2 February 2026
This second article on resnovation – introduced in blog #1– elaborates on possible ways to compose it from four main sources: 1) a sense of common loss after violence and destruction against commons, 2) innovative resistance seeking freedom, 3) resilience, and 4) innovation. Resnovation can also be sourced in other origins and concepts but let’s focus on these four.
Our next blog will deal with resnovation practices and applications of the concept.
Lost Commons and Common Loss
Resnovation starts with the acknowledgement of both a common loss and a loss of commons.
For instance, the plastic cycle will lead to losses in life expectancy. Globalisation has been endangering languages, and human economic activities have been destroying biodiversity. In the case of the Mediterranean region, over-fishing has led to the loss of marine species. Wars and violence in Palestine, Syria, Libya have destroyed lives as well as the perceived heritage of peaceful coexistence, often related to mythical nostalgia around past Empires and civilisations.
These lost heritages are connected with various identity-building components: Arabic (involving numerous and diverse califats), Ottoman (mixing Turkic and Mongol origins, including the Mamelouk rulers in Egypt and domination of Northern Africa, ) Phenician (currently investigated through projects such as the Phenician cultural routes of the Council of Europe); Greek (colonies, settlements and diaspora all around the sea) and Roman (ruling from today’s Portugal to Egypt and Persia/Iran) and its Byzantine heir.
Between the nineteenth century and the second world war, two Western colonial empires (French and British) also dominated the region. Their heritage is still vivid and part of contemporary post-colonial realities in the region. The European Union and NATO (and some may want to add certain US and Israeli governments) are partly the heirs of these colonial empires in the ways they perceive, design and negotiate their relations with their Mediterranean partners.
Today, as discussed in the first blog, all these conflicting Mediterranean mythical narratives (including battles, defeats, sieges all remembered from various perspectives) are faced with the same systemic crises and forms of violence. Under such, as discussed in our first blog post on resnovation, a resilienc-only-based approach has become insufficient and inappropriate to maintain social fabrics afloat.
The very idea of a common sea, of common natural spaces, trade routes and holy spiritual sites as a source of wealth and anchoring is now undermined by ecological disasters and violent man-made destructions and violence. Mediterranean myths may survive, yet aggressed by new systemic threats against nature, they will become parts of a future collective mourning and grief processes. Acknowledging these new and upcoming losses, as the latest layers of our heritage history, is the starting point of resnovation.
In an era of acceleration (information flows, tech change) there is a need for more space and time for people and professionals to reflect and debate on common losses and responses to them: what will still be dividing and destroying those living around a lost or endangered common space (a sea, a mountain range, a language, a factory, a desert or a neighbourhood), and what could (continue to) unite them or bring them together – as people and as (cultural) professional networks.
Emergency of Innovative resistance
Resnovation is about resisting in emergency to intense violence against commons and values by using advanced technological and socially innovative tools. It can take the shape of advanced methods (possibly but not necessarily generative AI) and technologies to document human rights violations, to inform collaborative irrigation management for vulnerable agricultural communities or develop innovative governance initiatives. Our third blog and next ones will be dedicated to such applications of the resnovation concept and AI usages in particular. The objective of resnovation is survival, freedom and liberation from ignorance, rights violations and suffering through disruptive knowledge-based conflict resolution and threats mitigation.
Historical references to resistance movements are numerous: linked with war, occupation, repression, colonisation, slavery, authoritarianism, human rights violations and discrimination. Each family, tribe, social group and country has its own resistance narratives. Languages also resist to translation.
In an age of fast large-scale multidimensional transformations, our generations are facing new resistance imperatives that will have to match at least three new trends: i) the intersectionality and interdependence of various freedom struggles (decolonisation, ecology, gender) already clearly analyzed by authors like Malcolm Ferdinand in his decolonial ecology; ii) new ways of questioning the idea of a common world, through, for instance, reflections on the concept of universality and the commons; iii) unprecedented technological innovations coupled with economic transformations that are globally impacting all dimensions of human activities (science, health, education, governance, economy).
In fights for freedom, resnovation is the opposite of reactionary and nostalgic push-backs against change. Resnovation includes innovation as systematic qualitative disruptive novelty: if the goal justifies the means, then technological and social innovation must be used as weapon of resistance against rights violations.
In the case of the Mediterranean region, profit-making global tech innovations are not sufficient to provide satisfactory answers to common losses, intense violence and ecological crises. If not guided by right-based values, the (mythical and potentially universal) memories of peaceful coexistence and evidence-based knowledge, they actually contribute to multiply threats because of AI butterfly effects. The question then is to harness the positive transformational potential of cutting-edge tech innovation – particularly generative AI, but also biotechnologies, quantum physics – to counterbalance negative externalities that it has so far already generated. In a market economy, innovation is a technology that has found its market. In a resnovative economy, innovation is a technology that has found its purpose.
It is neither, as suggested by the cynefin framework, driven by intuitive action in chaotic contexts nor by already identified best practices in well-understood situations. It rather seems to operate in a situation requiring new “non-violent weapons” that could benefit a majority on an endangered planet
Resonating resilience
Resnovation brings added value to resilience-building and makes it resonate more deeply for those actively facing and suffering from threats. In acute crises situations when violence reaches such a level that it produces existential threats, striving for resilience taps into individual and collective fights and strategies for survival. In such extreme contexts, resilience mechanisms have recourse to survival reactions, self-protection reflexes as well as spiritual and value-based resources (meaning-making, intrapersonal strategies together with collective resilience modes and common space-building).
In a resnovative approach, the same resilience mechanisms may be strongly supported by innovative resistance, i.e. the combination of active push-back against aggression together with unprecedented technologies, methods or solutions. In that case, resnovation is a framework and a space within which resilience-making resonates.
In the next article article, I am elaborating on the ways the resnovation concept could be applied in practice in tech, business, political affairs and at individual level.