Social Movement Appreciation Project
In our rapidly destabilising world, it's clear that nothing will get better without large numbers of people working together. But social movements remain mysterious and under-studied creatures: the Social Movement Appreciation Project aims to shine a warm and loving light on today's many efforts at collective agency and system transformation.
Social Movement Appreciation Project
The Movement Hub, Greenpeace and NGOs
In an age of sinister international connivance, have you ever wondered where *our* shadowy networks are? Wonder no longer!
Ok not really, but the Movement Hub is a rare and brilliant case of social movement internationalism: alongside much-needed information-collation, the Hub’s runaway translation initiative has become the basis for an international convergence rarely seen in Europe since the COP days of the late noughties. I sit down with Karl to get a handle on this pan-European social movement scale, the significance of Les Résistantes, and the tricky but essential role of NGOs (non-governmental organisations) like Greenpeace. We also follow Carl’s own journey into activism from a Swedish Valentine’s Day gift-card directly into handcuffs in a German coal mine.
We cover:
Les Résistantes and its developing position as an international movement forum
The Movement Hub’s role in incubating international movement spaces, not least the inimitable international hub at Les Résistantes
How Carl got into activism from a conversation at a party and a Valentine’s Day gift-card
How the Movement Hub aims to build bridges between progressive struggles across Europe
How those struggles are generally going relative to last decade
The complicated role of NGOs in this work
What’s it like to work on social change from within an NGO, and Greenpeace in particular
Movement Hub’s calendar from this summer: https://www.themovementhub.org/events/
Arundhati Roy’s super short article The NGO-ization of Resistance: https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/globalism/arundhati-roy-the-ngo-ization-of-resistance/
My own piece about the Extinction Rebellion Netherlands’s A12 blockade (and the role played by NGOs and civil society): https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/10/how-the-dutch-created-breakthrough-climate-crisis-mass-protest/
Some written reflections from Karl himself on Les Résistantes: https://www.themovementhub.org/stories/les-resistantes-2025-impressions/
End music from a spontaneous performance at Les Résistantes by what I think was La Criée, a feminist choir Montreuil in Paris. Embarrassingly I don’t know the name of this song but will update when I have it!
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