Tag: Violence

Policy Paper: Mobilisation, Resistance and Popular Memory

In March 2024, social movements and activists from the cities of Santiago de Chile and Santiago de Cali (Colombia) and researchers from the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) in Freiburg met virtually for an exchange of knowledge and experiences on the mass protests that took place in each city. The central premise of this initiative is the recognition that communities and social movements are an active part of the dynamics of spatial production and city governance, as well as producers and bearers of different, legitimate forms of knowledge. The meeting of social movements and popular initiatives from Colombia and Chile was motivated by the creation of reflexive connections, as well as personal and collective links between the actors and experiences of each city.

This document compiles the key reflections from the exchange. It aims to convey the insights of a policy report originally written and published in Spanish. By translating it into English, we seek to reach a broader audience of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of urban protests, the politics of memory, and repertoires of resistance—including civil society organizations, international donors, activists, journalists, and artists.

Policy Paper: Menschliche Überreste in Universitätssammlungen

Dieses Policy Paper greift eine dringend notwendige Debatte auf: die Verantwortung von
Universitäten, sich aktiv mit ihrer kolonialen Vergangenheit auseinanderzusetzen und die
daraus resultierenden Gewaltverhältnisse zu überwinden. Trotz wachsender Sensibilität fehlt
es bislang an klaren Richtlinien für universitäre Praxis und Politik, insbesondere im Umgang
mit kolonialen Sammlungen und der Rückgabe menschlicher Überreste. Um Forschung von
diesen problematischen Grundlagen zu befreien, braucht es eine systematische
Auseinandersetzung sowie eine enge Zusammenarbeit mit betroffenen Gemeinschaften und
politischen Akteuren. Das Africa Centre for Transregional Research (ACT) der Universität
Freiburg beantragte erfolgreich eine Förderung beim Ministerium für Wissenschaft,
Forschung und Kunst (MWK) in Baden-Württemberg, um die Herkunft kolonialer Relikte zu
erforschen. Basierend auf diesen Erfahrungen zeigt dieses Policy Paper konkrete Wege auf,
wie Universitäten ihre koloniale Vergangenheit aufarbeiten können.

Justice from the peoples

By means of a dialogue, this entry discusses the different and contested meanings of justice and how they are transformed when justice is thought of as a collective and popular praxis. We emphasise the place of emotions in the conceptualisation of justice. In other words, justice from the people as a collective practice that operates at multiple scales and involves multiple knowledges and emotions.

Security. Speaking with Fanon?

The anticolonial writer and psychiatrist Fanon became famous in the 1960s for his radical criticism of colonial racism and its influence on the colonized peoples. His descriptions of how colonialism destroys people not only physically but also mentally and emotionally have inspired many political movements and theoretical concepts to this day. His work highlights the enduring nature of colonial relations and the different ways in which (in)security and its protection is perceived differently depending on the very position in society. However, Fanon’s name also remains inextricably linked with his most controversial and uncompromising stance: his commitment to the right of colonized peoples to insecure others by the use of violence in their struggle for liberation. Post/decolonial research as one of the heirs of Fanons writings challenges critical security research till today. In the following, the article uses post/decolonial research to indeed point to multiple ways in which both theoretical fields enrich the articulating and practicing of (in)security.

Systems of Conflictivity

Beyond the state-centric categories of war/peace, the ongoing genocide against Indigenous and African-descendent populations on the continent which Lélia Gonzalez renamed ‘Améfrica Ladina’ – recognised neither as a civil war nor as an international conflict – calls for methods of analysis which respond to what and whom has been excluded from the debate as a condition of possibility for its reproduction. By means of transnational and diasporic perspectives – which neither begin nor end at state borders and limits, nor rely on universal or particular/relative decrees – it effectively repositions inherited Eurocentric categories for thinking about violence towards instead relational accounts of systems of conflictivity.

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