Lesson 3.2: From Hostility to Harm: Violence and Intimidation

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This lesson focuses on how structural hostility becomes personal, embodied harm. Through testimonies across all RESIST contexts, you will explore the continuum of violence, from online smear campaigns and doxxing to physical attacks, threats, and the resulting atmosphere of fear. This topic emphasises how digital and offline violence reinforce each other, cultivating hypervigilance and self-restriction.

5. Fear, exhaustion, and withdrawal

Across contexts, people describe violence as cumulative, anticipatory, and relational. It affects not only individuals but also organisations, public institutions, and the collective life of communities. The fear of attack — and the expectation of attack — becomes a mechanism of governance in itself. The consequences are multiple:

  • Fear and hypervigilance: “an underlying feeling of being on edge.” (expression used by the participants in the RESIST Irish case-study, p.l4)
  • Self-censorship: ”I silence myself.” (GERINT08, Germany Report, p. 13)
  • Withdrawal from activism: ”I need my life back.” (IRLFG6.2, Ireland Report, p. 14)
  • Loss of institutional trust: participants in Switzerland and France described police and universities as indifferent

Reflect

  • How does constant exposure to hate shape people’s personal and professional lives?
  • When fear becomes internalized, what forms of resistance remain possible?
  • How can digital safety and emotional care be understood as political acts?
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