2025/04/18 by C. Santos · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration #Geographies of human-animal interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/17565529.2025.2489105
openalex publication_date 2025/04/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/16
Everyday resistance is an essential mechanism through which marginalized communities reclaim their agency and preserve their right to stay put. Drawing on ethnographic research in Guinea-Bissau, this paper shifts the focus from the threats posed by climate change to how vulnerability is created, sustained and resisted. In a context deeply marked by structural injustice and power imbalances, resistance emerges against the prevailing forces that undermine Bissau-Guinean’s agency and freedoms. Deliberately deprived of state support, they engage in extraordinary and creative counter-strategies to assert self-determination. Rooted in solidarity, these powerful acts often shape alternative pathways to development that allow them to carry on with their lives. By situating resistance within climate migration scholarship, this paper calls for a critical reassessment of the concepts of vulnerability and resilience, moving beyond framings of victimhood and questioning ‘resilience building’ grounded in neoliberal rationales. It shows how the ambition to make others resilient ignores the existing agencies embedded in the individual and collective everydayness of resistance. Staying put is not about accepting a passive state while waiting for something to change. In a context where self-sufficiency is crucial for survival, staying put is sustained by relationships of solidarity and a constant state of resistance.