Imagining a Different Way: Moving Beyond Resistance Toward Liberatory Possibility

By Elsa Casanova

There’s a heartbreak in watching persistent violence and power abuse in our world. While resistance has moved things and saved lives, a deeper transformation requires a fundamentally different way of imagining systems change, liberation, and collective belonging.

The treatment of people by law enforcement, ICE, and militarized forces doesn’t just upset me—it fills me with a disgust that’s hard to put into words. It makes my spirit ache.

And as I sit with all of it, a question keeps rising:

How did we get here? Why are we still here?

So much of our energy has gone into resisting, and so much of it has mattered. It’s moved things. It’s saved lives. But when I think about what could truly shift the course of things—not just temporarily, but fundamentally—I don’t just think about new strategies or policy tweaks. I think about a completely different way of imagining society altogether.

Where the Current Approaches Fall Short 

I’ve engaged with a lot of frameworks meant to move us toward liberation—decolonization, dismantling, deconditioning, restorative justice. But lately, I’ve come to feel that none of them go far enough. Not because they’re wrong, but because they’re still rooted in the very paradigms they seek to escape.

• Decolonization still moves through force; through a lens of opposition. It stays boxed in by what it’s trying to undo.

• Dismantling alone leaves a vacuum. It asks us to tear down without a clear vision for what comes after.

• Deconditioning is deeply personal, but without collective reimagining, it leaves structures intact.

• Restorative Justice is powerful on a relational scale, but often hard to scale or implement at systemic levels without supportive infrastructure.

These approaches often fragment us. They leave dominant power dynamics untouched. The same old hierarchies, repackaged.

What If We Chose Something Different?

What excites me is imagining something completely new. A vision not built on opposition, but on possibility. Not on what we reject, but on what we desire.

What if we stopped letting the oppressor’s tools set the blueprint?

What if we leaned into our strengths as a society and built an intersectional vision that truly liberates us all?

A vision that:

• Celebrates the fullness and diversity of human experience.

• Creates belonging not through assimilation, but through radical welcome.

• Replaces dominance with co-creation.

• Heals by building, not just by breaking down.

• Makes space for everyone to bring their whole selves into the future we’re shaping. 

I Can Imagine It. Can You?

I don’t have a ten-point plan. What I have is the sacred courage to dream.

To believe that another way is possible. One that doesn’t mirror the systems we’ve inherited, but grows from the soil of everything we’ve survived.

So I’m not interested in just “de-” anymore.

I’m interested in what we can be…together.

Read more about my vision in a future post. For now, I invite you to…

Join the table:

• What do you believe is possible beyond resistance?

• What could a liberatory vision rooted in collective/intertwined strength, not just shared pain, look like?

• What are the gifts we’ve been taught to hide that might guide the future?

I’d love to hear what comes up for you.