Donbat refers to a situated practice of transformation. It consists in identifying an imbalance—social, economic, ecological, relational or institutional—and undertaking a proportionate, inventive and responsible action to alter the conditions that produce it.

The word is formed by combining the French words don (giving) and combat (struggle). Yet it is not simply a matter of adding two notions together. Donbat redirects the energy of struggle towards another economy of action: no longer merely fighting against something, but acting upon a situation in order to transform its conditions.

Giving introduces a logic of circulation, attention, transmission and connection. Struggle retains the tension, commitment and necessity of acting in the face of what is not working. Donbat brings these two dimensions together: it gives and it fights, without reducing action to charity, struggle or sacrifice.

Active Attention to the Real

Donbat often begins with a concrete situation: a visible problem, an everyday obstruction, a normalised injustice or a vulnerability for which no one takes responsibility.

It may appear in a simple gesture: helping someone whose pushchair is stuck on the stairs of the metro, intervening where collective indifference has taken hold, or transforming an apparently ordinary situation into a shared problem.

It can also take the form of an organised practice, as in the field of care. When the nursing profession upholds a commitment to dignity, presence and vigilance, it helps us understand one of Donbat’s essential dimensions: giving time, attention, gestures and skills while fighting pain, isolation, abandonment and the loss of dignity.

But Donbat does not naively glorify devotion. It is not about continually demanding more giving from individuals without creating the material, human and economic conditions required to sustain that giving. A system that demands care without providing the means to practise it can become anti-Donbat.

Transforming Rather Than Merely Denouncing

Donbat is not limited to raising awareness. It intervenes precisely where criticism alone is no longer enough.

Many problematic situations are known, analysed, documented or denounced without actually being transformed. Donbat works within this gap between understanding and action. It seeks to move a situation from powerlessness towards the possibility of acting.

This can happen on a small scale in everyday life, but also through longer processes. In The Man Who Planted Trees, Jean Giono tells the story of a man who gradually transforms a desertified landscape through a simple, repeated and unspectacular gesture: planting trees. Whether or not the story is fictional matters less than the form of action it makes conceivable: identifying a failure, intervening over time and producing a lasting transformation in the conditions of shared life.

Donbat can therefore be an immediate gesture, a professional practice, a collective method, an artistic intervention, an economic strategy, a transmissible fiction or a long-term process of transformation.

What Donbat Is Not

Donbat cannot be reduced to resistance, struggle, civic responsibility, charity, activism or socially engaged art in its conventional sense.

It may intersect with these forms, but it differs from them through its ethical demands, its attention to concrete situations, its capacity for transformation, its vigilance against reproducing forms of domination and its determination to make action transmissible.

Resistance and struggle can serve very different causes, including causes opposed to emancipation or the common good. For example, when the far right seeks to combat immigration, it presents this as resistance or a struggle for national sovereignty, the preservation of cultural identity, social welfare or public safety. In this particular case, one may speak of resistance or struggle, but not of Donbat, because Donbat is explicitly guided by a sincere desire to improve the conditions of coexistence collectively.

Donbat therefore does not necessarily involve resistance, nor is it necessarily defined by struggle, although it may involve both. Donbat, resistance and struggle share certain areas of action, while each also has its own specific fields of application.

Finally, Donbat should not be confused with civic responsibility. It can be civic when an action serves an inclusive community and the common good, but it must also be capable of opposing the state when the latter acts undemocratically, violently or unethically. It may therefore have to act outside civic norms when circumstances demand it. The notion of civic responsibility is thus insufficient to define Donbat. Here again, they share an area of action without Donbat being reducible to it.

A Necessary Practice

There is a great deal of goodwill on this planet, but it is structurally prevented from acting. This is precisely where Donbat positions itself: where awareness is no longer enough and where criticism must become a method.

We do not lack ideas, analyses or criticism, but rather forms capable of making them operative. Our shared world grows more fragile as necessity, speed, consumption, management and the capture of attention diminish the very conditions of relationship and, with them, our collective power. We live in an intensely connected society that is ultimately impoverished in its experience of a shared world.

Donbat, however, is neither an individual reflex nor a morality of the good deed. It refers to a practice aimed at reactivating, even on a small scale, a collective power that has been dispersed, captured or turned against itself. Where knowledge, experiences, affects and skills remain isolated, it seeks to put them back into circulation; where powerlessness appears to be organised, it attempts to recompose capacities for action.

In other words, it is no longer enough to understand what subjects us. We must also find ways of regaining agency: moving from isolated awareness to shared power, and from a critique of the world to a practice capable of intervening in it.