Why movements need to learn to fly like bees and thread like spiders

This article Why movements need to learn to fly like bees and thread like spiders was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The first months of the Trump administration — with its rapid and sweeping turn toward autocratic rule — have rightly led to calls for collective and national resistance. Leading civil resistance scholars Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks have described the need for a “large-scale, multiracial, cross-class, pro-democracy front.” And Maria Stephan, writing for Just Foreign Policy, called this a critical moment for taking up the “journey from individual angst to collective action, from siloed work to big-tent formations.” Creating such a collective response, however, requires a great deal of creativity and focus, particularly — as these authors suggest — when it comes to relating to different groups and building unexpected connections.

This current moment, with all its challenges in the United States, feels like familiar territory. Over my four decades of work in international peacebuilding — especially accompanying local communities seeking to end cycles of armed violence while building dignity and justice in a context of historic protracted conflict — rarely did I see a singular movement take shape. The challenge always sits with how unlikely alliances and improbable partners thread together coordinated action.

The challenge of creating this collective response reminded me of the evocative question entomologists in the 1950s called the Paradox of Coordination, or how whole collectives achieve common purpose without centralized control. Their discoveries — despite being focused on the insect world — provided a catalyst for innovations in how to navigate deep and paralyzing divides in international settings. Much of the insight starts with a simple idea: Learn to strategically travel around different, divided, even highly polarized settings while rebuilding a broken circulatory system.

The practices of circulation

Let’s start with insights entomologists unveiled about coordination without centralized control by examining how bees pollinate, termites construct a home, or a spider makes an orb web. Three pivotal practices seem most relevant.

First, these insects circulate around the landscape. They do not expend energy convening meetings; they literally travel and navigate through a given geography.

Second, as they travel, they communicate and serve. Termites, for example, have found how to discover resources and communicate with others about their findings as they travel. Entomologists say these insects stitch a wider purpose by gathering and leaving a scent in the landscape. The orb spider, another example, is a genius at covering space by traveling and leaving threads that connect far-off but key anchor points, creating hubs and forging a wider web. Meanwhile, bees gather pollen and nectar, serving both their needs and the health of the wider ecosystem.

Lastly, these insects iterate — that is, they circulate over and again, continuously feeding places they travel while stitching together resources that also serve a wider common purpose.

But how might these practices make sense in settings of protracted conflict? Nepal’s Natural Resource Conflict Transformation, or NRCT movement, offers one example. Facing divisive, violent conflicts over access and use of natural resources after coming out of a civil war in 2006, community forest and water user groups started their movement by studying how spiders and web making offered a key orientation for their engagement.

Specifically, NRCT explored how the strategic movements of a spider could be emulated across a landscape of human conflict over land or the use of forests. This led to the idea of forming a spider group — a small mixed group made up of individuals from the divided communities who traveled together to the locations where those affected by the conflict lived. Theirs was no tourist excursion or a simple fact-finding endeavor. The spider group spent time in each community, listening, eating together and listening some more. They developed what we could call a practice of collective empathy: Seeing and feeling the world from the embodied lived experience of each community.

They would travel and repeat the same grounded listening practice with the next community.
Once the circle of all the communities in conflict had been completed, they returned, sharing what they had heard and seeking a deeper understanding. At each iteration, they asked simple questions: What is needed? What ideas might hold promise for next steps?

Over and over again, the circling took place, sometimes across months, even years. At essence, they were rebuilding a broken circulatory system, a shared feedback loop that both gathered and contributed to local need and collective understanding while building a sense of participation in things that really mattered where people lived.

To mix two metaphors, the spider group was spinning a web — and like bees — they were pollinating resources across the divided landscape. They attended to the needs of each location while they stitched something held in common, all without convening the whole until people were ready. The entomologist might say they were finding a way to create shared sensemaking and cohesion across deep differences without centralized control.

Stitching robust collective response

A circulation approach does not exclude or sit in opposition to a convening model. But it also does not follow the practices of holding a town hall meeting, a political rally, a one-time conference or a survey. A circulation approach does suggest that we have overinvested in key representatives meeting to design and decide, and we have underinvested in the practices of deep place-based listening, sharing, innovating and web making.

The most enduring social movements are those that have a robust circulatory system that depends less on the fragility of representation and more on the principles of accessibility, participation and relevant resources where people live. Three guideposts seem relevant for nurturing a better and more responsive circulatory system.

1. Emplacement. Circulating requires investing time to understand and meet people where they are, where they live and where they are trying to make sense of the world. More than performative appreciation for diversity, it builds the foundation for how unlikely and improbable groups of people forge dignity and connection, starting with where they live and then threading a shared conversation across a widening whole. We can understand “place” as both geographic difference and different spheres of interest, sectors, networks and professions. What makes good change endure is not found in forcing like-mindedness, but rather in creatively learning how coordination and unlike-minded alignment emerge by cultivating meaningful conversation across difference.

2. Stitching. Rather than an event, circulating is a continuous process that involves stitching together unlikely conversations. Put another way: It’s the capacity to notice, share, and test ideas, proposals and innovations across locations. This approach understands the power of contribution over the imposition of control. At its heart, circulation gathers and shares in ways that open understanding into the needs and innovation to local challenges while creating shared emergent learning about the essence of wider purpose, beyond a given location.

3. Critical Yeast. While the moment may have arrived here in the U.S. for a spectacular mass movement, ultimately, what makes its growth possible is the spread of critical yeast. By this I mean the quality of small pockets of unusual relationships that make a difference where they live. Yeast is the smallest ingredient in bread baking, but the only one that helps everything else grow. This is what NRCT understood: how a small, diverse group, spending time in each community, could create surprising reflection and, with time, coordinated joint action for a wider common good.
Enduring change always finds its roots in the quality of the circulatory system, in the thousand conversations, actions, and innovations in a thousand places that stitch the web capable of resisting the narrow tyranny of bubbled isolation, violence and oppression.

The appeal for a wide-spread movement could not be more urgent or needed in these times. And, it can also feel overwhelming, if not paralyzing, to imagine how exactly such a thing happens at a national level.

The good news: We don’t have to imagine the perfect national movement. What the national level needs most is robust local stitching and finding better ways to address our broken circulatory system. What this moment requires is to take up the spider group challenge and the very practical principle of the accessibility questions: Who do I have access to where I live? And who, if they found a way to travel together around our immediate, divided local landscape, might just create the improbable, surprising conversations that could startle our community into a better web of relationships?

It is, after all, the quality of stitching that gathers the whole.

This article Why movements need to learn to fly like bees and thread like spiders was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/07/why-movements-need-to-learn-to-fly-like-bees-and-thread-like-spiders/