Social Movements and Us

KURVE Wustrow has its roots in the peace and anti-nuclear movement with a special connection to the regional resistance against the planned final storage facility for nuclear waste in Gorleben in the Wendland region.

Our concern is to strengthen active nonviolence and nonviolent action, to make it usable, to reflect on it and to disseminate it as a legitimate and effective means of social change and the resolution of social conflicts. Social movements and their diverse civil society actors advance these changes by using the diverse means of nonviolent action - from online petitions and background talks to media work and civil disobedience.

Since 2017, we have created a separate field of work to support these social movements. At the same time, we now feel that we belong to a wider field than just the peace and anti-nuclear movements: the peace focus has been joined by human rights work due to the situations in many of our partner countries, and anti-nuclear engagement is no longer conceivable without climate protection. Movement actors from the field of refugee support and migration rights approach us with ideas and requests and the social shift to the right calls for strong counter-positions.

For all these movements, we continue to see ourselves as a place of education and encounter and support them in many ways with our movement work:

  • We strengthen the skills of activists - for example, through training and further education. Specifically, since 2016 we have been offering a multi-part training course on "Conflict moderation in social movements and self-managed projects", which almost 100 movement activists have taken part in!
  • We accompany movement-related initiatives and groups so that the activists have more impact and are less paralysed by internal conflicts - for example, by moderating their meetings.
  • We participate in effective campaigns or initiate them ourselves - for example, the campaign "Emergency Entry" of the Alliance against Right-wing Extremism Wendland / Altmark.
  • We support our international partners in their advocacy work in Germany and campaign for the protection of threatened human rights defenders (see here).
  • And we are also active ourselves: for example, we have co-founded a regional climate action group and participate in direct non-violent actions for more climate justice (see here).

Further activities can be found on the topic pages. Opportunities for participation are described there.

In all our actions and activities, it is important to us that they are planned and implemented in a way that is critical of domination and sensitive to discrimination. We want to contribute to the empowerment of marginalised people. In doing so, we strive to create safer spaces for the activists. In our trainings and advanced trainings, for example, we make sure that diverse perspectives are given space and that those affected can speak for themselves. In communication, we focus on discrimination-sensitive language as well as digital security. And: we are still learning in all these aspects and are grateful for feedback!