Draft HTML Booklet | 2026 Archive
A web-first booklet gathering insights from four sessions on colonial power in Europe, Fortress Europe, shrinking civic space, and the work of building solidarity across movements.
Overview
Decolonial Europe Day 2026 refused the idea of Europe as a finished peace project. It asked what becomes visible when Europe is read instead as a political project built through colonial extraction, racial hierarchy, border violence, selective democracy and ongoing resistance. Across the four sessions, speakers and participants asked what changes when EU institutions, former colonial states, border agencies, funders, museums, companies and civil society spaces are analysed from the standpoint of those made disposable by their systems.
Cross-cutting Learnings
The sessions did not offer one simple answer. They offered a map of political demands and contradictions: where power hides, how violence is normalised, what solidarity costs, and what must be reorganised if decoloniality is taken seriously.
Colonial violence is not a missing chapter to be added to Europe's story. It changes the story itself: peace, cooperation and prosperity were built alongside ongoing colonial rule, extraction, border-making and racial hierarchy.
Direct rule gives way to debt, trade conditions, outsourced borders, climate finance, museum control, development language, supply chains and institutional procedures that continue to organise unequal power.
Borders appear in visas, return hubs, detention, racial profiling, housing, offices, workplaces, humanitarian categories and daily assumptions about who belongs and who is always suspect.
Shrinking civic space is a democratic crisis, but also a racial and colonial one. Racialised communities have long organised under surveillance, policing, smear campaigns, funding precarity and exclusion.
Institutions can adopt words like intersectionality, participation, decolonisation and solidarity while leaving decision-making, resources, legitimacy and risk distributed in the same old ways.
It requires shared risk, redistribution of resources, political courage, accountability, slower forms of organising and the willingness to give up control, not only symbolic alignment from a distance.
Hope was not treated as optimism. It appeared as rest, political education, community memory, art, mutual care and the capacity to keep acting when the scale of harm feels impossible.
Decolonial spaces are not automatically free from hierarchy. They can reproduce anti-Blackness, class privilege, ableism, gendered labour, charisma politics, Global North dominance and extractive uses of lived experience.
Colonial power does not only extract land and labour. It shapes whose bodies are controlled, whose families are recognised, whose care work is exploited, whose sexuality is punished and whose safety is negotiable.
A decolonial approach cannot be assessed by language alone. It must be measured by whether resources, legitimacy, protection, authorship, agenda-setting power and decision-making move toward those most affected.
Session Summaries
Each session opened a different doorway into the same structure: how colonial power remains present in Europe, and how communities are organising beyond the limits set by institutions.
The opening session challenged Europe Day's official self-image as a celebration of peace and cooperation. Speakers instead asked what was happening in and beyond Europe in 1950, who was excluded from the story, and whose labour, land, memory and lives made European prosperity possible.
The discussion traced colonial continuity through debt, trade agreements, extractivism, museums, education, law, borders and the management of memory. Raouf ben Mohamed connected colonialism to the monetary and financial system, arguing that debt and climate finance can continue domination through softer forms of control. Filipa Pontes explored how museums, archives and cultural institutions can speak of restitution while still controlling the terms of conversation. Seema Syeda connected borders, partition, famine and inherited trauma to the wider European world-system.
Decolonial work requires more than critique of Europe. It requires changing the spaces where knowledge, legitimacy and memory are produced, and creating conditions where people can unlearn and organise together.
The conversation turned 9 May into a question rather than a celebration. Speakers returned to Algeria, colonial victory narratives and the Schuman Declaration to ask: peace and prosperity for whom, and on whose backs?
Raouf's strongest thread was that colonial power did not disappear when flags changed. Loans, repayment conditions, trade agreements and extractive contracts became ways to keep deciding Global South economies from outside.
Filipa brought the conversation into art and embodiment, asking what movements, rhythms, knowledges and sensitivities people have been taught not to see, feel or hear. This made unlearning bodily, not abstract.
Seema challenged the feel-good story of multicultural Britain by asking what it leaves unnamed: partition, famine, inherited family trauma and the colonial extraction that helped make Britain wealthy.
The migration session reframed European border policy not as neutral management, but as a racialised system of dehumanisation, detention, deportability and outsourced violence. Return hubs, expanded detention and externalised returns were read as colonial and political choices, not technical solutions.
Anila Noor grounded migration in lived experience, showing how refugees, women of colour, LGBTQ+ people, unaccompanied minors and racialised migrants carry emotional and existential burdens while being treated as suspicious or undeserving. Mustapha Jarjou connected freedom of movement to colonial borders, the Berlin Conference and the unequal global mobility that allows Europeans to travel while Africans are criminalised. Eugenia Gyamfi named the "internal borders" that appear in daily life, from migration offices to shops and workplaces. Dr. Emmanuel Achiri argued that the real crisis is not migration, but European identity, whiteness and the defence of racial order.
Fortress Europe is a colonial project that decides whose movement is freedom and whose movement is threat. Dismantling it requires both legal change and a transformation of how societies imagine belonging.
Anila refused the abstraction of migration management. She pushed the room to see migration as survival, family, gendered risk, racial suspicion, de-skilling and the daily burden carried by people who are treated as if they are taking something.
Mustapha's testimony made clear that people do not choose danger in the abstract. When visas and regular routes are closed, the desert, Libya and the Mediterranean become routes produced by policy.
Eugenia named the borders that do not look like borders: suspicion in shops, offices, workplaces, housing, care systems and progressive spaces. Belonging becomes political because exclusion is everyday.
Emmanuel's intervention moved beyond policy critique. He argued that migration is called a crisis because racialised movement exposes the contradiction between EU rights language, national border regimes, white European identity and the racial order they continue to defend.
The Brussels session treated shrinking civic space as a decolonial question: who has historically had access to public voice, who is funded, who is criminalised, who is considered legitimate, and who bears the risk of naming racism, Islamophobia, Palestine, migration violence and coloniality.
Palestine became one of the clearest examples of selective civic space: who is allowed to grieve, protest, name genocide, criticise state violence or refuse institutional neutrality without being punished, defunded or pushed outside the boundaries of acceptable speech.
Julie Pascoet stressed that civic space has never been fully open or neutral for racialised communities. Surveillance, policing, exploitation, counter-terrorism and exclusion shape the terrain before a protest even begins. Tyala Ifwanga brought Fern's environmental justice perspective, connecting European consumption, Global Majority partners, forest governance, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, and the limits of EU "win-win" language. Hilmi Tekoglu focused on legitimacy, international solidarity and whose voices gain access to decision-making.
Civil society must choose whether it will protect its access to institutions or deepen its accountability to grassroots communities, racial justice and cross-border solidarity.
Julie described how Brussels institutions can adopt intersectionality while stripping it of structural force, reducing it to stacked identities rather than a challenge to racism, capitalism and oppression.
Tyala pushed environmental civil society to confront how European consumption, forest governance, supply chains and "partnership" language can reproduce extraction while sounding participatory.
Hilmi returned to the question of who is recognised as a valid actor. Civic space is not only whether organisations can participate, but whose solidarity is welcomed, criminalised or dismissed.
The repression of Palestine solidarity showed civic space not only shrinking, but selectively closing around the struggles that expose Europe's colonial alliances, racial hierarchies and limits of acceptable speech.
The room kept coming back to EU funding: necessary for survival, but often administratively heavy, competitive and politically disciplining. Decolonising civic space means changing who controls resources.
The closing session asked what becomes possible when movements stop treating their struggles as separate. It framed silos not only as organisational divisions, but as habits of thinking that can prevent struggles around race, migration, climate, gender, disability, labour, art and democracy from illuminating one another.
Jana from Debt for Climate connected debt, colonialism and climate justice, arguing that illegitimate Global South debt is a common denominator across movements resisting extraction, austerity and financial domination. Dina Ntziora spoke from Refugee Week Greece and cultural community work, emphasising spaces where people can tell stories beyond trauma, build relationships and shift narratives together. The conversation returned repeatedly to sustainability, burnout, hope and the need to act even when outcomes are uncertain.
Solidarity is not the absence of difference. It is the disciplined work of building relationships strong enough to hold difference while confronting connected systems of harm.
Jana used debt to connect climate justice, labour, feminist organising, Indigenous struggles and anti-extractivist work. Debt cancellation was framed as necessary, but not enough without wider economic transformation.
Dina's contribution insisted that people are not reducible to displacement. Refugee Week Greece uses art, food, comedy, music and gathering to make room for stories beyond trauma and humanitarian expectation.
The conversation did not romanticise movement work. Speakers named exhaustion, scarcity and the impossibility of being everywhere, then asked what people-centred solidarity can look like anyway.
The closing reflections turned toward hope without sentimentality: rest, breaks, reading, care and action chosen despite uncertain outcomes. Continuing can itself be a revolutionary practice.
Reflection Prompts
These prompts translate the archive into practice. They can support internal reflection, workshops, post-screening conversations, coalition meetings or organisational strategy sessions.
Who defines the problem, sets the agenda, chooses the language and decides what counts as legitimate knowledge?
Look beyond explicit racism. Where do debt, funding, borders, data, trade, archives or procedures reproduce unequal power?
Who pays the price for naming racism, coloniality, Palestine, migration violence or institutional hypocrisy?
Which words have entered your organisation without changing resources, decision-making or accountability?
Where do everyday behaviours, eligibility rules, communication habits or professional norms make people feel suspect?
What comfort, control, speed, reputation or resources would need to be given up for solidarity to become material?
Who would decide, be paid, be protected, set the agenda and have the power to refuse if decoloniality became operational?
How might our own movements reproduce hierarchy, anti-Blackness, ableism, gendered labour, class privilege or extractive uses of lived experience?
What This Asks Of Us
The archive asks us not only to understand Europe differently, but to organise differently. Decoloniality cannot remain a cultural theme, a grant keyword or a symbolic gesture. It has to reshape how movements learn, how institutions distribute power, how solidarity is practised, and how communities imagine freedom beyond the limits of colonial common sense.
A decolonial commitment should be judged by what changes: who decides, who is paid, who is protected, who carries risk, whose knowledge shapes strategy, whose timelines matter, and who can say no.