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In this paper, I examine the concept of the political as an embodied sentiment through which pro-refugee and anti-border activists make sense of and engage with the world. While scholars often use the political as an analytical concept, I show what we can learn by engaging with it empirically.

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Is one already political if one engages in practices that potentially have political consequences? Especially since the emergence of resistance studies and the influence of Foucault's connection between politics and power, the political and political subjects are assumed to emerge wherever there is resistance. Rather than considering the political as an etic analytical concept, I propose that we examine it empirically by looking at how those who call themselves political activists experience it. I approach the political as an embodied sentiment through which political activists make sense of the world, engage with it, and experience what is political and what is not. Following Saba Mahmood, I take seriously the beliefs, attitudes, and sensibilities of political activists behind their practices and discourses and show that the political is not always everywhere, but where activists feel and cultivate it.

I do this by engaging with pro-refugee and anti-border political activist groups that were active during the European Long Summer of Migration of 2015/2016. Most of the literature on this period argues that thousands of European citizens organizing in support of asylum-seekers were acting politically. While acknowledging the differences between these individuals and groups, it glosses over the fact that some refused to see their work as political, while others presented it as such. My focus on political activist groups engages with these differences and explores what we can learn from a more robust understanding of the political—especially given that the European migration regime has become much stricter since then.

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By exploring the activist trajectories of Bunong leading figures struggling for their peoples' rights on the margins of Cambodia, we will reflect upon the complex relations between global and local scales of engagement and on indigenous activists’ challenges in fostering diverse relations of trust.

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Mediatized images of indigenous activists pleading their cases in international and national fora might leave the impression of a smooth convergence between local and global forms of political action, either through multi-skilled customary guiding figures or through complementary alliances between different types (and sometimes generations) of leaders. However, the struggle for indigenous rights that Bunong inhabitants of the Cambodian highlands have been waging for a decade and a half demonstrates the complex interplay between these different scales of engagement. Internal divisions have been exacerbated or created as external supporters, commentators and news media choose which Bunong voices to amplify and which to cast doubt on, not always appropriately or accurately. This reminds us not only that indigenous communities are far from homogenous, but also raises questions about how different scales of action influence each other, and how lines of confidence are stretched and sometimes broken.

Having followed the struggle of indigenous Bunong people to maintain access to their land and resources in the hilly margins of Cambodia for over a decade, I will draw upon the activist trajectories—the rise and, in some cases the fall¬— of several key actors as well as on conversations with them and with some of those for whom they speak. By reflecting upon the transcalar making and unmaking of indigenous activists, I wish to emphasise the challenges these actors face in fostering diverse types of relations and living up to their often-diverging tests of trust.

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Following the Arab uprisings, Lebanese activists alighted upon a temporality of rupture, which punctuated the future with multiple event-like moments. Experiencing moments of rupture transforms what seems possible, and cultivating those experiences keeps movements going when things fall apart.

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This paper traces the development of a distinctive temporality of rupture amongst Lebanese political activists who, in the years following the Arab uprisings, alighted upon an eventful orientation towards the future. Lebanese activism is highly heterogeneous. It has seen the cultivation of alternative social spaces, solidarity organizing with marginalized communities (particularly migrant workers from the Global South), radical intellectual production, and experimentation with multiple political and organizational models: anarchist, autonomist, directly-democratic, broad coalition, separatist and gradualist. This makes it an excellent natural experiment for exploring what is general and what is particular to activist subjectivities, while tracking how they are produced and maintained.

I suggest that experiencing moments of rupture radically transforms what seems possible, and that cultivating these experiences keeps movements going when things appear to fall apart. Through my analysis of the heterogeneity of activism in Lebanon, I argue that some form of a temporality of rupture is fundamental to ‘activism’ as a form of action in the world, whatever its content. Extending the current anthropology of radical politics, I show that though contemporary anarchist and leftist communities offer a privileged site in which to think through activism, there is no necessary correlation between their practice and activism as a kind of activity (though there is a very clear affinity). I provide a conception of activism that can accommodate other forms of political engagement, even and particularly when they are forms that we might find objectionable.

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This paper discusses the political subjectivities of the neighborhood-based grassroots organizations of the Sudanese Resistance Committees. The paper discusses the power relations at play by focusing on the attached meanings of being a ‘revolutionary’ or an ‘activist’.

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This contribution analyzes the political subjectivities of the lijān al-muqāumā (English: Resistance committees, short RC) in Khartoum, Sudan. The RCs are neighborhood-based grassroots initiatives that organized the resistance during Sudan’s December Revolution 2018/19 and resisted the military coup d’état in October 2021. Today, with more than 5,000 RCs nationwide, they provide emergency aid in Sudan’s civil war.

Until the outbreak of the war in 2023, RCs organized and coordinated street protests to bring down the military regime. Further, they organized community events, e.g., during Ramadan and memorials for the martyrs. Other events, such as symposiums, film screenings and music shows, aimed to educate the community. Within days after the war, they shifted their activism to humanitarian aid.

Based on one year of ethnographic data collection on political subjectivation within Sudan’s revolutionary movement resisting the counterrevolution in the capital Khartoum, the paper analyzes the contested and often opposing subjectivities of being nāshīd (activist) and thawrī (revolutionary). By analyzing the terms' embeddedness into Khartoum's social, political, and cultural context, the paper draws out the different power relations, especially class relations, that are manifested in these labels and simultaneously (co)produce them as subject forms.

I argue that the RC's subjectivity of being revolutionaries offers an emancipatory view of activism that challenges its boundedness to Western normative understandings.

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Based on ethnographic work with Colombian feminist NGO workers, the paper challenges the demarcations of the good feminist subject in the NGOized field of transnational activism for women’s rights and studies the modalities of construction of feminist political alliances despite power asymmetries.

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Since the 1990s, many critiques have targeted “professional feminists”, i.e. the visible political subjects of processes of institutionalization and NGOization of radical politics. These critiques have finely described and analyzed how these processed have narrowed the scope of social transformation in different sociopolitical contexts, how social movements and organizations have developed their collective action within restrictive frameworks of global agendas, and how the logic of the project relies on rationalized ideas of social change. In this context, professional feminists have implicitly been demarcated as bad activists or simply not acknowledged as such. This paper unpacks the moralized assumptions about what constitutes a good or a bad feminist subject in the context of NGO politics in Colombia, related to normative ideas about the legitimacy of certain type of political subjects and the appropriateness of certain feminist practices.

The paper discusses ethnographic material collected with a group of privileged white-mestiza Colombian feminist NGO workers who have been at the forefront of institutionalized feminist politics in the country over the last decade. By unpacking their ethical dispositions and affective attachment to feminism, their awareness about the political contradictions they inhabit, and the political imaginaries they rely on to sustain their political work, I delve into the formation of political subjectivities in the context of transnational activism. I argue that despite their in-between position of professional feminists, their ethical engagements to a feminist imagined community with other feminist activists sustain transnational political alliances across power asymmetries.

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Who is a human rights defender (HRD)? I trace what I call a definition dilemma between opening the concept of HRD to diverse types of subjectivity to reckon with past exclusions, and the need to define conceptual boundaries to protect against abuse and increase the robustness of protection regimes.

Paper Abstract:

The last decades have witnessed a conceptual opening of human rights practices, hitherto prerogative of experts in international law, towards a multiplicity of subjectivities that enact new imaginaries. This afforded human rights scholarship addresses subaltern histories and reckons with past exclusions. Conversely, however, critical deconstruction and empirical diversification have aggravated the seemingly basic, yet thorny quest for defining, or delimiting, human rights activism. This not only poses a challenge to research but, foremost, opens human rights concepts to abuse and undermines protection regimes.

This presentation is based on a provocative think piece I drafted for the Journal of Human Rights Practice. Based on more than a decade of own activism and (ethnographic) research on human rights activism, in Mexico, Kenya, and Colombia, I first trace the definition dilemma as it emerges from emancipatory genealogies in human rights practice scholarship that move away from elitist conceptions of human rights. I am not pretending to solve this dilemma; rather, in a second step, I offer ‘metaphorical dislocations’ changing the terms of discussion to elicit new avenues of thought. Taking common allusions to the economy of human rights as my point of departure, I pursue Marx’s critique of political economy as a metaphor to re-centre human rights activism as a labour practice that: a) produces discursive value qua rendering violence legible and b) transforms activist cultures socio-politically. I contend that critical discursive-economic thought can help us delineate the specific subjectivity of activists from the perspective of fetishism, labour and value, and overdetermined representation.

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This presentation deals with the formation of Brazilian HV/AIDS activism as a particular mode of social mobilization of people with wide heterogeneity (gender, sexuality, class, race, etc.), which operated as a moral matrix and political commitment in relation to health, rights and citizenship.

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From an anthropological and historical perspective, I will discuss how the HIV/AIDS epidemic was a critical event that forged social and political mobilization in Brazil, relating to global AIDS activism. The social mobilization of people with wide heterogeneity (gender, sexuality, class, race, etc.) operated as a moral condition and political commitment in relation to health, rights and citizenship against stigmatization and the so-called “civil death”. Since the mid-1980s, there has been a growing social and political mobilization from NGOs, patient associations and social networks, configuring a specific social world with complex relationships with civil society and the State. I would like to address the contrast between social categories of political leadership, such as militant and activist, which expose particular meanings in historical terms and in the formation of social movements. In this way, I will address the dynamics of training, recruitment, membership and permanence (or not) of people in a relevant Brazilian AIDS NGO. The internal social differentiation between volunteers and activists also reflected biosocial differences in terms of the experience of living with illness or not. Training as an AIDS “activist” implied acquiring moral and political requirements such as greater awareness, intimate/personal responsibility and greater control over correct information, which produced lay expertise. Likewise, I intend to discuss the impasses in the actions of activists in key government positions in state administration and in the production of public policies. I start from my own trajectory as an activist, anthropologist and university professor, which places me in different positions over four decades of the epidemic.

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As activist researchers, we seek ways to make sense of a world in deep crisis with tools and frameworks from inside and outside academic disciplines. What does it mean to deploy epistemic disobedience to challenge the restrictions of neoliberal academia?

Paper Abstract:

The modern world is characterised by a singular perspective, wherein any deviation from the universal norm becomes a challenge. Anthropology itself exemplifies this mindset, originating from the belief that 'others' must be comprehended, translated, and assimilated into the universal framework through rational processes. Elements resistant to such reduction are relegated to insignificance, existing as residual, ontologically incomplete, and irrelevant remnants. As activist researchers, we seek ways to make sense of a world in deep social and ecological crisis with tools and frameworks from inside and outside academic disciplines. The paper is a personal reflection on the implications of researching with social movements and deploying epistemic disobedience to challenge the restrictions of neoliberal academia and oppression in late-stage capitalist lifeworlds. As activists are always already doing theory and theorists are always already political subjects, the challenge lies in increasing our awareness and acceptance of this mutual implication. As such, the concern is not only to navigate between the fields of “activism” and “academia” but to surpass the separation altogether. We are tasked with reimagining anthropology as a machine for the “production of other worlds” (Russell 2015). This means rethinking some of the deep-seated assumptions and dualisms in anthropology and using its tradition and the tools that are at our disposal, to create a “new” kind of anthropology that works for our agenda for change.

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This field report presents evidence that the pressure of “activist” identity creates barriers of entry to resistance work. I connect this resistance to perceived lack of power and general fear-informed state (tenants of white supremacy culture) and present creative examples of working around it.

Paper Abstract:

When are people ready to take on an identity? Whom is activism for? These are some of the leading questions I explore in the context of three (3) different educational institutions across the U.S.A.: “Prestigious” in the mid West, “Southern” in Southern U.S., and “Non-Profit” in the U.S. West.

Rather than an academic exploration, I present real-life evidence that everyday resistance work has a potential to inspire people to work towards chance when employing terms that decenter activist identity. The intellectualization of “activism” stemming from academic theory may lead to a barrier of entry to meaningful change work; likely because activist ideology is understood to have prerequisites, such as advanced knowledge, already established proficiency, and at times networked connection.

Evidence implies that people may purposefully deny themselves and others the label of “activism” due to fear being perceived as radical and leftist (both considered inflammatory terms in many U.S. American workplaces). Instead, workers find creative ways to work around ideology by simplifying, re-owning power, and focusing on local policy, at times away from executive leadership eyes while staying within institutional mission.

I connect the resulting resistance to labeling advocacy as “activist” to a perceived lack of power and general fear-informed state of being punished for radical ideology (tenants of white supremacy culture). These exploratory findings have implications for both academic theory on activist ideology and formation as well as on movement organizing that relies on inviting people into daily action.

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In this ethnographic paper, I analyze how Basque speakers who don't necessary conceive of themselves as activists have come to feel empowered and compelled to act together for socio-linguistic change, while I also reflect on my experience of becoming “kontzientziatuta” in the field.

Paper Abstract:

In conversations with Basque speakers in Pamplona-Iruñea (Navarre, Spain), four concepts are often mentioned: language, community, “kontzientzia” (consciousness/awareness) and “militantzia” (activism). Although they don’t usually describe themselves as activists, my research participants invest considerable effort in various forms of Basque language and cultural activism. Indeed, for some of them, speaking Basque and being Basque – in a context where the language is minoritized and where vestiges of past conflicts still reverberate – seems to entail a subjective orientation towards action, a commitment to their community, and resistance to hegemony. In particular, living in the Basque language is, for them, both a “natural” way of life and a decision, the result of a process of conscientization, that must be constantly reaffirmed through activist-like practices.

In this paper, I dwell on the research participants' reflections on being/becoming “kontzientziatuta” (aware of one's position (as a minority language speaker) and the urge for activistic engagement), which involve a genealogy of family and collective narratives and experiences of oppression and resistance. I avoid defining whether my research participants are (or could be considered) activists or not, and instead foreground the experiential ways and intersubjective processes by which they come to feel empowered and compelled to act for/enact socio-linguistic change. The ethnography is interwoven with a personal account of how researching in a socio-cultural and affective context in which community mobilisation seemed an always feasible possibility and in which alternative socio-linguistic worlds were being actively prefigured, has changed my sense of agency and made me “kontzientziatuta”.

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Drawing on my personal experiences within the activist network, this paper explores the relationship between aging and activism. It focuses on fears and struggles, but also on hope and lessons learned from activism and how and whether activism changes the aging process and its experience.

Paper Abstract:

The activists of the Women in Black network have been involved in disobedience and activism in the (post-)Yugoslav space for decades. They are aging and, along with them, their activism is aging. Their situation and experience point to the need to supplement previous reflections on activism, which often neglect personal, social, and political relations over time. In the popular imagination, activism is often associated with youth, making it even more difficult to recognize the struggles of aging activists and improve their visibility in public spaces and political discourses. On the streets, in addition to the traitors and the toms, they hear more and more ‘old hags’. Ageism is also experienced within activist movements and organizations themselves. It seems to be forgotten that age, but also the course of life of each generation can be important experiences in understanding political participation and activism itself. The experience of aging activists has led to tensions between being an activist and a citizen of the so-called retirement age. For many activists, being old seems to be a privilege and a luxury they cannot afford.

This is not only because there is still a lot to do and that there is always no one to continue their decades of work, but also because of economic uncertainty.

Following the experiences and ‘political biographies’ of an older generation of activists in the (post-)Yugoslav space, I attempt to shed light on the relationships between age and activism and the possibility of ‘retiring’ from activism.

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Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Athens, this paper reflects on activist subjectivity as a collective experience that encourages long-term commitment. We explore the way in which everyday tasks become part of learning processes that reenforce communitarian and prefigurative values.

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Based on our fieldwork among activist groups maintaining self-organised infrastructures in the centre of Athens, in our communication we would like to reflect on the individual and collective learning processes through which people not only become activists in the first place but also consolidate their identity as politically engaged subjects throughout their lifetimes.

We will focus on the example of two grassroots organisations that, apart from different types of contentious action, sustain solidarity projects such as a social kitchen, refugee and migrant housing and self-organised firefighting. They understand their activities as revolutionary, prefigurative acts of rendering state and capitalist entities unnecessary through everyday praxis. In this context, long-term commitment is crucial to allow for the organisations to both meet basic human needs in times of subsequent crises and pursue their strategy of sociopolitical transformation. Experienced activists transmit a complex culture of collective responsibility to newcomers which, as we argue in this paper, ultimately leads to an extended activist subjectivity, grounding each individual activist’s way of being in the world through in the values that their organisation seeks to enact.

As part of this process, everyday tasks are reinterpreted as tools of activist socialisation that imply unlearning hegemonic ideas understood as hindering for the common goals while providing activists with a sense of purpose and community that strengthens their desire to remain engaged in spite of personal risk and a considerable workload.