Slow nonviolence: Muslim women resisting the everyday violence of dispossession and marginalization

Feminist elaborations of slow violence and everyday peace

Linking slow violence to the intimate geographies of colonialism marking the everyday lives of Indigenous women and children, De Leeuw (2016) asserts that “ … this slow and everyday violence of Indigenous erasure … [constitutes] violent geographies, but [that] are also outside spectacle” (20). De Leeuw’s analysis resonates with feminists’ ongoing interrogations of the everyday, the intimate, and the mundane as vital spaces from which to theorize in/equality and to map the workings of power (Nelson and Seager, 2005). Following De Leeuw’s (2016) “call for a deeper engagement with the political geographies formed in everyday intimacies” (16), I argue for a similar turn to political geographies of nonviolence that are “outside spectacle.” Too often attention to the spectacle of violence creates an expectation for equally spectacular response or resistance to it. This expectation, even when well-intentioned, further marginalizes the knowledge of those who live with and resist violence in intimate spaces and relationships. For example, a sometimes obsessive attention to spectacular events of violence perpetrated by Muslim men against Muslim women not only conflates and pathologizes religion and “culture,” but also minimizes or erases the insights of diverse Muslim women who actively contest many intersecting forms of violence in their everyday lives and work (Piedalue, 2017). As a conceptual tool, slow nonviolence shifts attention to less visible and somewhat quieter spaces of anti-violence struggle, thereby demanding critical engagement with the ideas and world-making authored by those working to undo violence and cultivate peace with justice.

The specific examples from OCWRC, HF, and API Chaya’s work detailed in the following sections also resonate with some key feminist interventions on power, violence, and peace. First, these organizations’ approaches join a body of critical race feminist ideas and experiential knowledges that have showcased the radical political possibilities opened by constructive approaches to community organizing against gender-based violence, namely strategies that refuse complicity in state violence against subaltern groups and seek alternative modes of response (other than increased policing and incarceration) (Bierria et al., 2010; Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, 2006). In addition, the emphasis on care, empathy, and compassion in this praxis articulates with feminist care ethics, particularly with discussions of emotional epistemologies and ethical engagement in social interdependencies of care and responsibility (Lawson, 2007). These approaches, rooted in the experiences of survivors and activists relegated to the margins of modern liberalism and its itinerant notions of justice, extend the epistemological framework of feminist care ethics beyond its geographical and ontological roots in the West/global North (Raghuram, 2016).

Finally, this organizing in Hyderabad and Seattle often emphasizes building relations and spaces for women that are more than absent physical violence, sometimes using the language of “peace.” This calls forth and builds upon the insights of critical peace geographies, within which feminist scholars have highlighted the complicated but generative politics of “peacebuilding” as form of world-making across post-conflict and everyday sites (Koopman, 2010; Loyd, 2012; Williams, 2015; Williams and McConnell, 2011). In particular, Williams’ (2015) analysis of the everyday production of peace in place speaks to the kind of grounded and mundane practices that organizations in Hyderabad employ, and their work further illuminates “the myriad ways in which Muslims are orientated towards securing and maintaining peace within the Indian secular state and social milieu” (2). Feminist accountings of peacebuilding have also directly examined domestic violence, and offer critical insights into how “peace” can become a tool of discipline, coercion, or the maintenance of (gendered, racialized) power (Brickell, 2015; Laliberté, 2016). My analysis of OCWRC, HF, and API Chaya’s work, however, demonstrates that the make-up of the NGOs’ staff, their relative distance from seats of state power, and their self-reflexive engagements with multiple axes of power and violence position them to engage more critically with questions of peace with justice. In the process, they raise new questions for feminist geographies of intimate peace and suggest the need for further consideration of alternative models of gender justice authored at sites of dispossession.

Hyderabad: OCWRC and HF

Both OCWRC and HF work in high density urban settlements, or bastis, embedding their organizing within everyday life and neighborhood spaces. OCWRC primarily serves neighborhoods in the Old City, where a majority of the staff members also live. HF works in basti neighborhoods across the city, also with staff mostly living in these same neighborhoods. For the women OCWRC and HF support, domestic abuse (as physical, sexual, and psychological violence) manifests in forms that are common across India, for example as control of women’s mobility, dowry harassment, neglect of women’s health, threat of abandonment, and control of decision-making (Coomaraswamy and Perera-Rajasingham, 2008). As women commonly live in joint family dwellings with their husband’s family, the perpetrators of violence are not only husbands, but also members of the paternal family, including a husband’s parents, and/or his brother(s) and their wives. Despite these familiar experiences of violence, the women supported by OCWRC and HF also face distinctive constellations of violence based upon their particular socio-economic positioning (Coomaraswamy and Perera-Rajasingham, 2008). They live and work in spaces of dispossession and marginalization, and encounter forms of slow violence that are particular to these precarious spaces of dense urban settlements. For example, women face additional constraints on their mobility, due to limited economic resources and unsafe public spaces. In urban settlement spaces, slow violence also manifests in un(der)employment, hunger, ill health, limited educational opportunities, and decaying infrastructure and sanitation systems (Piedalue, 2017).

As the Old City and Hyderabad’s other bastis are home to large numbers of India’s “minority” populations—Muslims, Dalits, and other low-caste Hindus ⁵ —the women served by both NGOs also experience discrimination and hardship as members of these marginalized social groups. While OCWRC and HF serve women from all these communities and do not identify as “Muslim organizations,” both employ and serve primarily Muslim women due to the large number of Muslim families living in bastis. The concentration of many Muslim families in the Old City and other bastis itself reflects the socio-economic marginalization of Indian Muslims documented in the Indian government’s Sachar Committee Report (2007) and several academic studies, some of which also demonstrate how employment and housing discrimination produce urban segregation and exclusion for Muslims (Gayer and Jaffrelot, 2012; Hassan, 2016; Jamil, 2017; Shaban, 2013). In addition, in the 1980s and 1990s, increasing communal violence in Hyderabad re-shaped the demographics of the city. Many Muslim families, who had earlier lived throughout city neighborhoods and suburbs, shifted to the Old City seeking the greater security of a more concentrated community (Rao and Thaha, 2012). These realities are also partly the consequence of an insurgent Hindu nationalism, which manifests as an ideological framework and (often violent) set of political agitations that position Muslims as outsiders or “invaders” in India (Gayer and Jaffrelot, 2012; Jaffrelot, 2007). Thus, the lived realities of violence in these urban settlement spaces often reflect a materialization of intersecting structural inequalities, as patriarchal norms and impoverishment articulate with Hindu nationalist ideology and anti-Muslim bias to produce a particular vulnerability for many Muslim women. As OCWRC and HF have embedded their work in basti neighborhood contexts, they have confronted the effects of impoverishment, anti-Muslim bias, and resource deprivation that shape women’s experiences of and vulnerability to gender-based violence.

For many women, such dispossession and marginalization translates into both an increased vulnerability to gender-based violence and the heightened visibility of violence in their domestic relationships. Marginality limits women’s access to the knowledge and resources that help to prevent or mitigate violence, while it also makes leaving a violent home more difficult. Yet, the conditions of life in basti neighborhoods—where contextual notions of “privacy” are shaped in part by close proximity and auditory and/or visual access to one another’s intimate spaces and relationships—also mean that violence “in the home” is more widely known to neighbors. OCWRC and HF structure their work in relation to this reality—approaching people directly in their homes to discuss a taboo issue, but one which is made somewhat more speakable by the conditions of life that prevent it from being easily hidden. In this way, slow violence itself actually produces the materialities that facilitate the work of slow nonviolence, as material dispossession becomes a kind of rupture in the imagined private/public divide that so often figures in legal debates concerned with violence against women. This element of the spatiality of slow nonviolence illuminates the everyday politics at work in this model, as organizers leverage this rupture in the (perceived) privacy of the modern home/intimate space to open conversations around domestic abuse while simultaneously building neighborhood-level awareness and capacity for response.

In their neighborhood-embedded organizing against domestic violence, OCWRC and HF have developed contextualized frameworks and practices that constitute slow nonviolence. Slowness, in this sense, refers to the dynamic space-time of these particular approaches, which include punctuated moments of protest, media engagement, and public events, but primarily operate through the intimacies of everyday life and the less visible spaces of homes, neighborhoods, schools, and faith or community centers. This slow nonviolence works to undo violence in the future as well as in the present, seeking intergenerational, long-term social change that leads to the prevention of violence. This work proceeds as it does in no small part because OCWRC and HF serve women positioned at the intersections of multiple axes of dispossession and marginalization. While their unique histories and compositions shape their praxis, both organizations employ two modes of slow nonviolence: mobilizing family and community members and spaces, and women’s collective knowledge sharing.

Mobilizing family and community members and spaces

Most women seeking support from OCWRC and HF do not want to go to police stations to report violence, or file legal cases against their husbands or in-laws. While this presents a constraint for organizers, they continue to use the law as a tool for education and promotion of women’s rights in everyday spaces. They also employ a number of practices that work to address gender violence, and create gender justice, with the resources women can access more readily. This means they mobilize people—family members, friends, neighbors, coworkers, etc.—and spaces—streets, schools, community centers, home and work spaces—to confront violence and promote respectful and equitable relationships. Various activities and programs constitute this approach: door-to-door canvassing; family counseling; youth programs (working in schools, with parents, or in training programs); working with faith leaders (around issues like marriage contracts and counseling, or divorce); creative events featuring music, art, theatre; and community programming (that, for example, combines attention to gender-based violence and “communal harmony”). Here I focus on two key areas of this approach—door-to-door canvassing and family counseling, which illustrate the three elements of slow nonviolence enacted in Hyderabad.

Door-to-door canvasing exemplifies the persistent, everyday character of OCWRC and HF mobilizing against violence. This daily practice also demonstrates that incremental and unspectacular resistance to gender-based violence can also be confrontational and boundary-crossing. Both OCWRC and HF embed their work within bastis by employing women who live in these same neighborhoods, and by sending field workers out on a daily basis to knock on doors and talk with neighborhood residents about their services, about family life, community needs, women’s rights, etc.

As a new program manager at Healthy Families in late 2013, Bushra brought significant experience in human rights organizing and legal advocacy from her earlier work in north India. She described the approach of employing women to work in their own neighborhoods as an innovative and effective strategy. As known persons with some degree of pre-existing belonging, HF canvassers are better equipped to cross both physical and symbolic boundaries around intimate spaces, and to confront violence issues. She praises this approach:

[The] “basic idea to empower community women as peacemakers is a very fantastic idea … we [NGO managers] can’t be there all the time, if someone is there based locally with access to women [that is ideal] … [it’s] very important that community women are doing this …  they are trusted” and they are “known” in those places.

Field staff at the OCWRC also largely live in neighborhoods served by the organization. Like their counterparts at HF, their belonging in these spaces facilitates their work to support women and families and build community capacity for addressing violence. In describing these daily canvassing practices, several women emphasized the importance of persistence—that they might need to knock on the same door two or three times before anyone would talk with them about sensitive topics like domestic abuse. Breaching this topic often involves first describing the range of services OCWRC offers, including skills training courses for young women and men (which prove crucial in neighborhoods with limited educational opportunities). ⁶ Taalia, a no-nonsense senior manager at OCWRC, explains their canvassing work:

Usually people respond well to us and we mostly talk to women and girls, but sometimes when a man opens the door or a woman who is not interested in listening to us, then we leave but we make a note to visit them again. Upon consistent visiting, they listen to us, then we start explaining them about our work at OCWRC and other vocational skills offered here. We also let them know that they can seek our help in case of domestic violence, which is when they become defensive and say that it doesn’t happen at our place. Then we explain to them again that it is not necessary that the violence should be happening at their place but anybody known to them who might be going through domestic violence can be informed about the existence of OCWRC and they can get help free of cost.

HF and OCWRC also seek to address violence by transforming the social institutions of marriage and family, partly through an advocacy-based form of “family counseling.” This means that trained counselors at, or working closely with the NGO, counsel not only the survivor but also her husband and any family members that might be involved (either in the abuse, or as residents of the home who might play a mitigating role). While both OCWRC and HF employ family counseling, OCWRC’s model is somewhat less formalized. OCWRC field staff are equipped to advise women on their legal rights and options, as well as their rights in a broader framework. OCWRC also has senior counselors that come to their centers, where a woman’s husband (and possible extended family members) might also come to talk through the marital relationship and the various possible issues the wife/survivor has raised (i.e. around emotional or psychological abuse, physical abuse, unwanted sexual pressure or expectations, economic abuse, etc.).

At HF, the counseling model is more formalized and serves as the foundation of their survivor support work. As Farida, a senior counselor at HF and long-time activist with Muslim women in the Old City, explained in 2013:

Our aim here is to counsel … so that they lead a peaceful life. This doesn’t work in one sitting – sometimes the counseling goes on for four months and even after that we follow up with them … We also make the abuser understand that if at all he has a problem with the victim, he should approach us for counseling rather than exhibiting violent behavior. In this way, we build their trust (with men also) which is important, only then do they approach us in times of crisis.

Women’s knowledge sharing

Daily canvassing and family counseling exemplify a methodical, neighborhood-embedded approach to addressing domestic abuse. This slow nonviolence relies upon social relationships and shared spaces to create social change within the same. In this sense, as a non-spectacular mode of resistance, slow nonviolence operates through the everyday to both address the forms of slow violence that intersect to produce women’s vulnerability to and experiences of domestic abuse, and to actively produce new conceptions of social life and “peaceful” relationships. Another practice that facilitates this process is “women’s knowledge sharing,” an embodied approach used by OCWRC and HF. Several practices comprise this approach to women’s knowledge sharing, including creation of neighborhood women’s groups that meet regularly; training of neighborhood women on domestic violence, legal rights, and community organizing; and school presentations and college workshops. OCWRC and HF recognize that women gain power in their neighborhoods, communities, and even homes, when they also speak as a group. Cascading knowledge through trusted circles or spreading information through a group of people with similar experiences helps to build community capacity to support survivors and prevent future abuse.

At OCWRC, several field staff hail what the organization calls “each-one-teach-ten.” Meher describes the model well: “We go by the model of ‘each-one-teach-ten’, where we make one woman completely equipped with all the knowledge related to domestic violence so that this one woman can teach [an]other ten women.”

Referring to this same model, Taalia explicitly points to the slow nature of this method: “Obviously it is difficult to bring about change in everybody immediately and it is going to take time. We have been working for so long and only now people are opening up; we are aiming at changing 100 people but even if 10 people change, that is how it is.”

This idea of cascading knowledge is a powerful motivation for staff to imagine their daily work reaching beyond the individual women they support. And yet, as Taalia points out, they also recognize that change is slow and that aiming high and far is important, but that they may be more likely to see incremental and smaller changes. Both organizations argue for persistence and celebration of small successes, not only because they hope these will cascade and compound over time, but because their daily encounters with survivors demonstrate the significance of helping each person.

The combination of daily canvassing, family counseling, and women’s knowledge sharing distinguish the anti-violence work of OCWRC and HF from traditional models of addressing domestic violence that centralize criminal/legal systems. This is not to say that the organizations never access legal mechanisms. Rather, the distinction lies in their everyday practices that link survivor support with community organizing, such that the work of slow nonviolence takes shape as more than a reaction to violence (i.e. seeking to end or mitigate intimate abuse), but also as a process of constructing the kinds of relationships and support systems that facilitate a more vigilant, ongoing production of nonviolence. The person-to-person connections made (or deepened, or re-established) through daily canvassing and women’s knowledge sharing also become key elements of the slow work of producing a collective responsibility for preventing gender-based violence. In this vein, Farida noted in 2018 that HF is seeing some positive movement in this direction.

This everyday politics of slow nonviolence practiced in Hyderabad relies in part upon the contradictions of dispossession that give rise to radical possibilities for change. Rather than romanticizing dispossession, we might recognize in this work a “methodology of the oppressed” that offers vital lessons for a collective vision of liberation (Sandoval, 2000). As such, these forms of community-embedded, intimate, and mundane political action disrupt assumptions about the scale, visibility, and state-engagement of political organizing. Such spaces of politics also offer an instructive imperative to learn from sites of dispossession. In this way, the everyday politics of collectivity that characterizes the work of OCWRC and HF might inform not only praxis seeking to reduce women’s vulnerability to men’s violence, but also formations of political action working to undo the slow violence of marginalization and structural inequalities.

Seattle: API Chaya and the Peaceful Families Project (PFT)

API Chaya supports survivors of violence and works with communities to understand the power dynamics that fuel abuse, building capacity for community support of survivors and for violence prevention. In serving Asian, Pacific Islander, and South Asian communities in Seattle, API Chaya supports the specific cultural and linguistic needs of survivors in these communities, including those navigating immigration processes. API Chaya’s PFT works with Muslim families and communities with these same goals in mind. API Chaya (like OCWRC and HF) is not a solely “Muslim organization,” nor do they only provide services for Muslim women and communities. Rather, Chaya's early work in South Asian communities led to the development of the PFT program, which has been largely run through the volunteer support of community members, who work with the guidance of the PFT program coordinator. In addition to providing resources adapted to the specific needs of their communities, API Chaya recognizes that multiple systems of power condition violence in the lives of the individuals and communities they serve. For Muslim survivors and communities (and often those presumed to be Muslim, such as Sikh Americans), this means vulnerability to Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism in the form of hate crimes, immigration bans, detainment, derogatory political rhetoric, bullying of school-aged children, and more. API Chaya and PFT thus navigate the confluence of anti-immigrant sentiment and policing, racism, and Islamophobia—forms of slow (and sometimes fast) violence that have collectively informed their particular lens on gendered violence.

For the women API Chaya supports, many of whom are recent immigrants and refugees, the particular challenges they face in situations of domestic abuse remain invisible to the wider public. For example, immigrant women whose visa status is dependent upon that of their husbands may be fearful of reporting abuse and being forced to leave the U.S., either because their husband loses his status due to the criminal charges or because they choose to separate from him. At the same time, violence committed by racialized immigrant men (including Muslim men) against their intimate partners often becomes hyper-visual in public discourses on immigration and/or “violent Islam,” fueling anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric. API Chaya and PFT negotiate these politics of visibility by providing services attuned to survivors’ particular needs, while operating separate community mobilization programs that also empower marginalized communities.

As in Hyderabad, slowness as applied to API Chaya’s work does not denote the absence of immediacy, or even of confrontation. Rather, their approaches include punctuated confrontations (i.e. through public vigils), public engagement (through media and with state actors), and immediate action (i.e. providing services to women in crisis). Yet, they similarly rely heavily on the relationships and spaces of everyday life that allow them to mobilize against intimate violence at a time of intensified vulnerability for Muslims and racialized immigrants in the U.S. API Chaya and their PFT enact slow nonviolence along similar trajectories: responding to slow violence; operationalizing the everyday for long-term change; and engaging in the construction of more equitable, nonviolent social relations. Two elements of this work demonstrate potential methods for assembling durable practices of slow nonviolence: compassionate engagement and “organic community relationships.”

Compassionate engagement

API Chaya’s community mobilization programs (including PFT) employ compassion and empathy in engaging with their wider communities, even when this means working with people who are not initially capable of or willing to support survivors in an empowering way. Seema, an early leader of Chaya and part of the organization during the creation of their earliest community mobilization program, describes this approach:

 … One of the things I’ve learned over time is that we do best when we approach the work with love and compassion. I know it sounds a little hokey, but if you approach the work with love and compassion and understanding rather than out of anger and guilt and negative feelings, you go a much longer way in reaching people because people feel that intuitively and on a gut level. And I think [we’ve] been able to build a cohort of [PFT] volunteers and people who support this work because of that, because that’s the approach …  And I think organizationally too we’ve done that. And whether we’ve named it or been intentional about it, I think that’s how the organization really grew.

This investment in compassionate engagement is a slower practice of anti-violence movement that aligns with API Chaya’s anti-oppression framework and social justice mission. API Chaya’s investment in transformative justice, including an operative critique of criminal legal systems that exert violence in immigrant and communities of color and over-incarcerate men of color, has solidified compassionate engagement as a vital tool for resisting plural forms of violence. At the same time, the early Chaya and PFT approach to community mobilization described by Seema and Anam facilitated relationships and networks across diverse South Asian and Muslim communities that Chaya’s staff and board members were able to activate in the immediate post-9/11 period, to build a local Seattle response (both material and political) to heightened xenophobia and anti-Muslim racism targeting South Asian, Sikh, Arab, and Muslim communities. In this way, the community building established through compassionate engagement was extended to also resist state and political violence during periods when the slow violence of marginalization and dispossession intensified for Muslim Americans and racialized immigrant communities.

Organic community relationships

Similar to OCWRC and HF in Hyderabad, most API Chaya staff members and volunteers work within communities to which they themselves belong. Compassionate engagement allows API Chaya to build and maintain semi-formal networks of relationships that strengthen community capacity for supporting survivors and preventing violence. Another component that enables API Chaya and PFT to mobilize within the diverse communities they serve is what one long-time staff member of Chaya and former Executive Director of API Chaya, Sarah Rizvi, has referred to as “organic community relationships.” As will become clear below, this element demonstrates all three aspects of the concept of “slow nonviolence” at the center of my argument: a capacity to address or resist slow violence; an operationalization of the everyday; and the active construction of more equitable, nonviolent relationships through gender justice work in marginalized communities.

As part of my long-term service work and collaborations with API Chaya and PFT, I partnered with the organization during the course of this research, in particular with two colleagues—Sarah Rizvi and Farah Abdul. ⁸ Our collaboration enriched the project significantly, in particular through co-authoring one chapter of my dissertation. In order to properly frame and attribute authorship for this idea of “organic community relationships,” I quote extensively from that co-written chapter here. The following paragraphs were written in a collective voice, which includes Sarah—a former community mobilization coordinator, PFT founder, advocate for survivors, and Director of API Chaya; Farah, a former PFT-Coordinator and earlier an API Chaya volunteer; and myself, a volunteer with the program and organization for the past 16 years.

We argue that anti-violence organizing cannot simply fabricate the communities it wishes to change. While mobilization may bring people together for short-term campaigns and ‘create community’ in this way, we suggest that community relationships that evolve organically through mundane experiences and shared spaces actually offer a more sustainable model for ‘community’ as a site of social change.

The politics of violence and visibility

While the structural contexts and conditions of everyday life differ considerably in Seattle and Hyderabad, comparing the organizing work of API Chaya to that of OCWRC and HF exposes some parallel insights about the plurality of violence in many Muslim women’s lives and about the kinds of spatially embedded practices that arise in response to dispossession and marginality. These latter strategies and practices constitute slow nonviolence. As the examples from Hyderabad and Seattle demonstrate, “slow” nonviolence denotes more than temporality. Space also functions significantly in these processes, shaping both experiences and perceptions of visibility, embodiment, and politics. Slow nonviolence emerges partly from working against the plural forms of violence in women’s lives (including those “slow” forms embedded in economic and social institutions). Yet, slow nonviolence is also more than a response. It is also a mode of organizing that draws upon the substance of collective, everyday life in an effort to transform and re-build social institutions within which women can thrive.

OCWRC, HF, and API Chaya all work against violence as plural, systemic, and often institutionalized, countering invisible forms of violence that emerge gradually and accumulate over time. As De Leeuw (2016) shows, a feminist reading of the slowness of violence must also contend with the multiple axes along which violence enters into women’s lives and intimate spaces (see also Coomaraswamy and Perera-Rajasingham, 2008; Holmes et al., 2015; Hunt, 2013; Sokoloff and Pratt, 2005). While Nixon points to the heavier burden of slow violence born by those already marginalized (by race, gender, geography, etc.), De Leeuw’s (2016) confrontation of the slow violence of colonialism through the intimate lives of Indigenous women and children more critically centralizes the voices, experiences, and analysis of subjects living and resisting in the wake of slow violence. As an effect of this conscious work to decolonize political geographies of violence, De Leeuw not only centralizes Indigenous ways of knowing (Hunt, 2014), but simultaneously returns us to the theoretical significance of critical feminist interrogations of everyday lives and spaces, and demonstrates that what we might call “structural violence” (i.e. violence that operates systemically, through social institutions, economic systems, and structures of governance) cannot in fact be understood through macro-level political geographies alone. Rather, it is within the lived spaces of the everyday that we can more explicitly see the entanglements of structural forms of power.

As a distinctive formation of slow violence, anti-Muslim bias emerges from the gradual and dispersed production of Muslim marginality, particularly for minority populations across the globe. This marginality varies across time and place but tends to be fueled by political rhetoric and exclusionary state policy, “counterterrorism” and war-making, spatial segregation and housing discrimination, and/or job discrimination and/or attacks on livelihood. The gradual dispossession accomplished through these mechanisms becomes both discursive and material, as the figure of the Muslim other is further distanced from (colonial, white) definitions of modernity and civilization (Arjana, 2014); and as Muslim subjects are gradually excluded from full citizenship (Razack, 2007), the resources required for survival and thriving, and human rights (Abu-Lughod, 2013). Ultimately, such dispossession means a reduction not only in rights bearing capacity of Muslim minorities in particular nation-states, but also a process of distancing “the Muslim other” from definitions of “the human” in such a way as to justify, normalize, “soften,” or erase the emerging patterns of a global and systematic violation of Muslim humanity. In India and the U.S., this Muslim dispossession and marginalization is constituted through both spectacular events and ordinary life.

Domestic violence can also be experienced as simultaneously mundane and spectacular—erupting in incidents of extreme injury, while also proceeding as banal and persistent (though shattering none the less). Those moments when state agencies or popular media turn attention to a woman’s experience of domestic violence are often themselves punctuations, or evidence of the cumulative effects of less visible violence. For example, Neha explained (in 2018) that when HF works with women who have gone to police, it is typically because the woman could not take the violence any longer or a very severe incident had occurred (often on top of years of “mundane” emotional, psychological, sexual, and/or physical abuse). In this way, the visible incidents or evidence of domestic violence accessible to the state often become the focus of response, and in effect domestic violence is contained within interpersonal relationships and divorced from the structures and institutions that also produce and maintain women’s vulnerability and gender inequality.

Slow nonviolence also marks a particular approach to addressing and preventing violence that emerges from experiential knowledge and place-based expertise. All three organizations employ a variety of practices that operationalize the everyday in their work to counter gender-based violence and to empower survivors and their communities. First, in establishing their institutions, all three centered place-based experience, belonging, and knowledge. Most field staff hail from the neighborhoods and communities where they work, and among managerial staff, most belong to the communities in some significant way (i.e. through shared religious identity). The work of each organization also depends upon recognizing and calling forth the strengths, assets, and existing resources of communities and social networks in order to proceed through the complexities of working with diverse communities that are vulnerable to state violence. Organizers are well aware of the limitations of this work, and sometimes invoke the “slowness” of change as an inadequate antidote to the overwhelming persistence of violence in women’s lives. At the same time, they remain vigilant and hopeful that their concentrated and methodical interventions will fuel transformations over time and beyond the women and families they directly support. They also recognize this slow nonviolent action as an alternative pathway to gender justice for women unwilling to accept the violent side effects of state-sponsored justice models.

Conclusion

The ubiquity, and quite often the spectacle, of violence against women rightly fuels demands for immediate action and large-scale responses (such as new or reformed laws, or institutional accountability) in India, the U.S., and across the globe. The often obscured, dispersed, and everyday practices of slow nonviolence discussed above do not represent an oppositional binary that seeks to undermine or reject the politics of outrage that fuel widespread public protests, and/or legal and institutional reform. Rather, in theorizing slow nonviolence from the work of grassroots women’s collectives serving marginalized communities, I argue that greater attention to the everyday politics of countering violence against women within the intimate spaces of family and community life yields a nuanced feminist accounting of intersectional social change. As such, slow nonviolence does not preclude or disavow other forms of feminist anti-violence politics, but rather opens the possibility for investing simultaneously in long- and short-term change, in small- and large-scale efforts, and in cessation and prevention. At the same time, these grounded approaches to seeking justice also offer a critical counter-point to punitive, state-facilitated justice—one that might suggest new avenues for state action (rather than state in-action). Given the wider reality of trauma and violence experienced by survivors who utilize legal justice systems (Cuomo, 2013), government agencies must reform these systems, but also look to how they can support the development of alternative pathways to justice for survivors.

The political worlds that OCWRC, HF, and API Chaya negotiate demonstrate not only the political significance of intimacies and everyday spaces, but also the false separation of intimacies from geopolitics, of individuals from collectives, of ideological and material encounters. This particular lens on the “global-intimate” (Pratt and Rosner, 2012) highlights the intellectual and political insights emergent from the transnational comparison of embedded social change work. Comparing the work and narratives of these grassroots women’s collectives in Hyderabad and Seattle reveals the hidden textures of slow violence structuring the lives of marginalized Muslim women and their families, across quite distinctive everyday and national contexts. The plurality—of violence and nonviolence—understood through their grounded theorizations also highlights the limitations and failures of large-scale “solutions” to gender-based violence that rely upon state institutions and mechanisms (such as criminal legal systems), which are also spaces of the historical and contemporary dispossession of “minority populations,” such as Muslims, immigrants, and people of color. In grappling with the contradictions of state violence and state leadership in responses to intimate gender violence, organizers in Hyderabad and Seattle continue evolving innovative pathways that slowly cultivate the skills, knowledge, and relationships of nonviolence, steadily working toward a less violent, more peaceful present and future.

These processes are not seamless. The women and organizations I collaborated with do not have romantic ideas about community, the social relationships that exist currently, or even those they seek to create. Rather, within the contexts of their work, they constantly negotiate immediate needs and long-term goals, and ultimately, they answer to the articulated needs and desires of individual survivors of gendered violence, which may at times mean accessing more conventional models of violence response through police or courts. Their investment in and production of slow nonviolence emerges from the everyday realities of plural violence they encounter. This slow nonviolence also marks a hopeful persistence that peace/nonviolence might be built not through the invocation of (more) state violence, but rather from dispossessed subjects’ avowal and reclamation of the social bonds and collectivities (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013) through which they might redefine their everyday lives.