Practising hope: learning from social movement strategies in the Philippines

Hope and resilience are found in surprising places. Our world resounds with practices of possibility that persist in tenacious defiance of the oppressions that characterise so much of existence. It is to such defiant practices of hope that I turn in this chapter. In doing so, I draw inspiration not from the question of why and how people are manipulated and paralysed by fear but from the more elusive and possibly more important question, particularly for those involved in the work of social change, of why and how they are not. Why is it that in some situations of threat, poverty and violence there is evidence of an active and empowered response? The work of social movements throughout the world, and particularly in the Global South where stakes are high, reveals an attempt to meet fear with action and in doing so generate that most radical of responses: hope. I discuss here the experiences of one such social movement from the Philippines called MASIPAG. MASIPAG, a network of small, mostly subsistence farmers, promotes discourses of empowerment and hope as a strategy for engaging farming families in sustainable agriculture. Network participants are encouraged to redefine themselves as active and hopeful (rather than passive and fearful) subjects. In doing so, these farmers bring hope into being through action. Resisting fear cannot be associated only with meeting fear head-on. It also needs to be recast as the generation of hope, of creating empowered subjects and of generating alternative realities that make fear, if not redundant, no longer central to the way that people live their lives. Subsistence farmers in the Philippines face hunger, military and paramilitary violence and landlessness. While fear is a very real part of their lives, there is considerable room for transgression in the imagination of alternatives. In this case, farmers create alternative networks of farmer-bred seed and organic agriculture that stress the subjectivity of farmers in ways that reconstruct them not as victims, or rather not only as victims, but build upon the creativity and resilience of farmers. What emerges is a politics of hope. Hope is bound up with action and is generated through practice. As small farmers reinvent themselves as fully formed, active agents able to imagine and bring into being new futures, they are working with a hope that exists in the present with its roots in empowerment and the articulation of alternatives. It is not premised on the absence of fear and does not exist in reaction against fear. Rather, hope draws on connection and on the work of creating and recreating solidarities through the very act of living. In this chapter, I parallel the practice of MASIPAG and focus on hope rather than fear. As I write, it is my aim to allow hope to push fear aside, to displace and marginalise it. It is, admittedly, a rather cheeky move in a volume that has fear as its focus. Yet, by sapping the shibboleth of fear, watching it fade (though not disappear), it is possible to shed light on its nature. The inspiration that can come from a study of social movements is precisely that fear need not be central to life, that it can be superseded by hopeful practices that can, in turn, bring hope