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What do questions of safety and digital security of environmental organisers who are facing government repression in Serbia, greenwashing mining for so-called critical raw minerals and internet shutdowns in occupied Palestine have to do with each other?
In this blog post, I share some reflections from connecting these and other seemingly separate issues during my time as a Green Web Fellow.
I see the logic of extraction, domination and dispossession as common threads across the different projects in my fellowship cohort: whether that’s greenwashing being used to justify intensified and often violent extraction from the capitalist (semi)peripheries, as Andreea has traced in her work on transition narratives; using narrow definitions of connectivity to expand corporate communications infrastructures on Indigenous lands in the Amazon as Luã has examined; mobilising colonial notions of progress and development to justify taking water and electricity for data centres amidst frequent electricity shutdowns in South Africa, as Samantha has pointed out; or the colonial urge to map out, classify, and control the Earth that’s embedded in military-derived geospatial technologies as Cathy has elaborated.
What these examples demonstrate is the inseparability of colonial ways of shaping knowledge from the material infrastructure of colonial capitalist modernity (an analysis put forward by peoples resisting the violence of (settler colonial) states for centuries and across geographies, decolonial theorists within mainstream academic institutions using the concept of coloniality and others).
We are seeing how deadly this cocktail of imperial ideas and infrastructure can be in real-time in what some have called a ‘live-streamed genocide’ that started in Gaza and extended to the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, the latest intensification of violence by the settler colonial state of Israel in the ongoing catastrophe initiated 76 years ago in occupied Palestine. Over the past year, questions of internet infrastructure directly or indirectly controlled by the Israeli government have come to the fore: far from being an ethereal thing somewhere ‘up in the cloud’, internet infrastructure is being actively wielded by the IOF/Israel in its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. More recently, the focus has extended to tactics beyond internet shutdowns when thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously in Lebanon and parts of Syria, with explosives possibly planted months ahead of the renewed invasion of Lebanon by Israel.
While the occupation forces are making it near impossible for people to stay connected to life-saving information and networks, their partnerships with other oppressive institutions is deepening. Joining its Western counterparts, the government of Serbia has sent multiple major shipments of weapons to Israel totalling more than 23 million euros in 2024 alone, according to a Balkan Investigative Research Network and Haertz investigation. This can be seen as a continuation of a relationship that’s historically seen Israel ship weapons to the government of former Yugoslavia/Serbian army under UN sanctions in the 90s that an Israeli court refused to investigate, and more recent closening between the two regimes, in particular, the Serbian Security Service being listed as buying Israeli spyware that the government increasingly uses to target activists and the two governments have announced a free trade agreement in September 2024.
To surface these connections is to surface the undercurrents in the global web of colonial capitalist modernity that form the most recent ‘wave’ of police/state moves to criminalise environmental protestors in Serbia and elsewhere in the world.
notes of gratitude
I share some of the seeds that have been sown during the fellowship over the past couple of months–through conversations within and across movements (including a feminist study group of environmental defenders from Jalisco, Mexico), digital security workshops and biweekly facilitated sessions with a group brought together through the work in the fellowship.
I want to take a moment to celebrate and thank the people who have come on this collective learning and practice journey with me:
I feel immense gratitude to be in a relationship with each one of you. Thank you for showing me how you trust yourself and your experiences, for putting trust in each other, and for being present for the tears, laughs, silences, discomforts and revelations. To Sandra who facilitated the sessions, thank you for your guidance, patience and sharing your experiences so generously while helping us build and strengthen life-affirming support structures. I feel proud of how we embodied our intention to create a space to slow down despite the relentless sense of urgency around and inside us.
The shared feeling of excitement, new openings and gratitude during the ‘closing’ session filled my heart with joy and reassured me this process has strengthened the foundations for long-term engagement.
some lessons, many threads
Moving with and through unsafety together takes time
The entanglements between digital technologies and (dis)embodiment are multiple.
Research and reporting on the ways that narratives about digital technologies tend to conceal or obfuscate the materiality of devices and wider digital infrastructures are abundant, and the organising to counter the consequences of such narratives includes struggles over data centres, mining for raw materials used in electronic devices, imported electronic waste dumping, to name just a few.
Understanding that the feeling of (un)safety is always relational and an embodied experience and acknowledging the stark absence of ‘activists’ space to engage and process experiences at this level collectively, our group agreed early on to treat embodied needs and experiential practice as a priority of our coming together. I’d been wishing for a more focused integration of my dance/movement practices and work in political organising spaces in the Balkans. These collective sessions encouraged me to seek out and make connections in multiple ways. I’ve found teachers in my contact improvisation practice who articulate the political aspects of their practice, committed to experimenting with a variety of practices of creative and embodied explorations of radical ideas, learned more about politicised somatics as a pathway and method to “embody transformation, individually and collectively” and unprocessed grief as a source of unsafety and grief tending work in social movements.
Our sessions with a feminist organiser and facilitator Sandra Ljubinković weaved discussions with somatic exercises designed to build trust and create more space to feel deeply so we can engage with challenging questions around shared and differentiated predicaments, and what it takes to create foundations for movement spaces that feel more life-affirming and sustainable.
One of the implications of embracing politicised somatics is the embracing of slowness that is necessary for new patterns to get embodied. Not everything can be captured in legal/security briefings and protocols, and even when these are extensive (and super helpful to have!) how they are enacted and followed can depend a lot on the quality of relationships within a collective, especially how much trust and capacity to (co)regulate exists in a group. Sandra often invoked one of adrienne maree brown’s emergent strategy principles to move at the speed of trust, which is central to organising that is relational and sees deepening relationships not as a distraction or security risk but as a foundation for successful collective action (I like the articulation in this Instagram post).
As an example, collectively shifting thinking around this led to some of the people who had been directly targeted by the state getting their devices checked and briefed about navigating digital aspects of organising for the first time. Even though resources exist online and digital security experts could have been contacted earlier, it wasn’t until space was made within existing relationships that steps were taken to make use of these.
The many selves of self-organising
How do we self-organise and interact with institutional frameworks in ways that bring about more autonomy and continuity while refusing pacification and cooption? When can funding be used in subversive ways and when is it better to stay clear from an organisation altogether?
Bringing people with varied experiences of engaging with formal institutions was crucial for reaching a collective conclusion around self-organisation being more generative than working within institutionalised frameworks. Given the history of neoliberal ‘civil society building’ during and post the breakup of Yugoslavia with large donors having too much influence over where and how energy gets spent (these critiques aren’t unique to the region, see e.g. The Revolution Will Not be Funded anthology, summary of Arundhati Roy’s writing on the NGO-isation of resistance, Leah Cowan’s writing on the pacification of radical struggle in the UK in Why Would Feminists Trust the Police?), we need to both be vigilant and organising alternatives, especially as extractive forces and repression intensify.
Going forward our group adopted a plan of monthly gatherings to keep developing a collective practice and contributing to key initiatives group members have been building, such as through holding our in-person gatherings at the Four Waters meeting point–an independent household and gathering space for artists and organisers focused in equal parts on political education through programmed activities and the practice of centring rest and relationship-building in the activities that take place there.
In June, a friend from the group and I joined the Novi Sad School for Feminist Abolition to collectively analyse abolitionist frameworks and practices as they manifest (or not) in the Balkans and relate to movements internationally. Practising coming into closer relationships with aligned groups while continuing our collective learning, we are feeding back to the group and contributing a text around the criminalisation of protesters to the School’s upcoming publication.
Thinking through ways of mobilising existing resources has also been central throughout the organising for the antiextractivist camp and platform ZBOR that came together in September 2024 (zbor means a form of assembly in BCS (Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian) and is also an acronym from Združeni Balkanski Otpor i Rad / United Joint Balkan Resistance and Labour). Building on the tradition of self-organised workers and peasant assemblies and collective work actions, ZBOR was borne out of the desire to bring together grassroots groups from the Balkans and further afield for political education, resource sharing and self-organising outside of existing institutionalised frameworks.
May these efforts continue growing our collective capacity for joy as a way to strengthen and sustain resistance.