My Fellowship Year: Solidarity, Connection and Common Struggle

If someone were to ask me what had really made a difference to my life over the past year, I would reply without a second thought that it was my experience as an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity. That’s why I’m writing a few lines for those of you in Latin America who are thinking of applying but haven’t really made your minds up yet.

Let’s face it, 2020 isn’t going to be an easy year to forget, so what was so special about my fellowship experience that it managed to overshadow the rest of such an eventful year? Well, for one thing becoming an Atlantic Fellow brought me London, a city where I never expected to live, and allowed me to meet wonderful people in an environment that is shot through with diversity, respect, and solidarity. This was genuinely a big surprise, as I had gotten it into my head that here I would find life a little hostile, with ruthless competition the norm. After all, we were talking about living in London and studying at the London School of Economics!

The somewhat unfounded fear that I felt as I prepared my application was based on the programme’s reference to “leadership for social change” being the central requirement and thrust of the fellowship. For me, I was certain that this had to be talking about an ethic along the lines of neoliberal entrepreneurship. I found it hard to believe that it would be possible, desirable even, to learn about leadership. More than that, in fact, I found it hard to understand why I should pay so much attention to something that, as far as I was concerned, reflected nothing more than the current dominance of the cult of the individual. But my first meeting in the fellowship made me realise that this had been a total misconception.

Here, the fellowship programme was not fostering that kind of leadership; in fact, they weren’t actually promoting any one kind of leadership at all. Rather, the programme invited us to reflect on our place in the world, wherever it was that we came from, and from there to expand our networks of global solidarity in order to collectively face the common concern that had brought us together: inequality. Instead of feeding the cult of the individual, AFSEE gave us a platform through which to meet and get to know each other, to find similarities and differences in our respective contexts, to form networks that would help to further our struggles back home.

There is a lot to be said here about connections. For one thing, my past experiences and training led me to pay more attention to certain facets of inequality: concentration of land and the socioeconomic divisions that crystallise into social classes. But from the very first module of the AFSEE programme at LSE in September 2019, it became clear that these issues had to be situated both on a far longer timeline and also on a geographical scale that would take into account the effects of colonialism, for example. I also came to understand how each and every dimension of inequality is intertwined with the others. Ever since, I find it impossible to ignore the fact that the climate crisis has been driven mostly by the richest and most developed nations, and within them by those accumulating the most wealth. The connections don’t end there…

Mind you, I did find it difficult to step back from what was going on in Colombia and move away from the communities that I cared about and campaigned with through my work. But having already dedicated a number of years to supporting the implementation of the 2016 Peace Agreement, I wanted to make the jump into academia to learn new theories and methodologies that would help me to study inequalities; that’s why I applied to join the Residential track of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme. I did miss, however, the communities that I’d forged strong bonds with through our shared struggle towards peace and the defence of their territories. Their absence was heartbreaking.

But here I was in for another surprise. In London I encountered a kind of activism that I didn’t believe existed there, maybe out of ignorance or even a little bit of prejudice. Global cities, those ancient imperial metropolises of the developed economies in the Global North, have been very successful in constructing an image as hubs of commerce, consumption, splendour and ostentation. And without doubt they fit that bill, not least London. But, to my surprise, there are also communities of resistance that operate, communicate, spread, and survive down in the roots below the glossy surface of these desolate cities.

I was both surprised and amazed by the sense of community, solidarity and mutual support amongst the AFSEE Fellows and from London’s social organisations. Once again these people and organisations reminded me that there is no domination that does not meet resistance: alongside the City of London, the financial citadel in the heart of London, there is also Extinction Rebellion, whose protests in Trafalgar Square defied a police ban on protests in the city centre.

I came to understand that what motivates our struggles may only be superficially different. In Latin America, through the efforts of the poor, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants and farmers, a tireless struggle has been launched to defend their territories and keep them out of the clutches of predatory capitalism. In London, the struggle is to preserve council houses (state-owned housing accessible to people on low incomes) and to halt the commodification of public space. Although they might seem different, once you scratch the surface, the two struggles are one and the same: the defence of the commons and of lives that are worth living; without oppression, without exploitation, without a price.

If at first I feared that I was moving too far from where my work made sense and for no good reason, I soon realised instead that I was building global networks with a clear objective in mind: to combat the many inequalities that oppress our societies. And that is precisely what this fellowship is now inviting you to do.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.