Skip to main content
Print this chapterPrint this chapter

Lesson 5.4: Knowledge and continuity

3. Sharing knowledge under pressure

How activists share knowledge despite shrinking civic space

Across the RESIST case studies, activists developed creative and resilient methods to preserve and circulate knowledge even under pressure. Peer learning through solidarity networks is a key way to sustain hope amid fatigue and repression. Intersectional peer learning helps navigate risks, internal conflicts, and organisational challenges.

In Spain, one collective described producing short, accessible documents responding to recurring questions and misinformation within feminist spaces. As one activist explained:

We made a very short document […] in which we answer questions that people have asked us, in a pedagogical way so that everyone can understand. Now every time we have a situation like this, we send this document. (ESPINT01,  RESIST Spain - Catalonia and the Basque Country Report, p. 13)

Rather than engaging in endless reactive debate, this form of shared knowledge became a reusable tool to counter trans-exclusionary arguments within the movement, showing how pedagogy itself functions as resistance.

  • Archiving and storytelling: In contexts where repression erases memory, documenting becomes a form of defiance. Projects like Queer Archive Athens and Belarusian Feminist Memory record testimonies, zines, and artworks, ensuring that activist histories remain visible. As Sara Ahmed (2017) writes, to “make things visible” is itself a feminist act.
  • Workshops and practical knowledge sharing: Many collectives organise peer-to-peer sessions on trauma care, digital security, or legal literacy, building practical skills and emotional resilience together.
  • Cross-border learning: Exiled activists from Belarus or Turkey share their digital safety and advocacy experience with peers across Europe, demonstrating how knowledge travels even when people are displaced — often more freely across borders than within states.

Exiled activists from Turkey and Belarus share their knowledge of digital safety, trauma survival, and authoritarian conditions with groups in Western Europe. Knowledge travels even when people are displaced – sometimes more effectively across borders than within states.