“Staying on our land”: The centrality of land, the natural environment, and identity in community self-protection

Is ethnic cleansing the fundamental condition of Palestinian life? Is uprooting the fundamental condition of Colombian life? Is forced exploitation of the commons the fundamental condition for the life of Papuans in Indonesia? In this chapter the authors explore the connection between nonviolent community self-protection and the persistence of peoples to stay on their land and territories, recognising their particular ways of understanding the relationship between humans, land, and water and the ways in which these cultural conceptions contradict the instrumental and utilitarian visions imposed by colonial and capitalist powers that promote dispossession, war, and genocide. To this end, the chapter establishes a dialogue between case studies of Colombia, Palestine, and Papua, drawing on the results of research projects developed within the Creating Safer Space network on unarmed civilian protection and community self-protection. The authors show how, in addition to dispossession, ethnic cleansing, dispersion, and disenfranchisement by political and economic interests, a fundamental feature of life of different peoples in different parts of the world is the extraordinarily widespread and tenacious resistance in the face of such hardships. This spirit of resistance is present in their struggle for land rights and their persistence to stay on their land in the face of the uprooting caused by settler colonialism, colonialism, and processes of capitalist exploitation of commons such as land, natural resources, and energy. The chapter shows how the very act of staying on and maintaining their ancestral lands is an act of these people’s resistance and unpacks which role community-led UCP plays in enabling this.