“Will Trade Racists for Refugees” by alisdare1 is licenced under CC BY-SA 2.0.
At the end of April I joined Work Package 3 of the CCINDLE project, which focuses on how activists in the UK resist far-right and anti-gender movements. Before continued participant recruitment in England, finishing up data collection in Scotland (namely Edinburgh and Glasgow) gave me an opportunity to reflect on my experiences researching activism against the far right and anti-gender campaigns. It was a different experience interviewing people with whom I was already familiar, as we had crossed paths in similar activist spaces, and useful to have the chance to reflect on the common struggles that we had when politically organising in Edinburgh.
What has stood out thus far has been the difficulties of navigating interpersonal relationships within the context of political organising. During interviews, participants wondered about friends in organising spaces and whether over-relying on these friendships as a precursor for organising hinders the building of mass movements. For example, Ben* (35 years old, trade unionist) pointed out the importance of not being friends with everyone you organise with despite the “instinct” to do so. Especially in Edinburgh, where networks of activists are often small, one regularly sees the same people mobilised in different informal groups where members are friends or know each other – what I jokingly term as “recycling activists”. This could be good for building community but sometimes curtails the recruitment of new people. Contrasting with these small groups, trade union organisations such as the one Ben* is active in have several hundred members in a branch, which makes it difficult to be friends with everyone. Rather than staying within one’s community, he argues that it’s important to grow that community by “winning over more people… to our arguments.” Adam* (34 years old, anti-racist community organiser) on the other hand, pointed out the importance of conflict management, especially when interpersonal tensions come to influence and limit activists’ capacities to continue advocacy work.
The difficulties that arise from interpersonal conflicts and our inability to address and manage these disagreements can also be consequences of political differences that are significant when organising and mobilising communities. What conservatives and right-wingers often refer to as ‘cancel culture’ also manifests in left-wing political organising, where concerns around safety in very diverse communities is always a significant issue. Organisational quagmires such as deciding who can be persuaded, e.g. who’s an ‘unrepentant fascist’ and who can be ‘saved’, involves determining when and how to draw those lines in the sand without pursuing a kind of ‘ideological purity’ within our own communities.
During my fieldwork, a ‘comrade-friend’ introduced me to Laura C. Forster and Joel White’s book, Friends in Common. Since then, it has come to my mind a lot as I engage with participants and co-produce data with them. Their book on friendship explores the potentiality of friendships being a “mode of political belonging and political imagination” (p. 19). Forster and White challenge often ‘apolitical’ understandings of friendship, emphasising the need to embed friendship, like other forms of social relations, within the broader system of capitalism. The aim of the book posits and encourages a way of friendship that disrupts capital and capitalism.
Reading the book while conducting preliminary analysis of CCINDLE data has been thought-provoking. It raises questions about how we understand relationships between people who organise politically together, and whether there are deep-seated underlying assumptions that in advocacy spaces, somehow, people are expected to act and speak differently than in other social contexts. For example, George* (30 years old), who runs a queer-safe community space, aptly pointed out the difficulties of actualising the expectations that people have of him as an activist while also being able to pay his rent and the upkeep of the space. Such idealised expectations of activists can also manifest in other ways. One of Ben’s* criticisms of activists is their focus on how their advocacy “makes them feel” rather than on their commitment to a political cause or movement. On the one hand, I shared Ben’s* sentiments about individuals who seek to build movements for their own sake, for power and fame, rather than to contribute to broader political goals. However, I also questioned the purpose of scrutinising individual activists’ ‘intentions’. If their intentions do not seem ‘pure’ or ‘right’, does it negate the effects and impacts of their work? I say this while also fully acknowledging the importance of holding space for those whose lived experiences of marginalisation are direct consequences of political action.
At this stage of the project, I have few answers and even more questions than when I first started. But that’s the beauty of social research isn’t it?
Author: Aerin Lai (she/they), University of Sheffield. 9th September 2025
* All participant names have been changed.