BY Samia Habli
Foreword
We are living in a time when the right to life is blatantly measured against a ruthless standard of legitimacy. What does it mean to ‘survive’ in the world as we now know it? Who meets these standards and who falls short? What metrics determine the worth of one life over another? These are the questions that now urgently press against us, that turn over and over in our minds as we continue to witness genocide, authoritarianism on the rise, and systems at work deliberately reducing human survival to little more than bare endurance. From this urgent moment, we—younger feminists from the Global South—share the reflections gathered here as part of our Reflections on Our Countries series. In this issue, we turn to the theme on Survival, Resistance, and Solidarity, beginning from the genocide in Gaza and extending to struggles across our regions as we examine how these current crises are reshaping our understanding of activism, care, and collective life.
Faced with the fragility of survival around us, alongside the relentless pressures on our communities, we turned inward and toward one another in a process of collective reflection. Through our writing circle, where some contributors joined us in person during our collective retreat while others participated online, we found ourselves confronting a question that addresses a fundamental tension of our time: how can we resist the destructive machinery of capitalism and imperialism driving us ever deeper into mere survival mode at the expense of the collective?
What emerged through these conversations, again and again, was a recognition that survival as we’ve been conditioned to understand it cannot possibly sustain us or our communities in the long run. The systems that profit from our oppression feed on exactly this kind of survival. The kind that keeps us scattered, desperately scrambling to pay rent and put food on the table while our movements lose momentum and our fractured communities remain vulnerable to the very forces we are attempting to resist. Our contributors offer a different understanding of survival entirely. In their reflections, we see survival that demands dignity, that insists on creating community even in the face of systems working tirelessly to keep us isolated. In a world that profits from stripping away our humanity, survival becomes a willful act of refusal: refusing to normalize genocide, refusing solidarity only when it’s convenient, refusing to fragment ourselves into solitary struggle when every liberation movement in history has required us to find each other and stand together.
The voices you’ll encounter here move between intimate confession and sharp political analysis, between heartfelt poetry and urgent testimony. They reveal survival not as a single strategy but as a constellation of living practices: the holding of grief alongside rage, the weaving of everyday care into acts of resistance, the drawing from healing circles and ancestral memory to establish connections that span borders and refuse the culture of disposability. Some contributors trace the threads linking the genocide in Gaza to the creeping militarization in their own regions, to the ways rampant fascism is actively weaponizing hope against us. At the same time, we find reflections reminding us that rage alone is fleeting; our fury must lead to something larger than individual catharsis if it is to challenge imperialism and the despair that fuels it.
It’s worth noting that several of our contributors are not writers by trade. They are community organizers and activists working on the ground, people who spend their days mobilizing rather than putting words to paper. Many hadn’t written in months, even years. Understandably, the return to quiet reflection came as a daunting task at first. After all, how do we put into words the overwhelming grief and grave disillusionment darkening our days? How do we invite others into more abstract conversations about survival when, for so many of us, the very concept has been whittled down to its most brutal basics? Yet even in exhaustion, our contributors trusted, as we do, that reflection is itself an act of resistance—to take pause in the chaos, name the violence we witness, and share insights in hopes of building solidarity.
Rather than offering answers about what survival means, these reflections extend a conversation already alive in our movements and communities about what it means to live rather than merely survive. Together, they form a chorus that echoes across movements and continents, each voice a window into larger questions of how we endure and resist systems designed to dispose of us. To our contributors, we offer deep gratitude for the courage it took to put these reflections into words. Thank you for trusting us with your insights, for expanding our understanding of survival and resistance as acts of solidarity that rely on our shared humanity. And to you, the reader, thank you for joining this moment of collective reflection, and by doing so, participating in the wider work of solidarity. We refuse the false choice between individual survival and collective doom, and invite you to refuse it, too. As you read on, we ask that you allow each piece to inform how you understand survival in your own context, and consider how that understanding can be made into lived practices from which resistance can grow.