Resist + Renew

As Resist + Renew we’ve got a lot of experience with social movement groups, both through organising within groups and supporting them as external facilitators. An issue that arises again and again within groups is conflict. So we get asked a lot to support groups to address this. In 2021 we were reflecting on the work we were doing around conflict in the context of the BLM uprisings of 2020. That summer saw a huge amount of interest and support for prison abolition and Transformative Justice. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says ​“abolition isn’t about absence, it’s about the presence of life affirming institutions”. For us some of those life affirming institutions are ones that support us to engage in conflict and disagreement in line with our values and without turning to the violence of the state or disposing of one another. When we looked at the tools and concepts available to us around conflict, however, much of what was available failed to take into account structural oppression. This means that things like experiences of race, class, gender, disability and so on weren’t factored into how it affects the ways people show up in conflicts. 

It was then we decided we wanted to see if we could explore how issues of conflict, Transformative Justice and anti-oppression could be woven together more, in order to inform the way we support groups better. We decided to apply to the Ideas and Pioneers Fund to be able to dedicate a good amount of time to this work. The application process was relatively straightforward. Being able to do a video as part of the application, whilst a little daunting, allowed us to show who we are, both in terms of identities and personalities, much more easily than in writing. 

Once the project started we conducted a series of interviews with people working in the field of conflict resolution, from youth workers to mediators. We followed these up with focus groups digging in deeper to topics that seemed to resonate with people in the individual interviews. Whilst we’ve worked together as a collective for a few years, we usually work in pairs on shorter projects, whereas this was the first whole group project that took over a year. Scheduling was one of our biggest challenges, setting dates for whole group meetings to sift through the content was difficult. But we allowed ourselves a lot of ​“buffer” time in our plans, which meant it was possible to make adjustments. Another adjustment we needed to make was shifting the budget. 

Some of the things we’ve learnt through this process are: 

We were able to coalesce some of our learnings into workshops and around the same time we also produced a podcast series covering tools and frames for approaching conflict. We had great feedback from the podcast and workshops including one participant saying ​“I wish we could do this every month!”. 

Though officially we’ve finished this process around thinking about conflict, we haven’t ended up with a final product as a result. We are continuing to do workshops, both open workshops for individuals who are interested and for specific social movement groups, and each time we learn something new and adapt our workshops as ideas shift and change.