an unhomeable home in the world. Basti based IWM women have self-organized for a very long time. They have collectively demanded state-supplied water and electricity, unionized trades such as sweeping, spread health information, and supported the decisions of  battered women to divorce. The construction of single-woman collectivities radicalizes women‘s struggles against male dependency across scale.

In their organizing praxis, single women from Delhi and elsewhere have agitated openly against lesbophobia and homophobia across scales, within India and beyond. They propelled IWM prolesbian stances on the suicides and marriages cited above. They organized the first workshop (called "Single Women") in which "lesbian" relations were discussed at an annual national IWM conference, in 1990 in Calicut. They led the first passage of a national IWM resolution stating that all women have the right to sexual choice (1994, Tirupathi). They confronted the state in agitations against IPC 377. And they inserted their politics transnationally in a public statement against "the assumption of heterosexuality and the marginalization of lesbians" at the Indian preparatory assembly for the1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing (Abha, personal communication, 13 February 1998). Single women insist on autonomy from gay men but demonstrate solidarity with them. For example, during a 1993 ABVA/Sakhi seminar, single women critiqued ABVA sexism and demanded a womanonly space therein (Jagori 1992 – 1993). But in 1994, when Vimla Farooqi, a leader of the Communist Party‘s National Federation of Indian Women, asked the Prime Minister to ban a gay men‘s conference in Mumbai, single women organized a nationwide IWM protest (Jagori 1994-1995). Finally, single women contributed to IWM support for lesbian rights when these rights were publicly attacked in 1998 by Hindu nationalists in the controversy over Deepa Mehta's lesbian film, Fire.

Through the voices of survivors and witnesses, human rights activists, judicial actors, journalists, and historians, Francesca Lessa unravels the secrets of transnational repression masterminded by South American dictators between 1969 and 1981. Under Operation Condor, their violent and oppressive regimes kidnapped, tortured, and murdered hundreds of exiles, or forcibly returned them to the countries from which they had fled. South America became a zone of terror for those who were targeted, and of impunity for those who perpetuated the violence. Lessa shows how networks of justice seekers gradually materialized and effectively transcended national borders to achieve justice for the victims of these horrors. Based on extensive fieldwork, archival research, trial ethnography, and over one-hundred interviews, The Condor Trials explores South America’s past and present and sheds light on ongoing struggles for justice as its societies come to terms with the unparalleled atrocities of their not-so-distant pasts.

https://bookshop.org/books/the-condor-trials-transnational-repression-and-human-rights-in-south-america/9780300254099

Challenging Capitalism: Voices for Climate Solutions

A Critical Examination of COP and Corporate Influence Every year, the Conference of the Parties (COP) brings together global leaders, government officials, and representatives from the private sector to address the pressing climate crisis. However, the sponsorship of this conference by transnational giants like Unilever, Danone, and Nestle, companies implicated in environmental devastation, raises questions about the effectiveness of such gatherings. The discussions often fall short of pinpointing the true culprits and demanding the transformative changes necessary to safeguard our planet. The Global South Unites: Insights from the III International Dilemmas of Humanity Conference In a landscape dominated by corporate interests, forums like the III International Dilemmas of Humanity Conference have gained paramount importance. Here, experts, activists, and members of global movements converge to tackle pivotal issues, with the climate crisis taking center stage. The focus shifts from the well-known impacts of climate change to the imperative solutions required to preserve life on Earth. Capitalism's Incompatibility with Life: A Bold Assertion Keynote speakers at the environmental crisis panel minced no words in highlighting capitalism's incongruity with ecological preservation. Theodora Pius of the National Network of Small-Scale Farmers Groups in Tanzania spoke passionately about the global struggle of peasants, who constitute a significant segment of the workforce. She emphasized the vital role they play in safeguarding land, forests, water, and seeds, defending life for all inhabitants of our planet. Dirty powerful male hands clenched into fists and chained with old rusty thick chain on the wooden boards. Unfreedom concept. Pius decried the solutions offered by capitalists, particularly the push for GMOs, which she viewed as counterproductive and potentially exacerbating climate challenges. Her rallying call resonates: the reclamation of common resources for the collective good. A Systemic Shift: The Imperative of Change Tikender Singh Panwar, a noted researcher and political activist from India, underscored the consensus among top scientists that the existing system is steering humanity towards catastrophe. The IPCC report's call for a "systemic shift" is seen as a recognition of the urgent need for transformation. Panwar drove the point home: the only path forward is a departure from capitalism and the emergence of a socialist paradigm. Battle of Discourse: Unmasking False Narratives Houcine Rhili, representing Tunisia, a nation grappling with recurring droughts and heat waves, emphasized the pivotal role of discourse in combating climate devastation. Rhili urged a reevaluation of blame, highlighting the disproportionate responsibility placed on poorer nations and individuals. He challenged false solutions, such as green energy alternatives, which often exploit resources from the Global South to fuel the North, perpetuating an unsustainable cycle. Rhili drew attention to the potentially detrimental consequences of green hydrogen extraction, particularly for African nations. He warned of the impending resource extraction, stressing that water scarcity threatens human dignity and life itself. The Dual Struggle: Humanity and the Planet as One Carlos Barrientos, an indigenous and peasant revolutionary, emphasized the inseparability of the environmental crisis from the survival of humanity. He called for a profound understanding of our intrinsic connection to Mother Earth, advocating for a joint fight for life and socialism. A Collective Call for Change The III International Dilemmas of Humanity Conference has underscored the urgency of addressing the environmental crisis through a transformative lens. Speakers from diverse backgrounds and regions have highlighted the imperative to challenge the prevailing capitalist paradigm and forge a path towards sustainability and collective well-being. As the world grapples with the consequences of environmental degradation, the clarion call for change resonates louder than ever. Read the full article

Every day, the fight against kleptocracy intensifies. From the boardrooms of corporate America to the streets of London, liberal activists struggle against forces that would rob the people of their democracy. But kleptocrats are a wily bunch, and they are not going down without a fight. They have taken to the internet, using transnational uncivil society networks to fight back against the forces of democracy and justice. These networks are a shadowy underworld, a place where kleptocrats can hide and plan their next move. But the activists will not be deterred. They are determined to fight for democracy, no matter what the cost. They know that the future of the world depends on it.

What is Digital Activism?

Over the years, with the evolution of technology and culture, the words “Digital Activism” has varied in its meaning and application. A major goal for writing this is to explain in the simplest way, the concept of Digital Activism and explore what defines “activism” in Digital age.

 According to Britannica, “digital activism, also known as cyberactivism is a form of activism that uses the internet and digital media as key platforms for mass mobilization and political action.”

The above definition is just one amongst many attempts to define Digital Activism, Computer experts and activists have looked at digital networks as a way to take action, starting with the early experiments of the 1980s and moving on to the more recent "smart mobs" and blogs. Given its capacity to instantly reach huge audiences across borders, online activists initially utilized the Internet as a medium for information dissemination. The World Wide Web was used as a platform for protest in a more advanced form of digital activism, mirroring and amplifying offline demonstrations.

E-mail and social media campaigns, virtual sit-ins, and "hacktivism" (disrupting websites) are all examples of digital activism.

In past and recent times, Digital activism has proven to be a potent tool for grassroots political mobilization and opens up new opportunities for protesters to be involved. In countries where public spaces are tightly regulated or under military control, online actions may also be significant. Online actions are preferable to potentially dangerous "live" actions hence making Digital Activism a safe and effective means for passing a strong message. Transnational institutions can also be targeted through online protest.

Although a lot of digital activism falls under the umbrella of "electronic civil disobedience," some activists demand that online political actions always represent a collective interest rather than an individual agenda, and that the motives and agents behind them be made public in order to distinguish them from cyberterrorism or criminal hacking.

In my opinion, Digital Activism is a more active and effective path to communicating to a larger audience in modern day, it is an inclusive form of Activism and your “voice” can and will be easily heard.

REFERENCES

‘Digital Activism’, (2014), Britannica, Available at https://www.britannica.com/topic/digital-activism/additional-info#history (Accessed: 1st November, 2022)

Amy Cauchi (May 21, 2020) Is Digital Activism as effective as it is made out to be? Is clicktivism a problem for democracy or is it a new form of activism that can indeed hold the powerful to account?, Available at https://medium.com/@amycauchi/is-digital-activism-as-effective-as-it-is-made-out-to-be-c8f323279ae4 (Accessed: 1st November, 2022)

 Dorina Yee Ye Zhen (Aug 21, 2020) Digital Activism and Volunteering, Available at https://heartware.org/blog/digital-activism-and-volunteering/ (Accessed: 1st November, 2022)

Virendranath Chattopadhyaya or 'Chatto' by Heike Liebau

Indian radical revolutionary, journalist, communist

via Ole Birk Laursen, right, celebrating May Day in Leningrad

Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (1880-1937) was part of a large transnational network of Indian political activists who, during the first decades of the 20th century, carried out organised anti-imperial and anti-colonial propaganda activities outside India, first in Europe and North America. He grew up in an intellectual Bengali Brahmin family as the second of eight children. Among his siblings were the famous Bengali poet and musician Harindranath Chattopadhyaya (1898-1990) and the political activist, campaigner for women’s rights, and renowned poet Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949).

Chatto studied in Madras and Calcutta before he entered Oxford University in 1902 and became a law student at the Middle Temple. Like other nationalist Indian students in England, he joined India House in Highgate, London where he contributed to the journal The Indian Sociologist published by Shyamji Krishnavarma (1857-1930). For a short period in 1909, Chatto was involved in the production of the journal Talvar. During his years in England, Chattopadhyaya established intensive contacts with revolutionary socialist and social democratic circles in Europe. Thus, in 1907 he participated in the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International. In 1910 Chatto, like other Indian political activists, moved from London to Paris and from there, in April 1914, to Germany where he enrolled in comparative linguistics at the University of Halle.

Involvement in International Anti-imperialist Movements during the First World War

While during the first decade of the 20th century, London and Paris were central sites for the Indian anti-colonial movement, with the outbreak of the First World War, Berlin became a hub for Indian revolutionary exiles. Chatto, already living in Germany in summer 1914, sought collaboration with the German Foreign Office and became a leading figure within the Indian Independence Committee (IIC), founded in Berlin in September 1914. Initiated and supported by the Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient (Information Service for the East), part of the German Foreign Office, the Committee was a loose association of South Asian political activists which had been built on earlier European and American networks. Despite the frictions within the Committee, it became a strong tool for Indian revolutionary and anti-colonial activities abroad. Together with other nationalist “independence committees”, the IIC was an important element of Germany’s so-called program for revolution which aimed at instigating unrest within the French, British, and Russian Empires. “Revolution was openly acknowledged as a means of warfare and as an aim of war”, argued Fritz Fischer. Colonial inhabitants were actively involved in this strategy, thereby also pursuing their own political aims.

The IIC carried out propaganda in and outside India, first of all among Indian soldiers at the front as well as among POWs. The Committee also engaged in military action and weapons training. Being a leading figure in the IIC and hoping for support from the German Foreign Office, Chattopadhyaya re-activated members of radical political networks, which existed before the war and invited other Indian activists like Har Dayal (1884-1939) to come to Germany. At the same time, Chattopadhyaya constantly enlarged and improved his international political alliances. In 1917, disenchanted with the role of Germany and with the conflicts among the IIC, Chattopadhyaya shifted the weight of his political activities to neutral Sweden, where he established contacts with the Socialist International Comintern, especially Russian socialist circles.

Activities and Conflicts within the Comintern Movement

Back in Germany, after the First World War, Chattopadhyaya founded the Indian Information Bureau, based in Berlin which engaged in improving Indian-German relations, including commerce and economic enterprises. The bureau also supported Indian students who came to study at German universities. At the same time, Chatto continued his collaboration with the Russian Bolsheviks and with the Communist International. In 1920, together with other former members of the now dissolved Berlin IIC, Chatto went to Moscow to present his “Thesis on India and the World Revolution” and to seek support from the Comintern for the anti-colonial struggle in India. However, the Berlin delegation’s negotiations with the representatives of the Comintern were not successful. At this time, Chattopadhyaya also became active in the League against Imperialism. He was the co-organiser of the Brussels Congress of the League in 1927 and became one of its joint secretaries.

Period of Repression in the Soviet Union

Chattopadhyaya spent the last years of his life in the Soviet Union. He moved there in 1931 and worked in Leningrad at the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. During the period of Stalin’s repressions, he was accused of espionage. Virendranath Chattopadhyaya was arrested and shot to death on 2 September 1937, having spent most of his life in exile in search of an applicable ideology to build a future world. He navigated his life through competing alliances and disconnections, through periods of active engagements as well as “silent moments”.

How autocracies are winning

“If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.”

“Mass arrests are unnecessary if you can jail, torture, or possibly murder just a few key people. The rest will be frightened into staying home. Eventually they will become apathetic, because they believe nothing can change.” “Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries.”

“This is not to say that there is some supersecret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor does the new autocratic alliance have a unifying ideology. Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, nationalists, and theocrats. No one country leads this group.”

“Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies—call it Autocracy Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals—deals designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich—which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines.”

“Like the Belarusian opposition, the Venezuelan opposition has charismatic leaders and dedicated grassroots activists who have persuaded millions of people to go out into the streets and protest. If their only enemy was the corrupt, bankrupt Venezuelan regime, they might win. But Lopez and his fellow dissidents are in fact fighting multiple autocrats, in multiple countries. Like so many other ordinary people propelled into politics by the experience of injustice—like Sviatlana and Siarhei Tsikhanouski in Belarus, like the leaders of the extraordinary Hong Kong protest movement, like the Cubans and the Iranians and the Burmese pushing for democracy in their countries—they are fighting against people who control state companies and can make investment decisions worth billions of dollars for purely political reasons. They are fighting against people who can buy sophisticated surveillance technology from China or bots from St. Petersburg. Above all, they are fighting against people who have inured themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else. Because Autocracy Inc. grants its members not only money and security, but also something less tangible and yet just as important: impunity. “

“For autocrats and would-be autocrats around the world, the Chinese offer a package that looks something like this: Agree to follow China’s lead on Hong Kong, Tibet, the Uyghurs, and human rights more broadly. Buy Chinese surveillance equipment. Accept massive Chinese investment (preferably into companies you personally control, or that at least pay you kickbacks). Then sit back and relax, knowing that however bad your image becomes in the eyes of the international human-rights community, you and your friends will remain in power.”

“We need a major investment in independent media around the world, a strategy for reaching people inside autocracies, new international institutions to replace the defunct human-rights bodies at the UN. We need a way to coordinate democratic nations’ response when autocracies commit crimes outside their borders. [...] As of now, we have no transnational strategy designed to confront this transnational problem.”

Excerpts from “The bad guys are winning” by Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic.

Two years ago, news outlets covered a story of prejudice against women activists from African countries in the climate movement. The Associate Press cropped Vanessa Nakate, a Ugandan climate activist, out of a photo with white activists at a climate conference. In the following days, conversations surrounding racism against activists ensued, with more people coming forward to share their experiences. Apologies were issued and the paper claimed they had no ill intent, but this is a broader recurring theme: the media portrayal of environmental justice is often not inclusive of the people who are most affected by climate change. In response to the situation, Nakate said “You didn’t just erase a photo. You erased a continent.” The silencing of African activists is especially distressing because countries in Africa are among the places most vulnerable to climate change. Climate change exacerbates existing gender inequities by increasing the risk of violence, jeopardizing human security and hindering everyday peacebuilding.

Columbia University’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) program has worked for the past five years to address these issues, and supports everyday women peacebuilding efforts and climate work by increasing the visibility of grassroots African women activists through fellowships, research and workshops. This winter, the program hosted a global workshop for women activists and scholar-practitioners across 13 countries, marking the culmination of three months of vibrant virtual exchange. The WPS fellowship has supported women peacebuilders in Africa for the past three years by hosting fellowships that create collaborative spaces for sharing everyday peacebuilding strategies, facilitating an intracontinental network of grassroots women peace activists, and publicizing lessons learnt from their experiences.

Women peacebuilders in the fellowship engage in everyday peacework activities, from facilitating sexual and reproductive health and financial literacy programs to resource conflict resolution. This fall, over a number of months, the activists began to organize key messages they have for funders, policy makers and academics aiming to support everyday peacework. They asked themselves and each other what gaps exist, both in terms of knowledge and also myths, that urgently need re-shaping in the fields of policy, practice and funding. Through facilitated small group discussions and virtual exchanges, the women also reflected on their own understanding of peace and security since beginning to work together as a multi-scalar, transnational network three years ago.

In their daily work, these activists interact with funders and policy makers with the resources to aid their mission, giving them direct knowledge on what most urgently needs to shift in the field of peace and security. One key critique was about who was included and excluded in key decision making. Women, youth, queer and disabled people are often missing from critical dialogue, resulting in ineffective policies that are furthered hindered by government bureaucracy. Grassroot women activists play an integral role in maintaining peace and security at all levels of government, as they possess intimate knowledge of their community’s needs and are able to replicate programs on a national scale that influence policy making.

For example, the Hope for the Needy Association (HOFNA) in Cameroon used trainings and capacity building to empower a network of community leaders who are responding to issues of gender-based violence and poverty in their communities. One of the members led an initiative to meet the needs of elderly people and widows in conflict-affected communities. “Everyday peace work in those communities consider the diversity, differences and different perspectives, values, beliefs, and cultures, as these are the elements that make peace work sustainable in the communities,” said Christelle Bay, one of the members of HOFNA

Funding agencies need to engage in conversations with groups like HOFNA, which will allow them to allocate resources appropriately and create a conducive environment for future projects. These women have an expansive view of peace and security that is not limited to the absence of war but includes “access to land, education, health care, infrastructure, equality, equity and social justice,” as stated by Margaret Sedziafa, member of Women International League for Peace and Freedom in Ghana.

Another core message the group highlighted, however, is that inclusivity is not only necessary in regards to who is seated at the decision making table, but also who is able to tell the stories that influence these decisions. Several women spoke to the importance of being equipped to share their stories themselves, with many chorusing their experiences that Western storytellers often extract “overly emotional or biased accounts” and repeat generalized perspectives without giving space for individual experiences. Over the course of the WPS program, many of the fellows shared how inspired they were to start writing, and documenting their own experiences. At the workshop, several women spoke of the books and creative projects they are working on—inspired by the fellowship and the need to get their voices out in the public sphere. Lineo Matkhala, a Lesotho-based activist working at the Barali Foundation, said, “Let people tell their [own] stories. Get information from both victims and victors. War isn’t just guns and explosives. It exists behind doors, in churches and schools. Do not direct the story, document it.”

The fellows were re-energized by the multiple-month virtual exchanges and final workshop. The messages shared in the virtual exchange are being captured in a co-authored collective paper on transforming the field of women, peace and security and what they have learned in these years as a collective network. They recognize that the contributions of women activists in Africa have been instrumental in toppling oppressive governments, implementing COVID-19 protocols, and serving their communities on a local and national level. Yet, they continue to be silenced in several spaces, from environmental justice to peacebuilding. The fellows restated the importance of funders, policy makers, and academics creating spaces for working together and cross-learning strategies of everyday peace and justice.

Betty Sharon, of Collaboration of Women in Development in Kenya shares the following message to younger women invested in peace and security: “Raise your voices. The more we join our hearts together, the more we join our sisters and raise our voices louder, the stronger we become, the louder our voices become, and that is when we will be heard in all the corners of the world.” This message holds true for activists like Nakate, who are determined to be heard for the benefit of their communities.