Faith as Infrastructure for Nonviolent Resistance: Moral Ecology, Power, and Everyday Resistance under Protracted Conflict

Resistance Studies has expanded scholarly understandings of opposition to domination by moving beyond state-centric and movement-focused frameworks. Yet much of the field continues to privilege resistance that is visible, disruptive, and publicly recognizable, leaving under-theorised the forms of resistance that persist where visibility itself invites retaliation. In contexts of protracted conflict and institutional fragility, overt mobilization may be dangerous or unsustainable. This paper advances a conceptually rigorous and empirically grounded account of how resistance operates under such conditions. Drawing on qualitative research with Christian faith communities living through chronic repression, the paper argues that faith functions as infrastructure for nonviolent resistance. Rather than treating religion solely as belief, identity, or mobilization resource, it conceptualizes faith as a relational and organizational system that structures social life, produces moral authority, and regulates conduct in environments where formal governance is weak, compromised, or violent. The paper introduces the concept of a moral ecology of resistance to theorise how interdependent everyday practices collectively constrain domination over time. It analyses how presence, generosity, restraint, silence, forgiveness, and ritual operate as mechanisms of moral regulation that shape power relations without direct confrontation. These practices do not merely facilitate coping or evasion. They produce legitimacy, absorb trauma, interrupt cycles of retaliation, and narrow the moral space within which coercive actors operate. Resistance, in this framing, is cumulative rather than episodic and embedded within patterned environments rather than singular acts. By reframing faith as lived infrastructure and resistance as moral ecology, the paper extends Resistance Studies beyond visibility-centred accounts of agency while maintaining conceptual clarity. It complements existing theories of mobilization and everyday resistance by offering analytical tools for examining resistance where spectacle may accelerate harm. At the same time, it foregrounds the uneven and often gendered ethical labour through which such resistance is sustained, resisting romanticized accounts of endurance. At a moment of intensifying authoritarianism globally, recognizing resistance without spectacle is analytically and politically urgent. This paper contributes to Resistance Studies by demonstrating how communities negotiate power, sustain dignity, and prevent domination from becoming total in contexts where survival itself is a structured political achievement.