Building educational infrastructures for scaling up nonviolent resistance networks in Latin America

One of the key factors in nonviolent movements scaling up and strengthening their campaigns is capacity building, especially through reciprocal and horizontal structures of training, network building, mutual support, and knowledge transfer. The Regional Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolent Action in the Americas (Acción Noviolenta en las Américas) represents one such case, in which a powerful network of activists from more than 30 countries have participated in virtual and in-person trainings, have shared experiences and lessons learned with peers, and have co-constructed a platform for knowledge co-production and dissemination that values local/contextualized knowledge and disrupts traditional North-South hierarchies of professionalized "expertise". Through a Spanish-language blog, a podcast, the production of a documentary film, and occasional webinars, and translations from original Spanish-language pieces into English, Portuguese, Quichua, and French, this platform supports a knowledge production cycle that connects activists across country and linguistic borders and enhances their agency to tell their own story and share it with others in the region and around the world. This presentation will examine the impact of this type of program model for encouraging participatory learning/knowledge production, and achieving concrete impact in scaling up subsequent activism and transnational connectedness.