Activist HandbookOn this page
Beautiful Trouble is a collection of over 300 stories, tactics, principles, theories and methodologies for activists. You can also order the toolkit for troublemakers in book form. Also, make sure to check out other resources for activists.
What is Beautiful Trouble?
The Beautiful Trouble platform is about making it easier for people to take creative action for social justice. They provide accessible tools and training that help movements become more creative, effective and sustainable, showing the beauty in activism. Like Activist Handbook, their approach is based on shared leadership, modified consensus-based decision making, anti-oppression politics, and international and intersectional solidarity.
In 2017, the Beautiful Trouble organisation published the Beautiful Rising book in collaboration with activists from the Global South. Afterwards, they updated their website with all the new knowledge assembled in that book.
What do they offer?
Resources for activists
All guides published on the Beautiful Trouble platform are available under a Creative Commons License. This means that other people can reuse and remix their resources for troublemakers. At Activist Handbook, we use the same licence, and many of our articles are based on the ones published on Beautiful Trouble.
Number of resources: 300+
Type of resources: Stories, tactics, principles, theories, methodologies
Languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Burmese, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian
Creative Commons licence: yes ✅
Most popular articles on Beautiful Trouble, according to Ubersuggest:
Alienation effect by Larry Bogad (people looking up ‘brechtian’, ‘alienation effect’ and ‘brecht alienation effect')
The Salt March by Nadine Bloch (people looking up ‘salt march’, ‘salt movement’ and ‘salt march gandhi’)
Flash mob by Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell (people looking up ‘flash mob’)
Power mapping by Andrew Boyd (people looking up ‘power mapping’, ‘target maps’ and ‘power map template’)
Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army by John Jordan (people looking up ‘military clown’ and ‘army of clowns’)
Commodity fetishism by Zack Malitz (people looking up ‘commodity fetishism’, ‘commodity fetishism examples’, and ‘commodity fetishism definition’)
Temporary autonomous zone by John Jordan (people looking up 'temporary autonomous zones', ‘what is an autonomous zone’, ‘autonomous zones in us’ and ‘hakim bey taz’)
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Levana Saxon and Virginia Vitzthum (people looking up ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ and ‘paulo freire pedagogy of the oppressed)
Training for activists
No one is born an activist. If you would like to learn more about social change-making, make sure to check out their training programme. Their experienced campaigners will teach you all about protests, campaigns, and movements.
If you are interested in grassroots movement-building workshops offered by other organisations, make sure to check out our list of training organisations for protestors.
Difference Activist Handbook and Beautiful Trouble
Beautiful Trouble is an awesome resource for change-makers around the globe. At Activist Handbook, we were very much inspired by their work, especially when it comes to their efforts to get a good international representation of activists.
We wanted to take this a step further: by allowing anyone to edit Activist Handbook, Wikipedia-style, we lower the barrier even further for troublemakers all over the world to share their knowledge and experiences. In addition, we actively integrate existing resources with our platform, so that together we can create the most comprehensive manual for rebels – available in all languages and with content adapted to local contexts.
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How important is this page?
On average, people look up ‘Beautiful Trouble’ 720 times monthly globally. Over half of those searches are from the US. This keyword has low relevancy to Activist Handbook, meaning we will show up low in the search results.
The website of Beautiful Trouble receives about 21.7K monthly visits through organic search traffic, of which 50% from the US, 10% from the UK, 8% from Canada and 4% from India (according to Semrush). The website has 123.8K backlinks.
