Sutures hold together open wounds that would otherwise come apart, while leaving visible the fractures that made their application necessary. This metaphor departs from more conservative formulations of solidarity that privilege cohesion over contestation.
The 2024 People’s Circle for Palestine protest encampment at the University of Toronto is best understood in terms of “contradiction” as the tensions and struggles which make political life. Over its two-month duration, it was neither a unified expression of solidarity nor reducible to a narrative of institutional repression, but a shifting field of forces in which insurgent organizing and institutional authority converged. What emerged from the People’s Circle was a political formation shaped by the interaction of these opposing forces, each delimiting what could be sustained.
The primary contradiction structuring the protest was the relationship between the university and the institution’s investments in imperial violence. The People’s Circle demanded that the University of Toronto disclose its investments linked to the ongoing genocide, commit to divesting from them, and cut ties with Israeli academic institutions while the genocide and occupation continue to destroy Palestinian universities, murder academics, and prevent Palestinian students from studying in Canada. The People’s Circle also contested the contradiction of the university’s management of dissent, including its uneven invocation of ‘safety’ and its escalating reliance on legal instruments such as the issuance of trespass notices and the pursuit of a legal injunction against the protest encampment. Contradiction was evident in the university’s policies, leading to such strong political tensions.
To identify the University of Toronto’s contradictions is not to claim unanimity among the People’s Circle participants, nor to suggest that all actions cohered to a single line. Rather, this identification names the structuring antagonisms that oriented the encampment’s goals. Without orientation, as a horizontally organized protest, collective action would risk dispersal and ineffectiveness. With the identified contradictions lending to orientation, differences can be negotiated among the People’s Circle without dissolving the political project itself.
Yet, the encampment could be equally identified by secondary contradictions. These included disagreements over strategy and uneven relationships to risk shaped by identity, citizenship status, and institutional affiliation, among others. At its peak, the encampment brought together nearly 200 in solidarity with Palestine, many of whom were strangers prior to arrival. While this density enabled a powerful form of collective presence, the urgency of the protest limited the time and capacity for sustained relationship building, which produced friction. Such secondary contradictions operated within the primary antagonism with the institution and often intensified under conditions of external pressure.
An understanding of the tensions and struggles which make political life, however, provided a useful framework for analysis that aided People’s Circle organizing. Secondary contradictions cannot be ignored in the name of unity, nor can they be allowed to displace the primary struggle. The work of organizing was less about resolving disagreement, and more about managing its effects; developing practices that allowed for continued collective action without requiring premature consensus. (more...)
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