To Live in Protest: resistance and solidarity made criminal

How do we maintain ourselves, and each other, in the face of authoritarianism? How do movements for liberation survive crackdown and how do they re-emerge from defeat?

Abdelrahman ElGendy spent six years as a political prisoner in Egypt, having opposed the military coup of 2013 as a student activist. Shezana Hafiz works for the organisation Cage International, which has been challenging war-on-terror driven state oppression since 2003. They are joined by Stu Bretherton, one of the Scottish activists sentenced to prison for occupying the Thales weapons factory in Glasgow in 2022.

Join our panel as they discuss the narratives we’re up against, in the UK and internationally, as we continue to struggle for justice, the ways in which the law has been used to hold them up, and how - in spite of it all - communities of organising and resistance are finding ways to persist and evolve.

Our speakers:

Abdelrahman ElGendy is an author and translator from Cairo.

Winner of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award in 2024, he holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Pittsburgh, and his work appears in publications including the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, and Guernica. His poetry and prose translations from Arabic appear in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Literary Hub, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere.

ElGendy’s work has received awards or fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Heinz Foundation, the de Groot Foundation, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Arab American National Museum. Huna is his debut.

Shezana Hafiz has spent years involved in grassroots community work, campaigning on justice related issues, and leading on some of the most pertinent issues threatening fundamental human rights. She is currently the Outreach Coordinator at CAGE and also most recently was the Campaign Coordinator for the International Witness Campaign lead by CAGE which explored two decades of the war on terror, its impact, its failures and its future, while promoting solidarity, justice and dialogue.

Stu Bretherton has engaged in community organising and direct action over the past decade on issues including poverty, housing, the climate crisis and the arms trade.

In 2022, he participated in the launch of Palestine Action in Scotland, occupying the Thales weapons factory in Glasgow. In 2024, he was convicted of a breach of the peace and sentenced to 12 months in prison, serving 4 of these in Barlinnie.