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By Jill Carr-Harris
The Road to Cotonou: How Nonviolent Caravans Redefined the World Social Forum
By early August 2026, the roads leading into Cotonou, Benin, had become unlikely frontlines in a new experiment in global civil society. Long caravans of buses and jeeps carrying farmers, women’s groups, youth activists and land defenders inched toward the coastal city, only to be met with police blockades on the border. Inside Cotonou, there were about 10,000 people from 80 countries waiting for the buses to arrive on August 4th so that they could begin the inauguration of the World Social Forum. The government used bureaucratic stonewalling to stop this symbolic convergence from happening. Among them, a 10-member Indian delegation representing Ekta Parishad and the Peacebuilders Forum had traveled to Benin alongside partners from RRAS Africa, Home for Humanity and the Mahatma Gandhi Canadian Foundation. Their mission was ambitious: not only to participate in the WSF, but to help transform the gathering into a “Peace Factory”—a space to train and galvanize young peacebuilders from across Africa and beyond. They arrived to find a civil society gathering under siege—and a rare, quiet victory for nonviolent resistance in the making, and what would become a defining moment for the World Social Forum (WSF). In this circumstance, the first-ever Peace Forum took shape.
Since 2001, the World Social Forum has presented itself as a counterweight to the World Economic Forum, bringing together movements and organizations that fight inequality, land grabbing, climate injustice and corporate power. Yet in recent years, critics charged that the WSF had become a periodic talking shop, removed from the daily realities of those it promised to represent. African activists decided to do something about that. For more than a decade, organizers had floated the idea of a “WSF on the road”—a roving forum of caravans that would criss-cross countries, listening to communities and gathering testimonies before culminating in the main event. In 2026, they finally did it. The model drew on earlier experiments across Mali and the wider Sahel, where activists had organized “Convergence of Land and Water Struggles” caravans in response to land grabs, water privatization and climate shocks. Those efforts had been small and local. By 2026 they had grown into something far larger: a Global Convergence of Land, Water and Indigenous Seeds. Traveling over two weeks across 22 countries, the caravans stopped in rural villages and urban neighborhoods to visit agroecological farms, hold public forums, meet local officials and document stories often absent from development reports: forced displacement, coastal erosion, seed privatization, contaminated water, shrinking farmland, and the slow erasure of indigenous ways of life. The caravans were, in effect, moving classrooms and town halls—part political education, part organizing tool, part act of visibility for people who rarely see themselves reflected in global summit halls. For Ekta Parishad, the Indian land-rights movement long associated with Gandhian foot-marches, this method felt familiar. In 2024 they had led a “Gandhi to Buddha” cross-border march and bus caravan from India to Nepal’s WSF in Kathmandu, insisting that nonviolent public pressure remains essential for social justice. The African caravans, they believed, were a natural extension of that philosophy. What nobody had fully anticipated was how strongly governments in the region would react.
Benin, host to the 2026 WSF, became the flashpoint. Its government, with an Interior Minister known for quashing a coup attempt in late 2025, watched as buses filled with mobilized activists rolled toward its borders. State security systems, built to confront armed insurgents and jihadist groups, were poorly equipped to respond to an explicitly nonviolent movement that traveled openly, held public meetings and broadcast its agenda. The reflex was to block. At both the western border with Togo and the eastern frontier with Nigeria, border police units stopped the caravans. Vehicles were held up for days. Dozens of participants in Benin who had come from various countries were deported without clear explanation. Benin’s largest public university, Université d’Abomey-Calavi, was suddenly denied permission to host the WSF, leaving more than 5,000 registrants with no formal venue. Inside the blockaded buses, however, conflict did not escalate. Instead, it slowed down. Participants from across West and Central Africa turned the border stands into impromptu forums—running workshops, cultural exchanges, strategy meetings. They discussed land rights, women’s leadership, agroecology, and peacebuilding, all within sight of heavily armed security forces. The images and stories trickled through local networks and social media, even as official communications from the Benin WSF Organizing Committee all but collapsed under governmental pressure and its own internal weaknesses. At one point, after finally allowing the buses to cross from Togo, some officials ordered them turned back again, deepening confusion inside the government and sharpening the moral contrast: an apparently indecisive state against calm, disciplined caravans committed to nonviolence. It was, for many observers, a textbook case of how nonviolent resistance can work under pressure. “Governments understand how to fight guns,” one participant remarked during the Forum. “They don’t know what to do with songs, stories and patient determination.” Eventually, authorities relented. Seventeen buses rolled into Cotonou on August 6—two days after the WSF’s scheduled opening—greeted with celebration. For those on board, the border ordeal was not just a delay; it became the political prelude to the Forum itself, a lived demonstration of what they came to discuss.
Once in Cotonou, another story was quietly unfolding: a shift in who leads the global conversation. African organizations, long marginalized in international civil society spaces, were the backbone of WSF 2026. Their leaders brought hard-won experience from conflict zones, climate frontlines and resource struggles. They also brought new assertiveness in how they engaged European partners—particularly senior members of the French NGOs, who have historically played a dominant role in the WSF’s International Committee.
In a region still marked by French colonial and neo-colonial influence, the emergence of formations like the Alliance des États du Sahel (AES)—an economic and security bloc of Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Benin—has made relations with French actors more politically charged. Some African activists openly backed efforts to dismantle French economic dominance in the region. Many French NGOs chose a deliberately low profile in Cotonou, conscious of their country’s legacy and the changing dynamics.
The result was a more complicated, sometimes tense, field of alliances. European solidarity, once taken for granted, was now being scrutinized. The Indian delegation, aware of these sensitivities, opted to remain neutral, prioritizing unity around nonviolence over taking sides in intra-movement geopolitics.
Despite the frictions, the Forum crackled with cross-border organizing. There were Afro-Caribbean farmers from Haiti and Martinique—descendants of people enslaved and shipped out of Benin’s ports between 1750 and the 1820s now returning to West Africa as land-rights campaigners aligned with Via Campesina. Women in Peacebuilding from Nigeria confronted deep questions about security architecture in a region scarred by Boko Haram and cross-border kidnappings, arguing that women must be integrated not just symbolically but structurally into security decision-making. Women-led caravans from Mali and Burkina Faso, guided by figures like Aichata Koné, illustrated how land, water and seeds are inseparable from peace; control over resources determines whether communities can withstand climate and conflict shocks. Delegations from DR Congo migrants stranded in Morocco, youth resisting mining in the east, women survivors of violence tied to extractive industries—drew direct connections between global demand for minerals and local ecocide. Algerian youth and women described fragile but tangible partnerships with their government around conflict resolution. South Asian participants from Nepal, Pakistan and India came in solidarity, linking Himalayan climate challenges and land struggles with those in the Sahel and Congo Basin.
The cumulative effect was a different center of gravity: a WSF no longer dominated by Latin American or European narratives, but increasingly shaped by African voices.
Within this wider ferment, the Peace Forum set out to do something specific: turn discussions on nonviolence into practical tools, especially for young people.
The Peace Forum was anchored by four organizations: RRAS Africa (the initiator, rooted in West Africa), Home for Humanity, the Mahatma Gandhi Canadian Foundation and Ekta Parishad. Their shared vision that the Peace Forum should be like a factory was less about a single event than about setting in motion processes that would continue in villages, universities and communities long after the WSF banners came down.
Unable to conduct the large-scale training they had originally envisaged, the coalition instead organized five intensive workshops each a laboratory for rethinking peace from the ground up.
The first workshop, led by Home for Humanity, tapped into local and indigenous traditions of conflict resolution. RRAS Burkina Faso presented examples where customary systems emphasize reconciliation and social harmony over punishment. Participants from Gandhi Gram University and Ekta Parishad linked this with Gandhian community approaches, while First Nations representatives from Canada—the Métis and Dene–Suline—described land-based learning, language revitalization and ceremonies once outlawed under colonial rule. The message was clear: real peace must be rooted in place—its ecology, culture and memory—not imported wholesale from international handbooks.
The second session focused on women’s roles in peacebuilding, and the persistent tendency to treat gender-based violence as a “women’s issue” rather than a structural one. RRAS facilitators brought in the framework of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which mandates women’s participation in peace and security processes. A male practitioner from DR Congo working on 1325 implementation, speaking from a war context, challenged male allies to take responsibility rather than outsource the work. Participants experimented with re-framing gender not as a rigid binary but as interacting energies—drawing on Gandhian ideas of the “feminine” and “masculine” as coexisting forces. Examples from Benin, Nigeria and Canada showed how women’s leadership is reshaping village councils, refugee camp management and even urban classroom practice, where circle-based learning brings youth into spaces of shared responsibility and mutual care.
The third workshop, facilitated by Ekta Parishad, gave the floor to young people whose biographies read like compressed versions of 21st-century turbulence. One had grown up in an Indian urban slum, organizing peers around basic services and safety. Another came from a Nigerian refugee camp, where self-organized youth committees had emerged in the absence of effective state support. A Rwandan participant, shaped by the genocide, spoke of intergenerational dialogues to break cycles of trauma and revenge. A young Indian architect sketched out what a hospital would look like if designed around the needs of the poor, rather than private profit. A youth activist from a mining-affected region detailed campaigns to hold companies to account for environmental devastation. What united them was a demand not simply to be “included” but to co-design the structures meant to govern their futures. The workshop ended with a call for stronger global networks of young peacebuilders, able to mentor, support and learn from each other between big summits.
The fourth session moved from the streets to the balance sheet: what does a nonviolent economy look like? Participants examined community-based solar projects, drew lessons from the Japanese natural farming system Shizen N?h?, and engaged with Gandhian economic principles that prioritize mutuality, cooperation and minimal harm to nature. Speakers from Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Egypt shared stories of enterprises that resist extractive models, grounding themselves instead in local ecosystems and knowledge. From DR Congo came a stark reminder: the global economy of extraction—cobalt, coltan, gold—has a human cost borne by women, children and fragile environments. Nonviolence, the speakers argued, must extend from protest tactics to the core logic of how resources are valued, extracted and used.
The final workshop turned to education as a long-term peace infrastructure. Gandhi Gram University showcased its model of higher education that requires students to live and work with marginalized communities, learning development work by doing it. RRAS presented the University of Peace model in Africa, aimed at reframing “security” in human and social terms. Canadian educators described “slow peace”: a pedagogy that privileges deep relationships, patience and steady transformation over quick fixes. Nigerian participants spoke of efforts to keep girls in school as a strategy against both gender inequality and recruitment by armed groups. Collectively, these workshops suggested that peace is less an event than a set of enduring practices economic, cultural, educational—that need to be woven into daily life.
As the WSF ended, the Peace Forum convened African leaders and international allies for one last session. The border blockades, the fragile victory, the successful caravans and the improvised Peace Forum had opened space, but they had also underlined how fragile that space can be. Several concrete follow-up commitments emerged:
Training future bridgebuilders: Ekta Parishad will identify African students currently studying in India and expose them to nonviolence and community-based organizing, with the idea that they will return home as bridges between movements.
Ethical investment: The Peacebuilders Forum plans to design “Nonviolent Economy” training for Indian companies investing in Africa, to prevent development projects from reproducing the very inequalities and conflicts they claim to address.
Village-level peace labs: RRAS, which has already trained roughly 350 people from over 30 countries through the University of Peace, wants to launch village-level intervention programs in Africa. They have asked Indian practitioners to spend 6–12 months embedded in African communities, offering technical and educational support.
South–South activist exchanges: The Global Convergence of Land and Water Struggles in West Africa (CGLTE-WA) proposed regular exchanges: ten activists from India to Africa and ten from Africa to India every year. The goal is mutual learning on land rights, rural organizing and nonviolent movement-building.
These proposals, still seeking funding and political space, amount to a quiet wager: that South–South solidarity and shared nonviolent practice can provide a counterweight to shrinking civic space and hardening state security attitudes worldwide. If the events in Benin are any indication, future World Social Forums may increasingly happen not only in conference centers, but on the roads, fields and border crossings where global crises are already playing out.
The caravans to Cotonou were blocked, delayed, and harassed. They arrived late. But they arrived—transforming the WSF in the process. In an era of militarized politics and digital outrage, the spectacle of hundreds of activists waiting peacefully at a border, holding workshops under police watch, may seem almost anachronistic. To those who were there, it felt like something else: the early days of a new kind of global movement, one that insists that peace is not a slogan, but a route you take slowly, together, bus by bus.
Jill Carr-Harris is a teacher, trainer, researcher in the field of peace in both Canada and India.