Across the Global South, defending land and environment has become a way of being exposed. This paper asks how state, corporate, and hybrid governance arrangements produce violence against environmental defenders, and what forms of protection communities build in response. Drawing on nine research initiatives brought together through the Knowledge Alliance for Environmental Defenders (Kallied), it traces conflicts over critial minerals, climate policy, conservation, extractive projects, and digital infrastructure across Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Africa, and transnational spaces.

The central argument is that violence against defenders is not a series of discrete abuses or governance failures. It is produced through the ordinary operation of climate and environmental governance: permissive regulation, selective enforcement, and participation that exists mostly on paper. Physical attacks, criminalization, online harassment, dispossession, and epistemic marginalization are interconnected expressions of the same uneven power over land, resources, and voice. Protection holds up best when it is collective, situated, and tied to territorial life. Assemblies, territorial monitoring, legal accompaniment, feminist care networks, and agroecological initiatives sustain collective agency under pressure.

The paper offers a framework for understanding violence as a continuum, governance as a producer of harm, and protection as collectively governed and territorially grounded, with implications for advocacy, donor support, and future research on environmental justice.