Share
Wednesday, May 27, 2026

Across regions and struggles, ESCR-Net members are confronting escalating violence, repression, militarization, and criminalization. These dynamics are often framed as responses to insecurity, crisis, or governance failure. But members’ lived experiences and collective analysis point to something deeper: violence is not incidental to the current world order: it is structural, organized, and economically profitable. This is a Political Education Learning Series by ESCR-Net.

Share
WEBINAR SERIES PEV(1)

This Political Education Learning Series builds on ESCR-Net’s Systemic Critique Project to deepen collective analysis of the political economy of violence and examine how neoliberal capitalism governs, disciplines populations, secures territory, and concentrates wealth and power.

Drawing from movement knowledge and human rights struggles across regions, the series seeks to strengthen collective analysis, solidarity, and political imagination across movements.

Designed as a multi-session political education process, the series creates space for deeper reflection, continuity, and collective learning across struggles.

The series brings together organizers, popular political educators, human rights defenders, and grassroots leaders working across our Network to address growing repression, authoritarianism, inequality, and attacks on communities and collective rights.

The Series

Session 1 — June 11, 2026
Shifting Power, Crisis, and a Changing World System
What is changing in the global order and what does it mean for our struggles?
9AM NY / 3PM CEST / 9PM UTC+8

This session will explore the major structural transformations reshaping the global capitalist system, including geopolitical realignments, rising militarism, corporate capture, and the erosion of democracy and state legitimacy. Together, participants will reflect on what these shifts mean for movements struggling for human rights and dignity worldwide.

Featured Speakers

Gustavo Castro Soto is a renowned Mexican human rights defender and environmental activist. He is a founding member and general coordinator of Otros Mundos AC / Chiapas, based in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Mexico. His work has focused on environmental justice, anti-extractivist struggles, and the defense of communities impacted by corporate and state violence across Latin America.

Azra Talaat Sayeed is an anti-imperialist, decolonial feminist activist and academic from Pakistan. Her organization, Roots for Equity, supports women peasants in struggles for land rights and food sovereignty. Azra currently serves as Secretary General of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle and is part of the Regional Council of the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD).

Session 2 — July 16, 2026
The Political Economy of Violence in the Age of Fascism: Repression, Extraction, and Control
Why is violence intensifying across the world?
9AM NY / 3PM CEST / 9PM UTC+8

This session will examine how states, corporations, financial institutions, paramilitary forces, and organized crime groups increasingly operate together to sustain systems of accumulation, control and dispossession through violence. Participants will explore how repression functions to discipline communities resisting extraction, austerity, racial capitalism, patriarchy, and colonial domination. Together, we will analyze violence not only as physical repression, but also as structural, racialized, gendered, and economic.

Additional speakers will include grassroots organizers, feminist leaders, and movement representatives confronting repression and state violence across regions.

Featured Speakers

Rony Castillo  is a Garífuna community leader and member of OFRANEH (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña), a movement defending Garífuna territory, self-determination, and collective rights in Honduras in the face of dispossession, racial violence, tourism expansion, and extractive development.

S’bu Zikode is the founding president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the South African shack dwellers’ movement organizing for land, housing, dignity, and popular democracy while confronting criminalization, repression, and political violence. 

Cristina “Tinay” Palabay is a Filipina human rights defender and the Secretary General of Karapatan, a leading alliance documenting and resisting human rights violations in the Philippines. For decades, she has worked alongside communities confronting state violence, militarization, enforced disappearances, and the criminalization of activists and human rights defenders.

Session 3 — August 13, 2026
From Resistance to Transformation: Building Collective Power Across Struggles
What strategies can move us beyond resistance toward systemic change?
9AM NY / 3PM CEST / 9PM UTC+8

This session will focus on movement strategies, collective protection, transnational solidarity, and the possibilities and limitations of global advocacy spaces. Participants will reflect on how ESCR-Net can deepen collective action across struggles while contributing to broader visions of systemic transformation grounded in justice, self-determination, and human dignity.

Speakers for this session will include movement leaders and organizers working to build collective alternatives, strengthen transnational solidarity, and advance transformative visions rooted in justice and self-determination.

Why this series matters

At a time when authoritarianism, militarization, extractivism, and inequality are intensifying globally, political education remains essential for strengthening collective analysis and solidarity across movements.

This series is an invitation to collectively study the forces shaping the current world system, deepen political understanding across struggles, and imagine pathways toward systemic transformation beyond violence, dispossession, and exploitation.