‘Everyday Constructive Resistance’: Exploring Bottom-Up Transformative Change

This article delves into the interplay between everyday peace, everyday resistance, and constructive resistance, exploring their potential for transformative change. Drawing insights from case studies and an interdisciplinary literature review, this article proposes ‘everyday constructive resistance’ (ECR) as a framework for analysing how communities, through embodied actions, may contribute to constructing alternatives and challenging prevailing power structures, whether in the wider context of organised groups and institutions, or as informal efforts. This approach focuses on the perspectives and agency of people who experience directly the effects of violent power structures in their everyday lives; it interrogates how the processes of resistance could take into account embodied experiences, and what meaningful change may look like. Drawing from the findings of field work in contexts of social movements against violent state domination in India and Brazil, the ECR framework includes the five core elements of embodiment, construction of alternatives, power subversion, community needs, and community solidarity, which could be applied in different ways and to a variety of contexts. Taken together, we think that a framework of ECR serves as a way to develop and evaluate peacebuilding initiatives and resistance efforts to encourage their bottom-up dimension.