Navigating Conflict in Movement Spaces

This article is excerpted and adapted from a webinar held on November 20, 2025, and moderated by Tom Llewellyn of Shareable titled “Navigating Conflict When Building Power with Dean Spade.” Access to the webinar and supporting materials is available here.

There is intense conflict in groups doing resistance work. This can get in the way of the work and stop new people from joining the work. It is my firm belief that if you do things that you care about with other people, you will experience conflict. And although we live in a conflict-avoidant society that tells us this is a bad thing, conflict is actually normal and inevitable. It doesn’t mean anybody’s doing anything wrong. Some simple things can help us be a little more prepared to have conflict and to not end up leaving groups or leaving social movement work when we encounter conflict with other people.

We are living in hard times, under great stress from ecological crisis, wars, increasing poverty, widespread criminalization, and so much more. One question we can all be asking is how do we want to treat each other knowing everyone is having a hard time?

I have found that burnout is not usually just a result of being tired…it was the loss of trust, the feeling of being blamed or stigmatized, or not being listened to.

It can be hard to have a generous interpretation of others’ words and actions when you’re stressed out and feeling a lot of scarcity of time and resources. It can be hard to be patient and generous with kids, lovers, roommates, family members, friends, and people we are collaborating with on community projects. We could all be asking right now, what’s it like to try to be generous, even when we feel defensive or afraid? We can recognize that when we’re tired and stressed, we might be extra sensitive. People’s small mistakes or infractions might stir up old histories of times we were betrayed or not listened to across our lives. How can we be gentle with ourselves and others when everyone’s on edge, trying to get by?

Disappointment, Conflict, and Burnout in Care and Resistance Work

People often experience a special kind of disappointment in resistance work. We join groups to do something that we really care about. Often, we are relieved to finally find people who see things the way we do, excited to be understood and have accompaniment and solidarity. We have high expectations for each other. And then we find out that we’re all very human and imperfect.

I have found that burnout is not usually just a result of being tired. Most people I’ve talked to who feel burned out and leave movement work, during the last 28 years that I have been in these movements, are actually in pain because of unresolved conflict. They joined work they really cared about, something went wrong that made them feel betrayed or left out or disappointed, and that is the pain of the burnout. It wasn’t just the hard work; it was the loss of trust, the feeling of being blamed or stigmatized, or not being listened to.

Sadly, so many urgently needed groups and projects entirely break apart because people are in a conflict. And so many people who want to join the work are driven away from our groups because they sense the bad vibes in the group, or they hear people talking badly about each other and can’t really figure out what is going on. We so badly need our work to be bigger—more people doing care work and fighting back against genocide and ecocide, criminalization, and immigration enforcement.

If we treat each other badly in our groups, and have conflict that tears us apart, we can’t do the urgent things we need to do to stop the ecocidal monsters who currently control so much of our lives. So, to me, conflict is one of the biggest security issues in our movements. Alongside political repression of our movements and apocalyptic conditions is the stuff we are doing to each other and our difficulty addressing conflict together.

One dimension of this is that many of us are very good at using political language and identifying political and identity-based dimensions to conflicts, but not good at identifying emotional dynamics. So, when we are having strong feelings, we use our politics to justify them. We weaponize our political language, not on purpose but because when we’re afraid and defensive, it’s a comfortable set of concepts and words to use to protect ourselves and defend our actions.

We’re doing work across a lot of important identity and political differences—as we must. And we’re having emotional reactions to each other, to the work, to the decisions our groups are making to the group dynamics. We’re all having moments of feeling not listened to, or not belonging, or left out, and we often don’t have words for that but immediately apply a lot of political labels to others in our groups, ask people to take sides, and engage in very binary frameworks that make repair difficult. Often, we become unsatisfiable, not willing to hear apologies or move forward, stuck in resentments, unable to access compassion for everyone’s imperfections.

I am hopeful that if we could get a little more skilled up on our emotional skills, instead of just throwing political words at each other, I think we could repair more often and actually stick together. We could love and care for everyone, even if we don’t like them all the time. We could make mistakes that are inevitable, have disagreements, and still work together or at least not tear down other people and groups that are close to us in our movements, even if they have some differences.

This all brings to mind author and musician Margaret Killjoy’s words: “Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.”

Abolitionism and Transformative Justice

I’ve spent the last decades in the movement for police, prison, and border abolition. I believe we shouldn’t have any of those structures. Abolitionists use a concept called “transformative justice” to describe the work we do to address conflict without using police. There is a lot of conflict, harm, and violence in our communities, we know the police don’t help and only make it worse. Transformative justice practices do three things:

1. Work to figure out and provide what the person or people who have been harmed need to heal and participate in community, to not be isolated by what happened to them, and to be listened to, even though we can’t undo what happened.
2. Work to figure out and provide what the person or people who did the harm need to stop doing it.
3. Work to figure out what the community surrounding the harm could do to make it less likely—how did we all set up a situation that made this more likely?

These three things are all things the carceral system does not do. They are practical, effective things that people in communities can do. There is so much that we can all be doing. Much of this is mutual aid work—direct support for basic needs that builds community connection and improves safety and survival.

A fundamental abolitionist idea is that no one is disposable. This means practicing actually believing that it’s possible for people to change. It doesn’t mean we have to say yes to everything with everyone. We’re allowed to have limits and boundaries, to decide who we want to live with, or how long we want to talk on the phone with someone, or who we want to collaborate most closely with. But this principle asks us to try to be more open to people being different than us and being on learning journeys.

Abolitionism encourages us to seek right-sized responses. This can be hard when we are upset. When our old scars of being left out or not listened to are stirred up, we might get so mad we want revenge. Fundamentally, an abolitionist approach acknowledges that shame and punishment and stigmatizing people doesn’t work. It doesn’t help people learn. This is very countercultural in a carceral society.

A fundamental abolitionist idea is that no one is disposable. This means practicing actually believing that it’s possible for people to change.

It means that when we have strong feelings and we want to punish someone, we have to notice it is happening and ask our friends for help to make sure the responses are right-sized. There is nothing wrong with having big feelings, and we deserve care and support when they come up. And that includes getting help making sure our responses are right-sized and aligned with our values, not damaging or disorganizing to our communities.

When Big Reactions Happen

One thing that is surprising and challenging about the emotional dynamics of conflict is that we do the most harm to others when we are feeling aggrieved, victimized, left out, and/or resentful. It’s counterintuitive because those are the moments when we are focused on what others did wrong and how we are hurting. But those are the times we are most likely to do something harmful, like go and write the really messed up email to somebody, treat somebody with a cold shoulder, gossip negatively about people in our group or about another group in town, post a bunch of stuff on Instagram that’s really inflammatory, or violate someone’s privacy.

As strange as it might seem, it’s when I’m feeling like the victim that I should ask for help from a friend to figure out what a right-sized response is, or to figure out if I’m still too upset to decide how to respond and need more time. It’s not that we aren’t legitimately sometimes victimized, but the victim narrative in our heads can cause us to skip our value assessment and then do stuff that later we wish we hadn’t done. It’s not bad to feel this way, but we should consider what to do with these feelings since they are inevitably going to come up in our groups and in ourselves.

This work addresses the question: How can we hold this with care? Conflict and strong feelings are part of our lives, especially since we all have wounds of living through violence, exclusion, stigma, betrayal, and other painful losses. We show up to movement groups with these wounds, we get our hopes up for finally belonging, we get disappointed, and the feelings can be huge. We need to hold each other and ourselves tenderly in this, caring for the feelings, and taking actions that align with our values.

Centering Belonging

I was recently talking to somebody who’s doing a conflict support process with a group that’s had a major difficult conflict. And one of the things the person is doing is individually reaching out to the 40 or 50 people who all were involved in the group over these many years where these hard things were happening.

The people from the group have been telling this conflict support person, who’s not even in the group, “It just means so much to me that you’re listening to me.” We live in societies that minimize our experiences of pain and harm. And so, we join movement groups and we hope we’re finally going to be part of something where we’re heard and seen. And then we have a bad experience where people don’t hear us or see us at some point. And then we wreak havoc. We’re like, I have to tear down everybody in this group and this group itself, because I’m feeling all of my historical cumulative pain of being dismissed.

If we could catch each other in the moment of pain and listen, I think it could be a huge change in the likelihood of those conflicts escalating to the most disorganizing behaviors between us.

A lot of us show up to movement spaces like a meeting or a conference and we are not aware of it, but we’re actually programmed to look for how we don’t belong. I’ve seen this so much. We go in excited to finally find our people, but we have had a lifetime of not feeling belonging, so we look through that lens and soon find something that feels familiar. We’re so hopeful, and then we are so let down when something isn’t perfect.

There’s so much vulnerability. Knowing this, we should plan our meetings and spaces knowing everyone’s showing up like this. So, can we be more welcoming? Can we give new people more space to share what motivates them to be here with us? Can we avoid being jaded and instead welcome their passion? And when they say or do things that show they need to learn some aspects of solidarity that they haven’t encountered yet, can we lovingly give the feedback (even if we have to give it more than once), remembering that we all have to constantly learn and unlearn things to practice solidarity?

We are all harmed and wounded in groups, like our families, schools, churches, workplaces, early in life. And when we join groups to work for liberation, we can find healing for those wounds. Those wounds will come up when we do things together, and rather than freaking out and shutting down and splitting, we could hold on to each other through those storms, find out that we won’t throw each other away, that it’s ok to say so when something is hard for us, that it’s ok to listen when someone has been hurt by us. It works this way: You join the group with all of your excitement about liberation, and then all your old stuff gets stirred up, and then there is opportunity to have healing, belonging, care with others.

Perhaps you never felt listened to in your family. And in this group, you’re starting to feel like no one’s listening. Can you create an experience with others where you get listened to and learn a new, deep lesson about your value? Or where you learn a new lesson about being recognized for your labor or about being cared about as a person with a disability or being seen in your experiences of racism and White supremacy in this culture or of transphobia? Can we create groups where we build these skills together, so that more people can experience increased capacity to stick together in these very hard times?