Untangling the Entanglements of Activism with Anthea Lawson, activist, author and organiser

Anthea Lawson is a campaigner who’s interested in the connections between our inner lives and the world we create together. 

In a world of such astonishing inequity, where ever fewer people hold ever more power, how do those of us whose lives are given to change, meet the reality that we are embedded in the system? If we are an integral part of the problem, how can we live the solution into being? Is that even what we're here for?  Anthea Lawson has thought about this in immense depth and with huge courage.  

Over two decades, she has campaigned to shut down tax havens and stop banks fuelling corruption and ecological destruction. She launched an award-winning campaign for transparency over who owns companies, which was taken up by many other organisations and has resulted in changes to the law in dozens of countries. 

She worked on the successful campaigns for an Arms Trade Treaty, and for the international ban on cluster bombs. She has worked for Global Witness, Amnesty International, and many other campaign groups. She's dug up Parliament Square in guerilla gardening efforts, and was arrested with Extinction Rebellion. 

In her writing she explores what we can learn from how we do campaigning: how our inner lives are entangled in our work to change the world. I’ve been exploring this as an associate at Perspectiva, and in her book The Entangled Activist: Learning to recognise the master's tools, to be published in spring 2021.

She is interested, too, in the limits of campaigning in a time of breakdown, which I’ve been exploring through editing at the Dark Mountain Project.

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Her book is a deep exploration of personal process that then expands so that it becomes relevant to us all - if we're activists (and frankly, if you're listening to this podcast, I imagine you're an activist at some point in your life even if you don't identify as such), then we are also an integral part of the system that is the problem - disentangling ourselves from this is not going to happen. So the question arises of how we can be the change we need to see in the world. Anthea has explored this in depth  and it was such a pleasure to engage with her on this question.  

Anthea's website: https://www.anthealawson.uk/
Perspectiva Press: https://systems-souls-society.com/insight/perspectiva-press/
Dark Mountain Press: https://dark-mountain.net/