Campaigning Wiki

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Summary

A small (5–15), trusted group that organises and acts together — the basic unit of anarchist and movement-organising practice, especially for direct action.

Body

An affinity group is a small (5–15), trusted group that organises and acts together — the basic unit of anarchist and movement-organising practice, especially for direct action.

An affinity group is a small, self-organising cluster of people who know each other well enough to make fast collective decisions in a high-pressure action. WRI’s Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns treats affinity groups as the basic building block of action safety and decision-making, with the same structure used whether the action is a sit-in, a banner-drop, or a coordinated block of rapid-response phone calls [source: wri-handbook]. Seeds for Change publishes facilitation guides for affinity-group meetings and consensus, plus the discipline of the spokes-council — when multiple affinity groups need to coordinate, each sends a single mandated spokesperson who can speak for and report back to the group [source: seeds-for-change]. The same pattern (small trusted teams + spokes-council coordination) underpins the distributed-organising models that MobLab and the Commons Library describe for large digital campaigns [source: commons-library].

Use it for

Organising a direct action safely; structuring the participation of newcomers; building the basic unit of a grassroots network.

Worked examples

  • case-studies/barbie-liberation
  • case-studies/gezi-park
  • case-studies/idle-no-more
  • otpor-milosevic
  • case-studies/sindicato-inquilinas
  • case-studies/sunrise-green-new-deal
  • case-studies/umbrella-movement

Open Questions

None yet.

Sources & verification

  • sources/wri-handbook — grounding: secondary — unfetchable
  • sources/seeds-for-change — grounding: secondary — RAW (452 chars)
  • sources/commons-library — grounding: secondary — RAW (5257 chars)

Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.

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