Beautiful Rising: Creative Resistance from the Global South

FOREWORD

THE PLANETARY SATYAGRAHA

Vandana Shiva

Humanity stands at an evolutionary crossroads. We can consciously choose the path of oneness — one planet, one humanity, celebrating our many diversities and our interconnectedness — or we can cling to illusions of security and stability while our real ecological security is undermined and our real social security is broken through the politics of division, hate, and fear.

The planet and humanity face the same enemy: the 1%, which is destroying the genius of nature and humanity, enclosing the commons, and spawning poverty and dispossession. We can defeat the 1%’s mechanical mind by becoming aware of our relationships with the Earth and with each other. This awareness enlarges our being, our potential, and our power, thereby rendering the emergence of a radical shift possible.

As we tend to these relationships, we become aware that rejuvenating the planet and reclaiming our humanity are not two different ends, reached through different paths, because the Earth and society are interwoven in one indivisible, vibrant, colorful fabric of life in autopoetic freedom. We will either make peace with the Earth by realizing that we are part of her, and not her masters, owners, or conquerors, or the Earth will make our continued existence increasingly difficult.

Beautiful Rising is grounded in this premise of interconnectedness. By compiling a common platform to document the most effective approaches and latest innovations in creative activism from the Global South, Beautiful Rising responds to the needs of diverse movements in a spirit of horizontal, open, and participatory collaboration. These teachings invite us to open new, democratic spaces at a time when those available to us are shrinking; to cultivate compassion and solidarity in times of greed, fear, and hate; and to reclaim our collective strength.

Over the past four and a half decades of my service to the Earth, I have always turned to Gandhi’s teachings for inspiration. His struggle for freedom from the British Empire teaches us that true freedom and wealth creation call for the practice of satyagraha, swaraj, and swadeshi.

Satyagraha — the force of truth — is the moral duty to not cooperate with exploitative and undemocratic processes that destroy the Earth and rob us of our humanity and our freedoms. Non-cooperation is the first step in breaking free from the enslaving shackles of colonialism.

Swaraj — self-organization, self-rule, self-governance — is the basis of real freedom in nature and society, beginning at the smallest level, then emerging at higher levels. Resistance by itself does not create freedom from oppression. Resistance without constructive action will not create another world. Only by sowing the seeds of freedom do we become one with the Earth and one with our own nature.

Swadeshi is self-support. It involves local production of our basic needs based on local resources, indigenous knowledge, and community. It makes possible the expression of our fullest creativity as Earth citizens. In swadeshi, we are co-creative with nature’s intelligence and regenerative potential. It is not extractive, polluting, or degrading to the planet or to human communities. It is the foundation of sustainability, the core of economic democracy, and the source of well-being and happiness for all.

The freedoms we enjoy today are the fruits of the struggles of our ancestors and forebearers, who refused to co-operate with unjust laws that denied us our full humanity — whether it was slavery in the United States, racial segregation in South Africa, or the colonization of India. Higher moral laws compel citizens to disobey laws that institutionalize injustice and violence. Our freedoms are gifts of civil disobedience and satyagraha.

In 1848, Henry David Thoreau coined the term civil disobedience in his essay on why his commitment to the abolition of slavery led to his refusal to pay the poll tax. Satyagraha was, and has always been, about awakening our conscience, our inner power to resist external, brute power. Satyagraha, the force of truth, is more important than ever in our post-truth age. It is an autopoetic response to the cruel and unjust global system imposed upon us. As Gandhi said, satyagraha is a no said from our deepest conscience.

Breaking free of the 1% is the satyagraha of our times. Today’s non-cooperation movement begins with not subscribing to the fictions and falsehoods through which we are colonized, and not cooperating with the regimes of violence and domination that enforce systematic extraction and exploitation. It is the contours of this emerging planetary satyagraha that Beautiful Rising is painting through its documentation of concrete and creative struggles and its celebration of the perennial urge for freedom and life.

INTRODUCTION

Juman Abujbara, Andrew Boyd, Dave Mitchell, and Marcel Taminato

The defining challenges of our era — deepening inequality, erosion of civil rights, and compounding disasters linked to climate change and war — cannot be adequately addressed by business-as-usual politics. The neoliberal consensus has nothing to offer the vast majority of the world’s people; only sustained, people-powered social movements can lead us through this catastrophe. Grassroots movements the world over are responding with astounding courage and creativity, even in the face of unspeakable violence. But to actually win, these social movements need ways to share, analyze, and learn from one another. That is precisely what the Beautiful Rising project seeks to offer.¹

Towards a pattern language of social change

Beautiful Rising is a modular and interlinking toolkit for social change, rooted in the concept of a pattern language. As the originator of the pattern language concept, Christopher Alexander, explains: A pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice. Pattern languages offer flexible, democratic, and endlessly adaptable solutions to common challenges, and have been developed for fields as varied as computer science, media studies, and group decision-making. Here, we have adapted the model to the field of social change. We′ve identified five types of social change tools that, together, offer organizers a strategic framework to adapt to their own unique circumstances:

Stories:

Accounts of memorable actions and campaigns, analyzing what worked (or didn′t) and why.

Tactics:

Specific forms of creative action, such as a flash mob or blockade.

Principles:

Time-tested guidelines for how to design successful actions and campaigns.

Theories:

Big-picture ideas that help us understand how the world works and how we might change it.

Methodologies:

Strategic frameworks and hands-on exercises to help assess our situation and plan a campaign.

This is an open-ended undertaking. As new movements arise, new stories must be told, new insights gleaned, new tactics, principles, theories, and methodologies developed. The toolkit evolves alongside the movements that use it on the ground, providing organizers with a responsive framework for thinking about their own efforts alongside others′ stories of success or failure. Because this book represents just a subset of the evolving collection of tools, in the following pages we will sometimes reference tools that are not published here but can be found in the online toolkit at beautifulrising.org

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Lessons and insights

Over a hundred organizers from five continents have contributed to the platform, many of them through face-to-face jam sessions we held in Yangon, Amman, Harare, Dhaka, Kampala, and Oaxaca in 2015 and 2016. The stories they shared include the Ugandan organizers who protested corruption with Yellow Pigs in Parliament (p. 96), the Burmese Students′ Long March against undemocratic and overly centralized education reforms in 2015 (p. 26), the Lebanese Honk at Parliament campaign against politicians who had clung to power long after their term had expired (p. 44), and many others.

What emerged from this process was a global network of frontline organizers, theorists, and strategists documenting innovations and analyzing common challenges. Among these challenges, the issue of the NGO-ization of resistance (p. 200) — the ways in which the rapid proliferation of non-governmental organizations under neoliberalism has inhibited popular and democratic struggles — quickly revealed itself as a problem faced by activists working in vastly different contexts across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By naming it, changemakers were able to identify a key pattern across their various struggles and thus better target neoliberalism as a global repressive ideology. To counter this destructive force, activists identified a need for solidarity not aid — both south-south solidarity, and a rebalancing of the power dynamics of north-south solidarity (see PRINCIPLE: Solidarity not aid).

The growing ferocity of state violence is another challenge faced by activists across the Global South. In response, activists shared several principles that guide their work and help to ensure their safety, such as seeking safety in support networks (p. 150) in order to deter state and paramilitary violence, and jail solidarity (p. 118) to deter abuse and shorten the detention of imprisoned activists.

While many common global challenges were revealed, other challenges seemed particular to a country or region — for example, the use of baltajiah (thugs) (p. 176) by authoritarian regimes in the Middle East to repress rising movements. Though it’s called different names in different countries (in Jordan and Palestine, sahijeh or clappers; in Egypt, baltajiah or axes; in Syria, shabiha or ghosts), a common political formation was identified by activists across the region: a marginalized group that are paid to support the state apparatus in key moments by violently disrupting movements seeking change. One of the most famous manifestations of this phenomenon is the Battle of the Camel (p. 14), in which camel riders attacked and killed protesters in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in 2011.

In the process of documenting the creative methods used by movements operating in politically repressive environments, we often uncovered similar patterns of creative response that had very different expressions from country to country. Take, for example, clandestine leafleting, a way to share information with the public when it’s too dangerous to do so openly (see TACTIC: Clandestine leafleting at beautifulrising.org

). In Syria, activists sent a cascade of slogan-marked ping-pong balls bouncing through the streets, and in Myanmar (Burma) they wafted a fleet of leaflet-laden hot-air lanterns across the city.

Throughout our workshops, campaigners repeatedly called for better tools to facilitate strategic thinking. To address this need, contributors documented the strategic frameworks and hands-on exercises their organizations use to assess their situation and plan their campaigns. The best of these are collected in the methodologies section.

We hope this book, and the larger project of which it is a part, will serve as an evolving body of knowledge for veteran social change practitioners, as well as an effective entry point for newcomers into the incredible creativity with which social movements are building resistance across the Global South. Since the platform launched online, more and more people have been getting in touch to contribute ideas, share lessons, request trainings, strategize local campaigns, and build a stronger global network of solidarity among changemakers. We hope this will only continue in the years ahead.

Finally, we′ll leave you with choice words from novelist and activist Arundhati Roy, from which this work draws much inspiration:

"Our strategy should be not only to confront Empire but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we′re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.²

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HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

Beautiful Rising is not a traditional book. It’s a network of interrelated concepts or tools that you can read in any order.

There are five types of tools in the Beautiful Rising toolbox: stories, tactics, principles, theories, and methodologies.

Each type of tool has a designated symbol:

Stories    

Tactics    

Principles    

Theories    

Methodologies    

Each tool begins with a snapshot summary. Each tool ends by listing one or more key and related tools. You can think of a key tool as helping to explain the current tool through the eyes of other tools from the toolbox. For example, let’s say you are reading the tactic civil disobedience (p. 108). In the write-up, you will find the key principle maintain nonviolent discipline and a paragraph explaining how nonviolent discipline informs a successful civil disobedience effort. You will also find a list of related tools that you can refer to if you want to gain a broader understanding on the uses of civil disobedience.

    Potential risks

If you see this sign, know that there are some risks or potential pitfalls involved that you need to be aware of.

Online toolbox

Because this book represents just a subset of a much larger and still expanding set of tools in the online toolbox, you will sometimes see a reference to a tool that is not published in the book, but can be found online at beautifulrising.org.

(see: NAME OF TOOL)

You may see (see: NAME OF TOOL) in the text you are reading. It will either be followed by a page number or it won′t. If it does include a page number, you can simply turn to that page. If it does not, you can find the tool in the online toolbox.

Learn more

Each tool also lists a few resources under the heading Learn More. Rather than providing a long URL for readers to type into their browser to find the resource, we have opted to provide just enough information to allow you to find the resource using an online search. (Alternatively, you can go to our online toolbox and simply click the hotlinked resource you′re looking for.)

Contribute

Finally, if you have an idea for a tool that you would like to see included in the toolbox, we′d love to hear from you. Please submit your story, tactic, principle, theory, or methodology at beautifulrising.org/contribute

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STORIES

Accounts of memorable actions and

campaigns, analyzing what worked

(or didn′t) and why.

Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.

—Anonymous

Revolutionaries practice without

safety nets. Our laboratory is the

world around us - the streets, the

Internet, the airwaves, our own hearts.

We experiment, we fail, we readjust,

we try again, maybe this time a

little less disastrously, a little