This session starts from a central premise: authoritarian power depends on containing dissent. Repression is not incidental—it is a core strategy for maintaining control. At the same time, movements and communities continue to resist, adapt, and sustain collective action.

The session examines both sides of this dynamic: how civic space is restricted and how resistance takes shape in response.

Participants will explore how repression operates through the criminalization of protest, police violence, militarized security, attacks on journalists, and surveillance of activists and organizations. These practices are reinforced through legal, political, and administrative frameworks.

Drawing on examples from Argentina and Colombia, the session highlights how public space becomes a site of control through policing, administrative measures, and targeted enforcement against specific groups. It will also examine the use of so-called “less-lethal” weapons and their role in producing harm and fear.

The session situates these trends within a broader global contraction of civic space, including the use of “foreign agent” laws, counterterrorism frameworks, and funding restrictions. It will also address the increasing criminalization of solidarity, including repression of Palestine-related advocacy.

At the same time, the session explores how movements sustain themselves under these conditions, highlighting strategies for protection, collective care, and long-term resilience.

By bringing these experiences into dialogue, the session supports a more grounded understanding of repression and the strategies that enable movements to persist.

Learning objectives
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• Analyze repression as a core feature of authoritarianism

• Identify how civic space is restricted across contexts

• Examine how public space is controlled and selectively enforced

• Understand the criminalization of solidarity and its impacts

• Engage with strategies for protection, care, and resilience

• Assess law as both a tool of repression and a site of struggle