Why RESPACE?
Right now the world is experiencing incomprehensible levels of armed conflict and escalating violence, alongside steadily increasing global inequality, and social, economic and climate injustice. Existing systems are brought to a stand-still by big power polarisation and institutional inertia that perpetuate the status quo, creating barriers and hindering efforts for transformative change.
Despite these challenges, this rapid aggravation of circumstances also provides gateways for transformative action and can serve as a catalyst for people and movements striving for a dignified future for all. When systems are cracking, they are also opening-up for alternatives.
Possibilities for change
We currently experience a new era of mass social movements that create progressive political pressures, new imaginations of a better world, and innovative strategies for addressing structural inequities. Against the shrinking space for civil society this global civic uproar provides vital momentum for change agents and initiatives across different causes and engagements.
We see that the defining struggles moving us towards a more just and peaceful global society were primarily imagined and won-by the people most affected by repression, marginalisation, and violence, and global civic collaboration and solidarity often played a vital role. T overcome the challenges for sustainable peacebuilding, complementarity and inspiration between different initiatives and movements is crucial to affect wider systems change.
At a time when power and territory is reconfiguring in an accelerated fashion caused by and interacting with simultaneous crises we believe there is a critical need for novel infrastructures and spaces that enable equitable ‘translocal’ engagements of solidarity and create a conducive global environment to build sustainable peace. New thinking and a bold collaboration between actors rooted in distinct places and multiple localities as ‘Translocal’, will constitute an alternative ‘globality’ to our dominant imagination of ‘the global’ as the relationship between sovereign nations.
What kind of peace we need
Radical reimagining doesn’t work without critiquing radically – meaning, starting at and including the foundations. This dynamism is what transformative social movements and initiatives engage in to shape the future. Tracing common threads through the various struggles for liberation and grassroot political movements of the past and present, it becomes clear that our use of the term ‘peacebuilding’ cannot be stuck to a specialised technical capacity but must be grounded in a global emancipatory practice for RESPACE to make a meaningful contribution to overcoming the entrenched and complex global challenges we face today.
Our initiative seeks complementarity with social movements that drive the making of a more just, equitable, and peaceful world on a broader spectrum. While RESPACE has a particular aim, focus, and approach, we hold this notion of a ‘deeper’ and ‘encompassing’ peace and understand the interrelatedness of our success to the constant struggle and successes of social movements and actors elsewhere.
