As global demand for raw materials, land and energy surges, so do the repression and attacks against environmental defenders from Indigenous and traditional communities, as they challenge the exploitation of their lands, territories and ecosystems. For many traditional and Indigenous communities, the work of protecting the land and environment is inseparable from defending their sovereignty, cultural identity, livelihoods, homes, history and wealth of ancestral knowledge.
This comparative cross-country analysis is commissioned by the Resistance and Resilience (R&R) project, a collaborative initiative that aims to contribute to a safer context for environmental activism through community-led research into the impacts of technology. The project works with frontline communities, particularly Indigenous and traditional communities, in Brazil, Kenya, Mexico and the Philippines.
The Resistance and Resilience project is led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) in partnership with Voces del Territorio in Mexico, Intervozes - Coletivo Brasil de Comunicação Social in Brazil, the Ogiek Peoples’ Development Program (OPDP) in Kenya, the Manila Observatory through the KLIMA Centre (MO-KLIMA) in the Philippines, and Indigenous Peoples Rights International (IPRI). Between 2024 and 2026, the Resistance and Resilience project partners collaborated with communities and local organisations in Brazil, Kenya, Mexico and the Philippines to explore how digital technologies are impacting their struggles to protect their territories from extractivism and violence.
Drawing on the research process and findings, this comparative report argues that technology-facilitated violence (TFV) is a direct result of extractivist and colonial ideologies and systems embedded in digital infrastructure. These very same systems are driving land theft, environmental destruction and violence against environmental defenders. Naming these regimes through an extractivist lens is important because it contributes to the partners’ ongoing work in decolonising the rigid framing of TFV and disinformation as solely technological problems requiring only stronger moderation or improved digital literacy or security.
What emerges from the four research studies are stories and insights that fall outside of the dominant knowledge paradigms and policy-making considerations around TFV and disinformation. The community-led research in Brazil, Kenya, Mexico and the Philippines grounds the current framework of TFV and disinformation in the communities’ lived realities and produces knowledge that is relevant and responsive to their localities. The research highlights how communities experience a multi-layered digital divide that cannot be simplified to a binary division of being connected or disconnected. The findings challenge the assumption that access to technology is inherently empowering and point instead toward the question of power, autonomy and people’s right to access technology on their own terms.
Across Brazil, Kenya, Mexico and the Philippines, the findings reported that women leaders were targeted online not only for resisting extractivism, but also as women defying patriarchal and discriminatory gender norms.
Existing tactics used in TFV have ripple effects where the harm reverberates across families and communities. These harms have to be contextualised against the distinct cultural realities of Indigenous and traditional communities, where collective and communal ways of living often shape relationships, identities, responsibilities and responses to harm.
When harm is experienced collectively and relationally, responses must also focus on building a stronger network to respond and recover from TFV and other means of repression. In this sense, addressing the harm of TFV is also about protecting the relationships, networks and spaces that are crucial to organise, resist and sustain the environmental justice movement. The report illustrates the resilience of environmental defenders who have turned to alternative forms of support, grounded in collective understanding of care, protection and accountability.
The findings also highlight that TFV and disinformation are part of a continuum of violence and repression faced by environmental defenders. Attacks online and on-ground are interdependent and work to silence and disrupt struggles for environmental justice while also sustaining capitalist, colonial and extractivist dominance in all aspects. Despite the different political and legal landscapes in Brazil, Kenya, Mexico and the Philippines, the research with communities demonstrates how violence, intimidation, surveillance, disinformation and harassment against environmental defenders are largely carried out with impunity. These failures of accountability are not implementation gaps within the development of a system, but are integral to the continuation and expansion of extractivism.
The last section of the report brings together recommendations that respond to the priorities identified by participating communities and aim to address interconnected and shared systems of harm while centring the lived experiences and needs of environmental defenders from Indigenous and traditional communities.