Theme 5: Power, Conflict, and Violence
All change generates conflict – in our families, organisations, workplace, and contexts. Standing up to dominant forces and beliefs can create exponential conflict and violence – backlash is an inevitable condition of social change.
Movements and activists face many risks as they navigate change. Governments, corporations, and other powerful actors often respond to policy change or calls against abuse, corruption, and injustice with threats of violence or direct attacks and repression, targeting activists and movements. These attacks against dissent include lawsuits aimed at undermining and paralysing organisations and the use of stigma, gossip, and misinformation on social media to isolate, shame, and silence activists, divide and neutralise groups and communities, and confuse or sow doubt. In the case of women and LGBTQI+ defenders, these attacks are often personalised aimed at shaming them. Widespread tolerance of gender-based abuses within organisations and families intensifies the risks that activists face.
Violence is embedded in the institutions that marginalise and dehumanise people and serves as a tool to create fear and force compliance. Throughout history, backlash and violence have been part of the operating system of unequal power relations and injustice, and yet we rarely factor this into our strategies and change work. Collective safety and protection strategies for activists are all too often an afterthought.
Political violence breeds rage, and it is tempting to want to respond to violent attacks with violence. That’s why it’s important to analyse how violence operates in relation to power broadly and specifically in your context, and to take time to reflect about non-violence and the tactics you choose.
Activity 8: It’s all connected
Our power analysis needs to include awareness of the dynamics of conflict, backlash and violence. Here, we explore how change creates conflict that can be either positive or negative, and we demystify structural and systemic violence so we can better anticipate risk, conflict, and threats, and, in turn, improve strategies and collective safety.
Before starting, check in with participants about the sensitivity of this topic. Many people have experienced violence in their private lives and political work. Discussing violence can trigger trauma or other unresolved feelings, which may be expressed in many ways. Give people the option of stepping out of the small-group discussions; it is important to acknowledge the real nature of that trauma and create space for the emotions this process can bring up.
Materials: Handout: It’s all connected.
Plenary: In Activity 7, we looked at interlinked systems of domination. It’s helpful to remember what these systems are and how they connect and overlap with each other. (Ask for a few examples.) We will now look at how violence and the threat of violence are essential features of these systems and play a critical role in maintaining unequal relations of power at all levels. We begin by reflecting on our own experiences of violence and backlash at the intersection of these systems.
Small groups: Distribute the handout: It’s all connected. Review the diagram and identify two concrete examples that illustrate how each of these overlapping systems – patriarchy, structural racism, extractive capitalism, and colonialism–imperialism – rely on violence.
- Who are the players behind the systems, people, and institutions that perpetrate and orchestrate these forms of backlash and violence? What do they hope to achieve with their actions?
- How have you, your organisation, or groups you’ve worked with dealt with these forms of backlash and violence? Identify examples.
Plenary: Share examples and reflections from small groups. Ask:
- What insights did you gain about how violence and the threat of violence operate?
- Have you been involved in change efforts that generate backlash intended to reverse or resist change? Did you anticipate this?
- How does this exercise make you feel?
- How might you approach strategy in a different way, given what you’ve discussed and the emotions it generated?
Download this activity.
It’s all connected
Dominant systems of power rely on fear, coercion, and the threat and use of violence to prevent change and silence dissent. Fear becomes a political and easily internalised tool for control and creates what observers might read as apathy or acquiescence.
This violence is systemic and structural – it plays out amongst us, in public and in private and in our families, culture, and politics. We absorb it in our bodies and minds. Context, gender, race/ethnicity, class, location, and so many other factors define its contours, but the violence is universal.
But violence is not invincible. We can prepare for the conflict generated by standing up and speaking out. Anticipating backlash and violence helps us to continuously build alternative kinds of relationships while preparing for the many challenges and risks our change-making will generate.
Download handout: It’s all connected.
Activity 9: Experiences of power, conflict, and violence
There are multiple kinds of violence deeply connected with how power operates. Here, we’ll consider some different forms of violence, an awareness that can guide our strategies and ways of organising.
Materials: A case study (Guardians of the River, or another case study the group is familiar with), or the timeline created in Chapter 2.
Handout: Power, conflict, and violence.
Plenary: Introduce the activity. Form groups to review the Guardians of the River case study, their timeline, or another case study of their choice. (Choose just one.)
Small groups: Review the case study or timeline to identify five examples of the use or threat of violence that blocked change from happening.
- What was the violence or threat of violence? Who was behind it, and why?
- What impact did violence or threat have in the short and long-term (years later)?
- How did activist groups adjust their strategies in response to violence or the threat of violence
Plenary: For discussion, ask:
- Why are we always surprised when our change efforts – whether inside our organisations and communities or challenging the dominating forms of power – create conflict and even provoke violence?
- What does this quote mean to you in terms of your work and the history you stand on?
Plenary: Share the handout Power, conflict, and violence, and review the definitions, asking for examples to make sure participants have a common understanding. If some participants have directly experienced violence, prepare a safe space and provide support for the psychological and emotional impact of remembering.
Small groups: Identify two examples of each type of violence described in the handout from your own work or the case study or your timeline. For each example, discuss:
- How does this type of violence work to maintain unequal power?
- What impact does it have on your life and your change work?
Plenary: This analysis links to the previous discussion about how power operates differently in the intimate, private, and public realms of our lives. Facilitate an exchange of examples and thoughts from groups. Ask:
- Which of the types of violence are most common in your context?
- How do these forms of violence work to maintain unequal entrenched power?
- What impact do these forms of violence have on our organisations and change work?
- What are the ways we can build safety and care into our organising and organisations to protect against and counter violence?
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Power, conflict, and violence
Conflict, violence, and the threat of violence are used to prevent change, quell dissent, and maintain power and control. Both power and violence are always changing and take direct and indirect, visible, and invisible forms in both public and private arenas. In anticipating and responding to conflict, violence, and fear, it’s helpful to understand the different forms these can take:11
Structural: The ways that social, economic, political, and cultural institutions systematically marginalise and exclude certain people (based on characteristics including gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability), rendering them impoverished and invisible. This discrimination is tolerated by society. Those who suffer from poor health, economic insecurity, lack of shelter, stigmatisation, or crime are often blamed.12
Political: Threats, attacks, and intimidation from both state and non-state actors when dominant actors believe their control and power are exposed or challenged, including:
- Lawsuits (for example, defamation) and legal restrictions on funding/operations.
- Repression, assassination, and the presence of police, military, and weapons to deter or suppress protest.
- Complicity in violent attacks by non-state actors such as private security, militias, and organised crime and paramilitaries.
- Surveillance and infiltration (such as posing as new members of a group to steal information)
- Use of digital and other media to marginalise, stigmatise, and blame dissenters and discredit their agendas.
- Death threats or threats of assault against family members and activists.
- Raiding offices, destroying equipment, or seizing property.
Cultural: The use of popular culture, stories, and humour that normalise gendered, racist, or economic violence or degrade certain cultures or communities.13
Symbolic: Highly visible attacks on communities, their leaders, cultural icons, and expressions of beliefs, language, dress, and customs in ways intended to threaten and destroy their core identity and existence.14
Ecological: The destruction and degradation of nature and the environment through mining, logging, and other extractive industries; through overuse, as in the case with industrial farming, or pollution produced by car emissions, pesticides, or industrial waste in water.
Identity-based: Perpetrated on the basis of a person’s gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc.
Consider, for example, gender-based violence, directed at a person, group, or movement based on their perceived biological sex, sexual expression, or conformity with norms of gender identity. Here, violence is used to control behaviour, freedom of movement, and expression. It prevents people from stepping out of traditionally prescribed gender roles and can include physical, sexual, verbal, emotional, and psychological abuse, threats, coercion, and economic or educational deprivation, harassment, and control on freedom of movement, whether occurring in intimate, private, and public arenas.
Femicides – the murder of women and girls because they are female – used as a political agenda is an example of gendered political violence, along with the sexualised and gendered attacks on women human rights defenders.
Violence of all kinds is used to police and dominate ethnic and racial groups, working class and poor communities, immigrants, and other marginalised communities
Download handout: Power, conflict, and violence.
Activity 10: Non-violence and liberation
Change involves conflict, but there are alternatives to violence and fear. Here, we explore age-old traditions of non-violence as a form of disobedience and resistance and nonviolence as a way to upend systemic power. We acknowledge that the concept of non-violence is debated – not all activists and changemakers believe that non-violence is the only option – and that it is important to grapple with these debates.
Materials: Videos or quotes from the videos:
- Interview with Martin Luther King about nonviolence
- Ted talk by Minniejean Brown-Trickey on nonviolence
Plenary: Invite participants to think about the meaning of ‘liberation’ in light of the last hundred years.
Many countries around the world, particularly in the Global South, gained their sovereignty and autonomy from occupations and colonial and imperialist power through liberation struggles involving civil wars and the armed overthrow of governments. Many governments currently in power may have betrayed the principles of the liberation struggle over time, but, for some people, this kind of violence has positive associations. Indeed, many of us are socialised to believe in violence as key to retribution or freedom. It’s important to begin this exploration of non-violence with an open conversation of how we see violence in relation to change.
Violence is a central feature of all of our histories. But it is not a given as a means for changing the way things are. Many of those who’ve made change before us recognised the need to disrupt the logic of violence that is so deeply embedded in all unequal forms of power – and also deeply internalised.
Change involves conflict – there’s no way around it. But there are alternatives to responding to violence and fear with more violence, including age-old traditions of non-violent disobedience and resistance.
Small groups: Take turns sharing what you know about the role and nature of violence in struggles for change and liberation in your context – including stories, beliefs, ideas, history, and your own experience.
- What beliefs or practices have been in favour of using violence to create change?
- What beliefs or practices have sought or created change without using violence?
- What are the fundamental differences between these two perspectives?
Create one or more drawings that represent these beliefs, ideas, and practices around violence and non-violence as ways of challenging, changing, or creating power.
Plenary: Post drawings around the room or virtual space. Allow time for everyone to look at them. Invite each group to explain what their drawings are about, and how they see violence and non-violence as ways of engaging with power. Document key ideas on a flipchart.
Present two critical ideas from older generations in quotes and/or full audio-visuals:
- Interview with Martin Luther King about nonviolence
- Ted talk by Minniejean Brown-Trickey on nonviolence
Invite discussion comparing these perspectives. Draw out implications for our own work:
- How do the ideas of these thinkers question and disrupt the logic of power and violence?
- How might these ideas be critical to resistance and liberation?
- What does this mean for how we see our struggles and how we organise?
- How do we have conversations with others about the limits of violence, given how important it has been in history?
Individually or in small groups: Invite people to go back to their ideas about reimagining the future. What gives you hope and energy in difficult times?. Ask:
- How might you refine your vision now?
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11 Some of these definitions draw on Rosemary McGee with Jesús Alfonso Flórez López, 2016, “Power, Violence, Citizenship and Agency: A Columbian Case Study” Working Paper 474, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, and others were developed and adapted for “Building Power in Crisis: Opportunities for Supporting Women on the Frontlines of Extractivism,” 2023, Sage Fund.
12 Galtung, J. (1969) ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6.3: 167–91, cited in McGee and Flórez López (2016)
13 Pearce, J. (2007) Violence, Power and Participation: Building Citizenship in Contexts of Chronic Violence, IDS Working Paper 274, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, cited in McGee and Flórez López (2016)
14 Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago: Chicago University Press, cited in McGee and Flórez López (2016).
