Resilience Under Repression

Repression affects movements at multiple levels: individuals experience stress, trauma, and burnout; groups can fracture under pressure or become overly cautious; movements as a whole may lose strategic coherence or reproduce harmful defensive patterns. Understanding these layers helps us to identify points of intervention — places where care, strategy, and analysis can reconnect to strengthen long-term sustainability.

Participants will work with risk analysis tools to unpack threats and assess their impacts, developing appropriate measures and interventions to weather and respond to repression. We will also examine risk perception — how our sense of threat is shaped by personal history, identity, and positionality — and how to bring these differences into collective understanding rather than division.

The course will draw on psycho-social and trauma-informed practices to help participants recognise and work with the psychological and physiological impacts of repression. We will explore how fear, exhaustion, and overwhelm influence both individual behaviour and group culture, and develop methods to integrate emotional recovery into our strategic thinking.

Through case studies, embodied reflection, and peer learning, participants will deepen their capacity to sustain political work under adverse conditions — learning how to protect their groups and movements without reproducing patterns of isolation or mistrust. The emphasis throughout will be on combining practical risk awareness with grounded emotional resilience, so that our resistance remains connected, adaptive, and alive.

Aims of the course:

• To understand the current socio-political context of repression and its effects on activist practice.
• To develop the ability to analyse and assess risks at individual, group, and movement levels.
• To strengthen psycho-social resilience in the face of repression and sustained threat.
• To explore trauma-informed and collective care approaches that support recovery and adaptability.
• To deepen awareness of how positionality and lived experience shape perceptions of risk and safety.
• To identify intervention points where strategic and emotional responses can reinforce one another.
• To build peer networks of solidarity and mutual support for long-term sustainability in social movements.

So, the workshop will help participants to:

• Use risk analysis tools to identify and respond to concrete threats.
• Recognise and work with diverse perceptions of risk across identities and experiences.
• Understand the emotional and psychological impacts of repression and integrate trauma-informed practices.
• Develop personal and collective strategies for emotional recovery, reflection, and care.
• Strengthen group processes to reduce fragmentation, reactivity, and burnout under pressure.
• Reconnect strategic thinking and movement culture to resilience and sustainability.
• Find renewed confidence and capacity to continue political work in increasingly repressive contexts.

Who is it aimed at?

Anyone involved in socially engaged action addressing ecological, political and social justice issues, who organises under repressive socio-political conditions. We embrace a broad definition of activism, including: Resistance – action preventing further damage to ecosystems and social justice; Renewal – action focused on developing and creating alternatives for healthier societies and communities; and Building Resilience – action supporting increased resilience in communities to weather the uncertain times ahead.

The main spoken language on the course will be English.

For accessibility and venue information see <here>.