Our vision, approach and plans: building collectively towards digital justice in Europe
written by Salmana Ahmed and Laurence Meyer
It has been a few months now, since we have been up and running as a team, and it has been a busy and exciting period– setting up our internal operations, co-organising a Knowledge and Imagining space on Digital Policing with ENAR and the second Colour of Surveillance with Equinox and International* Women Space, and planning our Digital Liberation Retreat, happening at the end of October 2024.
We also officially launched Weaving Liberation on 4 June 2024, and over 60 wonderful people joined us to celebrate and learn more about our work and plans. As we enter the last half of the year, we wanted to take a moment to share more here too, for all those who couldn’t join us, and for anyone new to our work who may be interested in learning what we are all about.
Screenshot from a collaborative pad exercise during the online launch on June 4 2024
What is Weaving Liberation and why do we exist?
Weaving Liberation is an entity at the start of its journey but essentially marking the third phase in the evolution of the Decolonising the Digital Rights Field in Europe process. It is dedicated to supporting and resourcing a digital justice ecosystem, and will do so primarily by coordinating the implementation of “A vision for digital justice organising in Europe”, a programme of activities that will help create the conditions for communities to work towards anti-colonial and liberatory digital futures.
The Decolonising the Digital Rights Field in Europe initiative was a three-year co-design process started in 2020, co-led by EDRi and Digital Freedom Fund and involving a group of 30+ people from different organisations , funders and researchers. If you are interested in learning more about the Decolonising process you can explore the Blueprint which shares details on how we tried to build a process which rehearses the world we want to live in – in community, in movements, towards justice.
This coalition of actors formulated a series of activities and interventions to fully equip civil society in Europe to: address the threats digital technologies and the Internet poses to human rights and; shape digital technological futures that are desirable and liberatory for all.
These propositions were captured in the programme called “A vision for Digital Justice Organising in Europe”. Weaving Liberation was born out of this process, to ensure the coordination and the implementation of this programme.
Painting inspired by the process, made by Ahmed Isam Aldin
Some of the core participants during the Decolonising process’s final gathering in Essaouira, Morocco, 2022
Challenging anti-rights movements and oppressions from digital technologies and the Internet is more urgent than ever
Acknowledging the dangerous rise of fascism and anti-rights movements globally
“ And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples”
Discourse on Colonialism – Aimé Césaire
Anti-rights and fascist parties and politics continue to take hold across Europe, with a rise in violence against already marginalised communities incl. Black, Muslims, Roma and Sinti, impoverished, migrants and queer communities. We are witnessing the shrinking of the democratic space, a pervasiveness of far-right ideology and a rise in violence against marginalised communities. We see anti-rights movements creating an environment in which simply promoting human rights is perceived as polarising, extreme or criminalised. Key mechanisms of human rights protection are being discredited. Non-profits are under threat. Reports expose the institutional failings to slow this trend down with a rise all over Europe of racist, anti-queer and xenophobic attacks. In this context, it has become clearer than ever that digital technologies and the internet, are not neutral tools or spaces. There are countless examples of how the use of certain technologies are being designed, sustained and deployed in ways that exacerbate discrimination, surveillance, violence, exclusion and extraction both in Europe and abroad. Major social media platforms that have shown to be crucial for social justice movements to share knowledge, denounce injustices, share alternative visions and organise on the ground are also locations of repression and today, more than ever, used by some of their owners as a vehicle for far-right ideology. Misinformation campaigns are massively investing in online content production and dissemination with determining influence during elections, but also more widely concerning environmental, migration, racial or reproductive justice issues.
And while threats to physical and mental safety have skyrocketed for marginalised communities, they are also the ones bearing the human costs of the unjust digital reality we live in. Essential to building digital technologies and making them work, they are the ones most harmed by them.
In this context, the amount of data collected from sex workers, from migrants documented or not, from disabled people, from queer communities, from impoverished groups, which has already created so much harm in too many instances, puts them in an extremely dangerous position.
The shift to an anti-right framework in Europe does not only impact Europeans but has global ramifications – emboldening far right, fascist politics in other countries, but also materially impacting realities outside of the region through Europe’s digital, migration or cooperation agreements, development aid policies and environmental regulations. As a key trendsetter in matters of digital issues and considering its political and economic power, what happens in Europe doesn’t stay in Europe. Digital technologies are one of the prime examples of the globalised issues we face. No tech developed in Silicon Valley could materially exist without raw material or exploited labour from the Global Majority. A large amount of those technologies are powered by militarisation and surveillance frameworks, tested in war zones and at borders, provoking an immense loss of lives and environmental damages. Regional approaches which fail to create bridges with other regions will be unable to tackle technological harm in lasting and effective ways.
This situation is the result of years of wrongly considering that issues impacting marginalised groups were marginal and/ or irrelevant – nice add-ons rather than central to any serious work on human rights. Today we see the consequential shortcomings of such strategies. Centring the margins is never just a moral question but the only strategic route to fully guarantee and promote human rights – as attacks against human rights always start there, before being generalised.
There can be no doubt concerning the gravity of this moment. The urgency to double down in protecting human rights for all, especially at the margins, and the need to invest firmly in racial, social, economic, environmental, migrant and feminist justice is unquestionable. In doing this, we need a digital justice ecosystem that can also rise to meet the moment.
The need for a well-resourced, interconnected and supported movements-driven digital justice ecosystem
The work to build a digital justice movement in Europe will not happen through quick fixes, one or two-year project solutions, one big action on one specific topic, or one shiny genius idea. We shouldn’t “move fast and break things”. It will demand time and many building blocks, decentralised efforts and engagements, a multiplicity of tactics, fumbling and building of complementarities. We should move with care and repair. To build a digital justice movement, we need to move away from Big Tech’s ways of doing – which have also sometimes prevailed in the non-profit sector. While anti-rights movements target communities living at the intersection of multiple sites of oppression, the leadership of these communities need to be supported, both to sustain existing forms of protections while the threats are augmenting, and to create change.
Often techno-solutionist views obscure the justice questions that are at the core of digital rights issues even within the digital rights field. There is a dominance of technical approaches (in part due to funding going to very specific technical groups and theories of change) which limits our ability to meaningfully address harms. The investment given to ‘de-biasing AI’ as a mean to address discrimination, exclusion and harm, instead of bolstering efforts to challenge the broader goals these technologies are being designed and deployed for e.g., social control, securitisation of borders, widening socio-economic insecurity and inequality, is but one example. This leads to significant disengagement from a vast majority of civil society, and more broadly, of the impacted populations, concerning tech-related issues. It appears too technical, too complex, and requiring specific expertise.
But one thing has been proven time and time again: what brings about just changes are movements. Anti-racist movements, feminist movements, environmental justice movements, anti-colonial movements bring about change. They are our best bet against anti-rights forces. For them to do so, democratic movements upholding the promise of human rights need to be rooted in community – allowing for a vast range of people to reclaim ownership of the decisions made concerning the use of digital technologies which impact them.
Movements with the politics, visions and strategies to resist against these structural harms and bring to life liberatory digital futures are severely under-resourced or excluded from funding altogether. We have heard from so many groups who are having to organise in this context, resulting in only incremental changes and the capacity to only do the reactive firefighting of issues rather than being able to advance their positive visions for the future. To add to this, groups have little to no capacity, space or resources to build resilient operational infrastructures to help them sustain their work under increasingly hostile political and economic climates. At a time when governments are spending hundreds of millions on border technologies, lobbying spending of tech companies in Europe grows and philanthropic funding on tech issues is concentrated on technical groups and approaches, we urgently need to redistribute funding to racial, social, feminist, environmental and economic justice groups working to address technological harms to sustain and advance their work.
When it comes to tech and justice, the challenges of surveillance, criminalisation and discrimination being faced by groups are largely shared, whether that is sex workers, Black communities, Muslims, migrants, queer communities, human rights defenders and environmental justice activists specifically, impoverished segments of the population, the Roma communities, and racialised people more broadly. But currently these movements rarely have the opportunity to meet and exchange – especially when it comes to digital technologies. There are limited spaces – designed by them and for them – to connect with each other, share knowledge and practices, build power and organise to address technological aspects of the issues they are encountering. This has direct consequences on the expertise that is mobilised. For instance, in the current digital rights field in Europe, there are very few community-organisers, racial, social, environmental and/or feminist experts. But it is precisely their knowledge and practices are crucial in understanding and resist technological harms rooted in patriarchal, ecocidal, racist frameworks and to imagine feminist, anti-racist, environmentally-sound technologies, including the internet. This fractured ecosystem leads to cornering civil society into a competitive role of amending in the margins of Big Tech’s plan, instead of proposing strong justice and human-rights compliant visions of the world.
We need to build cross-movement solidarity and affirmative visions of digital justice
Illustration by Alice Z. Jones
We need affirmative visions for digital justice – visions that are life-affirming for all beings and the planet, visions of worlds in which information and knowledge exchanges are facilitated in a way that support equal access to resources and environmental justice.
Creating affirmative visions and building new narratives, far from being detached from real work on policy-making, litigation, campaigning, organising, etc. is their essential fuel. Before organising for the abolition of slavery, apartheid, anti-colonial independence, reproductive rights, bodily self-determination, essential workers rights such as paid annual leave etc. – one had to imagine it as a possibility, in a moment when it felt completely irrelevant or presented as dangerous for society.
We need to imagine the new frontiers of liberation in the age of modern information and communications technologies.
To be able to fight for digital justice, we need – across movements – to co-design what digital justice could actually look like, feel like, which shapes it could embrace, and which new ways of being together it could help bring to life.
Building knowledge for movements
Knowledge here is critical. It is power. No one knows it better than Big Tech AND the communities whose knowledge is constantly erased, put aside or disqualified. In this crucial moment, it is necessary to tip the scale of knowledge around tech towards the people.
Whether that is on how technologies are impacting their own context, how a particular technology functions, models of designing technologies that are justice-focus or what strategies other movements have deployed to resist harm; groups need information to help bridge the current disconnect and build strong plans for change. It is the starting point of any movement – building a common understanding of the issue through shared vocabulary. Weaving Liberation is here to support the work of community-driven knowledge that concentrates on their needs, following their theories of change, and addressing who they consider relevant stakeholders.
How will Weaving Liberation support this:
By building a digital justice repository in the form of a mapping of critical digital technology and the internet knowledge, practices and movements, with an initial focus on Global Majority. Many people are already organising and creating practices and research around digital technologies within anti-colonial, abolitionist and/or transformative frameworks. This research will build a repository that will support the archiving and amplification of this existing knowledge and practice.
By organising Knowledge & Imagining Spaces, which are 2-day retreats for approx. 20 people working on specific themes. They are spaces for specific movements (e.g., environmental justice movement, Black feminists, Roma rights movements, etc.) to connect transnationally and with different experts, to discuss tech-enabled issues on their own terms, map common struggles and opportunities and areas where knowledge is needed for them to be able to advance a strategy. Research needs are intended to then be supported through follow-on grants.
Building spaces to shape hopeful power and liberatory practices of changemaking
To be able to shift narratives, we need different sectors of the civil society to feel ownership around tech issues and we need those sectors to talk with each other, discuss visions, alignments and disagreements, and find ways forward together. Discussing, exchanging, disagreeing, finding a resolution: this is the labour at the start of any work in policy-making, advocacy, campaigning, litigation and, in general, in organising.
For different movements to do that together, at the European level, we first need them to meet in a way that allows for that. We need to create spaces for people to meet in a way that allows for those conversations to happen without further draining activists, who are already drained. This is crucial work which is often disregarded. But the people who do the work know that spaces where you can actually meet people, share difficulties, obstacles and learnings honestly, be inspired by others and strategise are one of the most effective tools of power-building. Movements start when people meet, when they make connections between their struggles, when they see that they are not alone facing those challenges, not alone trying to find solutions, not alone feeling exhausted and desperate at times, often feeling useless and still somehow determined to create change. Justice movements gain ground and momentum when they bring hope. During the first two phases of the decolonising process, we have heard constantly the need for organisations to have spaces that are designed to activate the imagination towards what type of tech realities they want and desire – going beyond always having to just talk about how to resist or react to harm. Imagining solutions beyond firefighting, having clear enthusiastic horizons of human-rights compliant digital realities combats fear and enables coherent plans and strategies to be realised. We also need to create the conditions for holistic strategies to be developed, through the creation of material, strategy and skill-building workshops around transformative justice methods of community-knowledge building, movement and coalition-building.
How will Weaving Liberation support this:
By organising a annual 5-day Digital Liberation Retreat: It will be an opportunity for us to gather to build solidarity, share knowledge, practice and skills on digital justice and operational issues, and imagine, organise towards liberatory digital futures and regenerate. It will also be a space to share liberatory practices used in coalition-building, campaigning, litigation, organising in general. The retreat is meant to be a unique cross-movements space gathering around organisers, advocacy experts, litigators, funders and researchers from racial, social, economic, feminist, digital, environmental, and migrant justice movements to strategise towards digital justice. It will be a priority setting moment for the next year, nourishing different organisations’strategies, enabling coalition work, determining overall agenda priorities around digital justice. Such space currently doesn´t exist in Europe. We are very excited to be organising the first one in October this year!
By providing organisational support and knowledge-sharing around transformative practices of change: This will take different shapes, responding to needs - webinars on specific topics, following up on priorities to build capacity determined during Knowledge and Imagining spaces or the Digital Liberation Retreat, sharing of contacts of relevant experts and resourcing organisations financially to meet their organisational needs. This part of our work will be kick-started end of 2025.
Redistributing resources to racial, social, economic, transfeminist, queer and environmental groups
Resourcing is essential in a context where most organisations and collectives are forced into reaction mode and moving in a state of constant urgency, risking burnout, and do not have the space to intentionally plan for the worlds they want to live in at their pace, nor coordinate and strategise together about their resourcing needs. We need to give them money, organisational support, networks of expertise and care, in order to secure them the breathing space, to sustain and advance their work.
We share with many the conviction that effective grantmaking is about meeting the needs of the changemakers, instead of deciding for them:
This impacts how and what we want to fund.
Weaving Liberation aims to be the first participatory fund in Europe resourcing holistically at the intersection of tech and justice.
Currently there are no participatory funds in Europe redistributing resources at the full intersection of technology and justice. This is sorely needed. The funding landscape in Europe is particularly exclusionary of self-led organisations working on racial or migrant justice. The report from the Black Feminist Fund “Where is the money for Black feminist movements?” showed that only between 0.1% to 0.35% of foundation’s giving globally went to black women, girls and trans people. Only 5% of human rights funding went to black women girls and trans people. We don’t have the breakdown for tech funding in Europe but we can have little doubt that it mirrors similar patterns. Digital justice work necessitates to build the capacity of racial, feminist, social, migrant, economic and environmental groups and collectives to be able to propose and realise their narratives, goals, and visions of digital justice. Those groups are currently under-resourced, overstretched while at the forefront of resisting the rise of fascist and anti-rights movements. In all the events we’ve had the chance the organise we have seen effervescent organising and a multitude of plans emerge. They just need resources. Weaving Liberation is committed to helping with that.
When they are able to access funding in the current funding ecosystem, it doesn’t necessarily help with what they need funding for.
Very little funding in Europe supports groups holistically to transform their relationship with technology and enable them to develop sovereignty over tech so that it can be leveraged to support their movement work. Numun Fund, which focusses funding in the Global Majority world, noted that very few applications for funding from the 800 applications that they received in their first open call on feminist tech focussed on internet governance and policy or AI but rather on organisational strengthening and tech infrastructure development.
Currently, nominal funding is available to support organisations not yet working on digital issues, to figure out their strategy on the topic, invest in building knowledge, build organisational capacity to have time to meet and discuss new policies and their implementation, etc. This prevents many groups, with the potential for high impact, from using tools such as strategic litigation or advocacy or to strengthen the organising tools they are already using, or to explore and imagine new ones. Weaving Liberation aims to be a bridge towards other funding opportunities – such as those offered by funds like Civitates, the European AI & Society Fund or Digital Freedom Fund as well as expand the type of organising work currently supported when it comes to tech and the internet issues.
Finally, there is a lack of funding for affirmative visions of technology. One of the already noticeable impacts of the decolonising process, within the current digital rights field, is that there is a wider appetite to build bold visions on digital topics.
Weaving Liberation wants to give people resources to move from firefighting, and constantly responding to harm and have space to imagine, build and realise liberatory digital futures. For example, the Green Screen Coalition is doing great work at a specific thematic intersection with climate justice – Weaving Liberation aims to take a wider lens to build on this work and enable to cross movement solidarity and practice. We want groups to have the financial autonomy to organise their own Knowledge and Imagining spaces, their own cross or internal movement conferences or retreats, produce their own toolkits or other resources, build coalitions, invest in their organisational structures, build team capacity to engage on tech issues, etc. In short, we want them to be able to access flexible funding to do digital justice organising in the way that makes sense within their context.
How will Weaving Liberation support this:
By starting a Participatory Regranting Fund for Digital Justice that will support racial, social, feminist, environmental and economic justice groups organising on topics incl. migration justice and tech, anti-racism and digital policing, mass and targeted surveillance, workers’ rights, discriminatory digital welfare state, environmental justice and technology, etc. We anticipate making grants of up to EUR 50K, based on needs and will work with other regranting funds to ensure we distribute funding in ways which reaches those most in need of support. This work will hopefully be operational at the end of 2025 / beginning of 2026.
By establishing the Digital Solidarity Coalition, where we will enable organisations to connect to strengthen and boost their capacity on concrete technological points, e.g., how to build and maintain their own servers, how to develop a tailored approach regarding their organisational digital safety, what environmental-conscious options exist concerning the use of technology, and how to create archives that advance data sovereignty, etc. This work will hopefully be fully running in 2026.
Our relationship to the Digital Freedom Fund
The first two phases (2020-2023) of the decolonising the digital rights field in Europe process was led and facilitated by the Digital Freedom Fund and European Digital Rights, who organised and held funds for the design phase. As the programme was finalise, in recognition of their power and position in the field, and their own specific strategies, a decision was collectively made to transition the stewardship and coordination responsibilities of the work to a more community-centred structure – Weaving Liberation – aligned with the values of the decolonising process and responsive to the communities that we want to engage in this work.
Weaving Liberation is fiscally hosted by the Digital Freedom Fund (DFF) with legal and fiduciary oversight by the DFF board, but we do have distinct strategy, team and additional governance structures. We remain in close coordination with the leadership and team at DFF, given the complementarity of our work and shared engagement with communities working at the intersection of tech and justice in Europe.
You can find more information about our team here and keep an eye out there for an upcoming announcement about our Accountability Committee!
Our approach: ecosystem building and nurturing
To realise the vision of this programme, an entity which is dedicated to creating the enabling conditions for this change to happen is essential – taking on the burden of creating spaces for imagining, strategising and coalition-building, connecting groups to networks of solidarity, expertise, and care, and sustaining movement work through the (re)distribution of critical resources. We do not see ourselves pursuing policy changes, litigating or campaigning ourselves directly but rather we intend to support and sustain an ecosystem which has the conditions for this work to be done by the communities themselves.
Specifically, we understand ecosystem building to be about:
Multiplying efforts, by strengthening what already works and recognising that there is value and need for many groups to be doing similar things to make sure the critical work is not relying on one organisation or one actor but rather is benefiting from multiple efforts by enhancing the impact and building space for inspiration instead of competition.
Helping work thrive, bysupporting and sustaining organisations already doing the work and facilitating connections across groups to build common visions and strategies by aligning different tactics and methods.
Establishing a regenerative ecosystem, by building power and infrastructures of support across many levels so that there is space for different groups and initiatives to be able to ebb and flow in their efforts depending on their capacity and priorities, whilst maintaining the momentum and coherence of the whole ecosystem.
This approach is about challenging the idea that working towards justice means sacrificing oneself completely, and establishing an ecosystem that can continue to thrive as people, organisations and movements change shape and come and go.
What Weaving Liberation is committed to doing is the tedious work. The work that is often seen as an accessory although it is vital, the work that regenerates but doesn’t get recognised, the work that actually creates change but is too easily invisibilised, minimised, ignored or appropriated. It is the serious and significant work of building connections, networks, shared knowledge, visions, strategies and methodologies.
We approach the work of ecosystem-building using feminist analyses and an understanding of reproduction and regenerative work. Ecosystem-building is care work and beyond care, it is solidarity work. And, to overcome the violence and harms that are sustaining an unsafe world, it is needed.
We don’t make promises of an overnight transformation but we are committed to working on profound, lasting change and we want to do it with you.
How can you get involved?
If you are an individual, collective or organisation interested in being part of our community or have any questions or queries about how we may be able to support your work, please do get in touch at info@weavingliberation.org and / or join our newsletter to get updates on our events and activities.
If you are a funder interested in supporting a transformative collective effort to build a more liberatory and just digital futures, please email us on info@weavingliberation.org.
