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Paper short abstract

This paper will engage with ideas of agency and resistance by drawing upon early stages of a multi-sited ethnography with women human rights defenders and activists residing in London, UK, across Germany, and in Canberra, Australia.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the extensions of political engagement among activists and women’s human rights defenders from Afghanistan who are now living in global minority countries. Drawing on early stages of multi-sited ethnographic research in London, UK, Berlin, Germany, and Canberra, Australia, this paper will explore the transnational nature of social movements and activism in ‘exile’. Activism and human rights work do not stop once a person migrates, networks continue to evolve, develop and transform. Many activists use online spheres to maintain connections and work on-the-ground, whilst simultaneously working within their countries of residency to engage in varying forms of activism – from meetings with their local Members of Parliament, to engaging with NGOs and raising awareness through films, panel events, or creative methods of poetry, art and music. Methods of engagement with activism and notions of ‘resistance in exile’ are wide-ranging, and my research found that activists tend to both keep networks on the ground in countries they left, whilst expanding and transforming their ways of working and engagement with their new countries of residencies. This paper will engage with Saba Mahmood’s conceptualisation of agency, to not be a “synonym for resistance to social norms but as a modality of action”(Mahmood 2009). Mahmood raised questions about the relationship between ‘norms’ and individuals both as they ‘perform’ in the world and how they see themselves. This paper aims to develop understandings of activism, developed beyond Western notions of direct confrontation, as activists move from the so-called global south to the ‘north’.