Madhuresh Kumar
How can we imagine freedom outside the institutions that taught us what freedom is supposed to look like? Madhuresh Kumar reflects on his participation at a convening in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which brought together grassroots organizers to reimagine security beyond the nation-state and military-industrial complex. Alternative social infrastructures of security already exist in community care, mutual aid, restorative justice, and solidarity networks. Transformation entails liberating our imagination from capitalist, colonial and modern nation-state ideas of ‘security’, weaving alternative infrastructures of justice, care, and memory into a new ecology of life.
I recently had the opportunity to participate in a three-day convening with an extraordinary group of campaigners, researchers, journalists, and human rights activists from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. They came from diverse organisations working on Indigenous autonomy, feminist movements, restorative justice, migration, digital rights, community media, legal aid, and grassroots democracy. Our contexts were very different, but questions we confronted were similar: about power, violence, freedom, authoritarianism, shrinking democratic spaces, and our collective ability to reimagine security.
Over the course of the meeting, as we listened to one another, mapped systems of power, and reflected on experiences emerging from different parts of the world, we discovered commonality of purpose, strategy, and practice. Together, we grappled with the challenges posed by the global ‘security playbook,’ one increasingly shaped by nation-states, multinational corporations, and international institutions. We also came to recognise that the dominant security paradigm is beyond policing, surveillance, or militarisation and about power, projection, and narrative. It continually reinforces ideas such as ‘there is no alternative’, that capitalism is not in crisis, and that ever-growing wars, military expenditure, and nuclear armament are necessary to preserve global order, the rule of law, and peace.
We realised that our task, therefore, is to resist the consequences of hard security policies and infrastructures, and also to challenge the stories that legitimise them. We need to build counter-narratives through our campaigns, communications, research, and collective practice. At the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA), like many others we have been engaged in this work too: connecting existing alternatives, amplifying their stories, and creating spaces where different ways of building society can learn from one another. In that sense, the conversations in Rio encouraged us to seek elements of a different security paradigm that already exists in our everyday practices.
The House We Inherited
As we shared our work, both in the formal sessions and in conversations over meals and coffee, we gradually recognised how deeply we are immersed in a global security architecture shaped by the intertwined power of states, capital, and militarised institutions. Reimagining alternatives requires us to reverse our gaze and overcome the limitations imposed by the hegemonic systems on our visions. After all, for centuries societies have been organised through systems of power that present themselves as natural and inevitable. Colonialism did this. The modern nation-state did this. Contemporary security regimes continue to do this. They shape institutions, laws, and economies, and the ways we think about the world. They define what appears normal, desirable, and even possible.
When formal colonialism ended, many countries celebrated political independence. Yet one of the enduring critiques of the postcolonial state is that, while the rulers changed, much of the underlying architecture remained intact. New elites inherited colonial legal systems, administrative structures, bureaucracies, borders, development models, security institutions, and even the categories through which societies were understood and governed. The masters changed, their colour changed, but the house remained largely the same. Inheriting that house also meant inheriting its assumptions. We became so accustomed to thinking through those categories that even our alternatives often remain confined within them. We imagine better states, better laws, better security systems, better development, better democracy. Rarely do we stop to ask whether the categories themselves are part of the problem.
Perhaps this is why imagining alternatives remains so difficult. The question before us, then, became: are we capable of imagining freedom outside the institutions that taught us what freedom is supposed to look like? This is not an argument against reforms or struggles within existing systems. Those struggles remain essential and must continue every day. Rather, it is an invitation to hold another horizon alongside them; to recover our capacity to imagine worlds that are not simply improved versions of the present.
This understanding led us to ask a different set of questions: What do we mean by security? Security for whom? Security from what? Security towards what kind of life? And, perhaps most importantly, what forms of community security already exist around us, often without being recognised as such?
If security means protection from oppression, exploitation, humiliation, dispossession, hunger, loneliness, violence, environmental destruction, and fear, then we are already speaking about something very different from what most nation-states mean when they invoke the language of security. We are speaking instead about dignity, freedom, care, belonging, mobility, and the conditions that allow both human and more-than-human life to flourish.
Looking Through the Cracks
As our conversations moved from critique to practice, another pattern began to emerge. The alternative infrastructures of security we were searching for were already present all around us. They exist in small, local, and often overlooked initiatives that emerge in the spaces where formal institutions fall short. Taken together, they begin to reveal another way of organising life. A few examples from the conversations illustrate what I mean.
In Kenya, for example, the work of Muslims for Human Rights shows how civil society creates mechanisms for resolving disputes while waiting for courts that may never come, or while navigating judicial systems marked by delay, exclusion, and inaccessibility. Security here is not produced primarily through state authority, but through relationships, mediation, trust, and collective responsibility. At the regional level, ARTICLE 19 in Eastern Africa has been strengthening networks of human rights defenders by creating spaces where knowledge, experiences, and strategies can be shared across borders, recognising that protection is often something movements build together rather than receive from above.
Something similar is visible in the work of Restorative Justice for Africa in Nigeria, which works with people who have been failed by the justice system, providing legal accompaniment and representation, and developing tools such as the Justice Mobile App to improve access to legal assistance. Justice thus extends beyond legal procedure or punishment and becomes about restoring dignity, freedom, repairing relationships, and ensuring that they are not abandoned by the institutions meant to protect them.
In Mexico, the feminist collective Luchadoras has documented how women confronting violence, surveillance, and exclusion survive through networks of solidarity that extend far beyond formal institutions. Protection frequently comes through friends, neighbours, feminist organisations, shelters, and informal support systems that accompany people through moments of crisis, displacement, and rebuilding. Our own work in India revealed similar patterns. Domestic workers, street vendors, private security guards, and other informal workers rely heavily on extended families, neighbourhoods, and informal networks of care and solidarity in the absence of meaningful social protection. Often, their greatest insecurities arise not from the absence of the state but from everyday encounters with municipal authorities, police, and other public institutions. Negotiating the state therefore becomes an essential part of securing physical safety, economic survival, and social wellbeing.
The same pattern extends well beyond organised initiatives. How do homeless people survive? How do undocumented migrants’ cross continents? How do refugees rebuild their lives when institutions fail them? Often, the answer lies in countless ordinary acts of care: someone shares food, offers a place to sleep, watches over belongings, accompanies another person to a hospital, helps navigate bureaucracy, or simply refuses to let someone face hardship alone. These practices rarely appear in national security doctrines, yet for millions of people they constitute the most immediate and meaningful experience of security.
Working-class neighbourhoods offer similar lessons. When someone falls ill, neighbours cover shifts, collect money, care for children, or share work so livelihoods are not lost. These may seem like ordinary survival strategies, but they reveal something much deeper. Cooperation, reciprocity, mutual care, and solidarity are not exceptional responses to crisis; they are among humanity’s oldest and most enduring social infrastructures for a secure and peaceful society.
Perhaps this requires us to invert the way we usually think about security. Instead of treating these practices as informal responses to insecurity, as substitutes for systems that have failed, what if we recognised them as security itself? What if care, solidarity, reciprocity, and collective responsibility are not peripheral to security, but its very foundation?
Communities That Refuse to Disappear
Another lesson from the convening was that alternatives are not built only through institutions and processes. They are also built through knowledge, culture, memory, and the relationships that allow grassroots organisations to protect themselves, and also to make themselves visible in the face of violence, displacement, and erasure.
Across Europe, the Border Violence Monitoring Network documents abuses committed against migrants and refugees along Europe’s borders. Its members are present where migrants first arrive, around detention centres, asylum courts, and border zones, documenting violations, bearing witness, and pursuing due process and justice. In doing so, they create a tool through which violence can be recorded, made visible, and challenged. Alongside this, initiatives such as Alarm Phone and Asylum Support demonstrate how digital technologies, so often used for surveillance and control can be reclaimed for care, accompaniment, and survival. Rather than rejecting technology altogether, these initiatives appropriate the master’s tools to create pathways through systems designed to exclude.
Something similar is also visible in the work of Weaving Liberation, a European network exploring questions of digital justice. Working with grassroots organisations, it develops tools, resources, and collective strategies that help communities understand, document, and resist digital policing. Their Digital Policing Toolkit grows directly out of lived experience, enabling affected youth to expose technological harms and to organise collectively against them. The lesson being that technology itself does not produce justice. Collectives and collective resistance do.
Questions of visibility and narrative surfaced repeatedly throughout the convening.
In Guatemala, the work of Agencia Ocote and 25A challenge dominant stories about cities, violence, democracy, and public life. They demonstrate that building alternatives requires – along with new institutions and policies – new ways of seeing, naming, and describing reality. The experience of La COMADRE in Colombia perhaps illustrates this most powerfully. For years, Afro-Colombian women affected by conflict, displacement, and racial and sexual violence have relied on collective memory, mutual care, ancestral knowledge, and organisation to rebuild lives that war sought to destroy. Long before public institutions recognised their pain and rights, these women were already creating the conditions that allowed them to continue existing with dignity. They continue to shape the inadequate and half-hearted state designed reconciliation mechanisms and processes for peace and security.
Viewed together, these experiences suggest another way of thinking about security. People, of course, defend themselves through reforming laws or institutions, but also by claiming their agency through knowledge, communication, relationships, and collective mobilising. In making violence visible, preserving memory, and refusing erasure, they create the social conditions through which dignity, justice, and community can endure.
The Battle for Imagination
As the conversations unfolded, it became clearer that contestation to security paradigms requires going beyond laws, institutions, or technologies. It requires contesting the language, stories, memories, and the worldview. Every security system depends on its capacity to exercise force, but also on its ability to define what appears normal, legitimate, and possible, one such domain being family and society. LGBTQ+ communities around the world have long created chosen families, alternative kinship structures, and forms of mutual support that exist outside dominant social norms. In doing so, they challenge not only social conventions, but also dominant notions of security rooted in fixed ideas of family, identity, citizenship, and belonging.
We repeatedly returned to the idea that one of the greatest achievements of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the modern nation-state is that they built institutions around us and also captured our imagination. We become so accustomed to thinking within their categories that even our alternatives often remain confined within them. We imagine better laws, better states, better security systems, but rarely do we pause to ask whether entirely different ways of nurturing life are possible.
It is in this context that the work of AFROntera Cimarrona in Mexico assumes importance. Drawing on Black, trans, Afro-diasporic, and decolonial traditions, the collective questions the categories through which modern societies organise people, power, and freedom. Through the language of cimarronaje – the histories of enslaved peoples who escaped and built autonomous collectives – they remind us that domination operates through institutions, and equally through representation, language, and the power to define whose lives, identities, and ways of being are considered legitimate. In that sense, the struggle is to resist inclusion within existing systems, and simultaneously reclaim histories, rename the world, refuse imposed identities, and recover the capacity to imagine otherwise.
Seen in this light, decolonisation becomes more than the transformation of institutions – a struggle to liberate imagination itself in everyday life and practice.
Towards an Ecology of Life
Looking back on the conversations in Rio, I found myself leaving with a different question from the one I had arrived with. I had come expecting discussions about alternative security but I left wondering whether security itself is too narrow a horizon.
Very few of the initiatives we encountered were setting out to build new security systems. They were trying to solve immediate problems: resolving conflict where justice systems failed, accompanying migrants across dangerous borders, rebuilding neighbourhoods after violence, documenting abuses, reclaiming public narratives, preserving memory, defending territories, or creating spaces for democratic participation.
I don’t yet know whether these constitute a typology, but I left wondering whether what appeared to be scattered local initiatives were in fact different social infrastructures through which societies sustain life. Some were building infrastructures of justice. Others were strengthening infrastructures of care, memory, communication, knowledge, solidarity, or interweaving. They looked very different across contexts, yet they seemed to share a common purpose: enabling people to live well together despite systems that increasingly organise society through fear, exclusion, and control.
Seen from this perspective, security is no longer the enabling principle. It becomes one outcome of us organising life differently. Perhaps this is also where the distinction between alternatives within the system and alternatives to the system becomes particularly useful. Both remain necessary. Communities need ways to survive, protect themselves, and secure justice within existing realities. But they also need the freedom to imagine and practise entirely different social arrangements. Without that second horizon, reforms risk becoming little more than better management of systems that continue to generate exclusion and insecurity. Our task, then, is to recognise these infrastructures of life, strengthen them, connect them, and weave them together into a new ecology of life.
Madhuresh Kumar is a member of the facilitation team of Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA).