Blog | Soziale Bewegungen

Die Hashtags #HambiBleibt und #LütziBleibt wurden zu Losungen des Protests gegen den Braunkohleabbau im Rheinischen Revier. Hier erklärt die Kommunikationswissenschaftlerin Daniela Stoltenberg, wie sich die Bewegung die Sozialen Netzwerke zunutze macht, welche Parallelen es zum indigenen Aktivismus in den USA gibt – und weshalb die Aufmerksamkeit, die in den digitalen Medien erzielt wird, nicht immer im Sinne der Betroffenen vor Ort ist.

After years of contention, Lützerath is completely demolished. In January 2023, police cleared the squatted village of climate activists near the open pit lignite mine Garzweiler II, with bulldozers following on their heels. These events make Lützerath the 22nd village or settlement to be resettled and demolished for mining purposes in the Garzweiler region alone, although none of the others have received comparable attention.

On 20th-21st of October the CRC 1265 held its fourth international conference, this year titled “My City is a Battleground – Intersectionality and Urban Violence”. After two years of COVID restrictions, we could finally meet in person again, which in itself provided a cause for celebration as participants pleased to mingle with new as well as familiar faces. This year’s theme followed up on the CRC’s interest in socio-spatial conflicts, looking at the way intersectional tensions accompany processes of urban spatial refiguration. Taking its inspiration from decades of research on social inequality, class struggles, migration, violence as well as from intersectional feminist work, the conference turned its attention to intersectional experiences of violence and the way conflicts manifest intersectionally in and through urban space.

The environmental movement of Turkey has three decades of history. A culture of resistance was transferred from the first women's ecological resistance that attracted attention in the Bergama peasant movement to today's struggling women.[1] One of the areas of resistance discussed in this article is the Mount Ida (Kazdağları) Resistance, which is one of the most reported ecological struggles in the press in recent years in Turkey. [2]  Global companies came to this significant area, within the borders of Turkey's Marmara and Aegean regions, to search for gold with cyanide and destroy some regions with the state's approval. Resistance temporarily stopped the destruction and cutting of trees in the area.

The far-right and anti-Muslim organization SIAN has repeatedly staged demonstrations as well as public Qu’ran-burnings in Norwegian cities in recent years. In August 2020, the organization held a demonstration at the Furuset center, which includes a subway station, a shopping center, a branch of the city library and the district administration. Furuset is part of and the central place in Alna municipal district in Oslo. In this area the population is shaped by migration, religious diversity, and socio-economic challenges. This blog post discusses how local people reacted to the demonstration and how, in the process, local identities and spaces were intersectionally negotiated, defended, and created.

This blogpost explores how counterpublic spaces act as intrinsically intersectional spaces shaped by power, history and emotion. In his celebrated 2019 book Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, Johny Pitts sets off by train from Sheffield on a five-month journey across continental Europe. Pitts’ mission seeks to explore the everyday life of black European experiences, beyond the “standoffish academic vernacular” (2019: 5) and to look for instances of “reverse colonialism” that highlight the long-term social and cultural presence and influence of blackness on European culture.

Izidora, a so-called “informal” settlement in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, is a laboratory of urban politics and sustainable urbanization technologies. As a self-constructed neighbourhood, it is marked by inequalities as well as conflicts with the municipal authorities. In this text, I portray the politics of Izidora’s dwellers, as they appropriate different agroecological practices, enmesh them in their struggle for housing and citizenship, and pursue an emancipatory logic of urban planning. Activist coalitions with intersectional agendas and political articulations of alternative forms of urban agriculture in Belo Horizonte’s peripheries have led to the creation of Izidora, as well as an array of new urban imaginaries. This text is about Izidora and the politics of a city in the making.

Navigating public space is globally complex and complicated . In nations of the Global South, where democracies are gradually becoming problematic , it is becoming obvious that these democracies are blurry with porous boundaries. Various mechanisms such as “no trespassing” signs, high fences and strategic CCTV cameras all testify to increasing contestations over what public space means and who has a right to access it. In Africa, the situation is progressively getting worse, as the recent oppression and killings of unarmed protesters in public spaces attest to. For example, the arrest and killings of unarmed protesters in the cities of Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria and Kampala, Uganda , should bring to the fore debates and questions on the reconfiguration and negotiation of public space. In this post, we seek to reflect on the ENDSARS protest in Nigeria and its implications for rights to public space in Nigeria.