Collective Care, Shared Knowledge, and Solidarity as Practices of Resistance in East Africa and the Great Lakes
Across East Africa and the Great Lakes region, resistance increasingly unfolds under conditions of repression, protracted conflict, climate stress, and shrinking civic space. In Uganda, Burundi, South Sudan, eastern DRC, and parts of Kenya and Tanzania, activists face surveillance, criminalisation, gendered violence, and legal constraints that fragment movements and exhaust individuals. This paper argues that collective care, shared knowledge, and cross-border solidarity are not auxiliary to resistance but constitute core, strategic practices of resistance in these contexts.
Empirically, this argument draws on activist experiences from women’s rights, land justice, environmental, and peace movements operating in post-conflict and authoritarian settings. Under repression, formal protest and overt confrontation are often curtailed. Movements therefore adapt by building infrastructures of care - mutual aid funds, trauma-informed support circles, safe houses, and community-based protection mechanisms. These practices sustain activists’ physical and psychological survival, enabling continued engagement despite arrests, threats, and burnout. Care here functions as resistance by refusing the state’s strategy of attrition and fear, particularly against women human rights defenders and environmental activists.
Shared knowledge operates as a second pillar of resistance. Activists across the region systematically document land grabs, environmental harm, electoral violence, and gender-based abuses, translating lived experience into evidence for advocacy and legal action. Informal learning spaces - peer exchanges, community trainings, and cross-movement dialogues - circulate strategies for digital security, legal literacy, and nonviolent action. Theoretically, this aligns with resistance scholarship that recognises knowledge production as a site of power contestation. In contexts where official narratives deny violence or criminalise dissent, producing and safeguarding alternative knowledge is itself a resistant act.
Third, solidarity - particularly cross-border solidarity - extends resistance beyond isolated national struggles. Regional networks linking activists in Uganda, DRC, South Sudan, Rwanda, and Burundi allow movements to share tactics, amplify threatened voices, and engage regional and international accountability mechanisms. Solidarity disrupts repression by increasing visibility and political cost, while also countering the fragmentation imposed by borders, ethnicity, and conflict.
Theoretically, this paper contributes to resistance studies by foregrounding relational and feminist conceptions of resistance, which emphasise endurance, care, and collective survival alongside confrontation. Rather than viewing resistance solely as moments of rupture, this analysis highlights everyday practices that sustain movements over time.
In conclusion, collective care, shared knowledge, and solidarity are empirically observable, effective strategies of resistance in East Africa and the Great Lakes. Recognising them as such expands how resistance is theorised and valued, and affirms the political agency of activists operating under repression.