Luca Gervasoni i Vila on advancing belonging through nonviolent action
Luca Gervasoni i Vila is a member of the Forum’s Advisory Board and the Founding Director of NOVACT- Institute for Nonviolence, former President of the Federation of Organizations for Global Justice and associated professor at the Catalan Open University, based in Barcelona. For the last two decades, his work has focused on how civil society movements can successfully fight for rights, freedom and justice. The Democracy and Belonging Forum’s Evan Yoshimoto met with Luca to discuss rising authoritarianism in Southern Europe, nonviolence as a strategy for transformation, and why justice activists need to protect and support one another.
Hi Luca! It is a pleasure to interview you. Firstly, I’d like to ask, what does belonging mean to you?
Many years ago, I was in a hurry leaving the city of Bethlehem after a meeting to go to Jerusalem and walking through the Checkpoint 300. It was a busy and hot day and there was a long two hour queue full of old people and mothers carrying stuff and kids under the sun, yet two military officers stopped me and told me that I was invited to move directly to the door. They never checked my passport or asked me anything. They just looked at me and decided that I was not supposed to spend two hours under the sun. I asked why, but the answer was as expected: I was the only white European person in a line full of Arabs. My whiteness was indicating that I wasn’t belonging to the Palestinians.
This story is not unique for me. I was not belonging to the Moroccan women carrying food at the Ceuta border. I do not belong to the group that will be stopped by the police 8 times more than me in the streets of Barcelona.
Based on my experience, belonging was always about my privileges in contrast to others’. It is a term that urgently needs to be re-addressed, re-defined. We will never be able to confront the unprecedented challenges of humanity without creating a more global sense of belonging.
Thank you for sharing. Much of your work countering polarization and authoritarianism seems to be doing just that—re-addressing, re-defining, and creating a more global sense of belonging. Can you tell us what is happening in Southern Europe right now and what are the implications for identity-based violence and out-group othering? Why is authoritarianism rising at this particular moment in the region?
There was an important meeting celebrated in the Hotel Nazionale of Rome, just after the Italian elections on September 25. Representatives of far-right movements from all of Europe decided to gather to share good practices and lessons learned from the Italian and Swedish elections. Actually, they had a lot to celebrate.
Since World War II, far-right movements in Europe were always under 10% of electoral support. But after 2010 the situation drastically changed. In Italy, the far-right won the elections with 26% of the vote. The Sweden Democrats, the nationalist and far-right populist political party, had 20%. They are already in the governments of Poland and Hungary. In France they held more than 40% of support during the last presidential elections. In a Europe that is losing economic, cultural and geopolitical influence… there is no doubt that a new specter is haunting it. It is a specter that embodies the worst of the European ideological tradition: counter-enlightenment dogmatism, authoritarianism, and nationalist essentialism.
And of course, it has implications for identity-based violence and othering. The core message of all far-right movements in Europe is based on three ideas: nationalist and ethnic exaltation; anti-politician populism; and anti-immigrant xenophobia. Checking the conclusions of the Hotel Nazionale gathering, it is evident that their strategy is to confront a traditional and exhausted political elite advocating for inclusion and belonging and offering to its followers an exclusive new identity that blames the establishment and advocates for simple and expeditious solutions. They are totally aware that xenophobia is one of the factors that is offering them the greatest electoral dividends. Their message is always the same—“You want to come back to our glorious past? Just throw out the foreigners.” They want to rebuild a Christian and Western Civilization that is in danger because of immigration and, in particular, of Muslim immigrants, who are depicted as being incapable of integration.
And how does polarization and authoritarianism look different or similar there compared to the US and Northern Europe?
The rise of authoritarianism is a global movement. And actually: an extremely well-funded and well-organized movement that has managed to gain cultural hegemony during the past decades. Of course, there are differences between the far-right movements from the US and Europe, but they share the same core values, the same communication strategies, the same ways of organizing their followers, and the same electoral messages.
In almost all “western” political systems they managed to do something that is politically more valuable than winning elections. If other parties want to rule, they should follow their policies or they will simply lose. In light of this situation, all traditional parties with governmental responsibilities must redouble their cooperation to rethink current restrictive migration policies, to shrink civic space, and to mainstream national rhetoric. This is cultural hegemony.
And you cannot confront this by advocating “management capacities.” If we want to confront this movement, we should be prepared to discuss ideas, to redesign our strategies, to think, and to write. We need to create community power.
Through the use of nonviolent action, NOVACT engages in the struggle to achieve a society based on human security and nonviolence, as well as a society free of armed conflicts and violence in all its dimensions. Understanding nonviolence as a strategy for transformation, NOVACT aims to contribute to a peaceful, just, and dignified world. Why are grassroots nonviolent movements important to advancing belonging and countering far-right authoritarianism? What is the role of bridging in efforts to promote nonviolence? And why do you feel called to bridge?
NOVACT was established in 2012, shortly after the Arab revolutions and the “Indignados” movement in Europe. We invested many efforts trying to learn what were the core principles that were used to spark and guide the moments of transformative unrest and the strategies behind such outburst of protest. We wanted to systematize what we learned and to offer new nonviolent tactics and strategies to other movements working for social change.
There is something I learned during those years. Whether it was an explosive surge of protest calling for the end of dictatorship in Tunisia or Egypt, a demand for democratic reform in Spain, a wave of uprisings against occupation in the Middle East, or a tent city in Western Sahara that spreads throughout the region, when mass movements erupted onto our television screens, the media portrayed them as being spontaneous and unpredictable. I was personally in contact with the movements organizing the protests and the well-planned strategies that they were implementing. I was shocked to see the way the media was presenting them and how the strategic use of nonviolent action was poorly understood.
Nonviolence is usually studied as a philosophy or moral code, rather than as a method of political conflict, disruption, and escalation. I realized how important it was to correct this gap. Drawing from discussions with activists working to defend human rights, challenging corporate corruption, or combating authoritarianism, it was evident that people with few resources and little influence in conventional politics can nevertheless engineer momentous upheavals.
And from this perspective, working to advance belonging and countering the rise of far-right authoritarianism in Europe has been one of NOVACT main priorities of the last years. We are supporting migrants in the European southern border trying to enter the “fortress,” and we are equipping them with systems and resources to denounce all human rights violations that they suffer and offering access to justice. We are also working with youth and trying to make them more resilient in face of the far-right messages.
And let me share something important that I learned. You cannot convince someone to not be xenophobic just by presenting them the horrors of racism and the benefits of global belonging. This is sad, but it is true. If someone is feeling a strong sense of grievance and injustice, she does not need words, she will need solutions. The far-right offers solutions that are apparently simple. We should do the same. We should organize these people to struggle and work for justice in their communities and build the power needed to improve their lives. The promise of change and equality that can counter the far-right must be built also at this level.
This is what bridging means to me.
You’ve worked between Jerusalem and Barcelona with other activists from around the world waging social change facing increased security threats from States. What kinds of threats are justice activists facing and how can we best support and protect each other?
I had the chance to meet Ronnie Kasrils once in Ramallah. He was a Minister of the South African government and I was especially interested in his past experience as one of the leaders of the African National Congress and the anti-apartheid movement. I asked him: what do we have to do to organize a successful movement advocating for change? He answered: you need money, you need to train your people, and you must be able to protect them.
He was right: protecting each other is an extremely relevant point in all civil resistance movements. Not only because you want to protect your friends when they are arrested. If the people feel that you can not do anything to support them in case they suffer repression, it is simple: nobody will join your movement. That’s the role of fear in authoritarian regimes.
And this fear has increased immensely during the last years. The capacity of the states to repress civil society movements advocating for change is much larger today than in all of history. Mass surveillance technology has proven that States have the capacity to read messages that share information on human rights defenders, to listen to meetings, and to send messages in their name. If we want the movements waging social change to be protected… they need to be trained. It is not something that we can expect to happen spontaneously.
But it is not only about cybersecurity. When we discuss protecting our people, we should also reflect on how we support each other. Many valuable persons feel burned out in social movements and they end up losing their hope for social change. It is a difficult business. In my experience, most of the people that are devoted to taking care of others, always forget something: the importance of taking care of themselves.
That’s something that should change. Discussing protection, the Ethics of Care Theory is a very relevant tool. We need to direct our attention to the need for responsiveness inside social movements (paying attention, listening, responding) and to the costs of losing connection with oneself or with others.
We must be the change we want to see in others.