Decolonizing Solidarity in Anarchist Strategy

Introduction

Every era of resistance faces its own ideological traps. For today’s anarchists, one of the most insidious is the Western reflex to universalize our frameworks—to speak for rather than with those whose struggles define the frontlines of global conflict. When comrades in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus navigate both invasion and internal repression, distant movements often respond with theory before listening. The result is an inverted hierarchy where abstraction outweighs lived reality.

To dismantle this hierarchy, solidarity must be decolonized. It must begin with proximity and humility, privileging those directly exposed to state violence and occupation. It requires turning every strategic doctrine into a hypothesis awaiting field validation from those whose survival depends on it. The Western left’s greatest challenge is not lack of compassion or analysis, but its habit of mistaking its own distance for perspective.

This essay explores how anarchist networks can construct sustained, trustworthy dialogues with local actors and build decision processes flexible enough to evolve without disintegrating. The goal is not to collapse coherence into chaos but to develop living strategy: adaptable, iterative, grounded in mutual accountability. The path forward is a synthesis of empathy and experimentation, where listening becomes an instrument of transformation.

Listening as Strategic Praxis

Movement success begins not with declarations but with listening. To listen politically is to disarm the ego, to suspend judgment long enough for others’ realities to rearrange your assumptions. In solidarity work connected to conflicts such as the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, this listening must go beyond token consultation. It must function as an early warning system and a design lab for tactics that Western activists can only partially imagine.

Reverse Briefings: Power Through Feedback

One method is the “reverse briefing.” Instead of Western collectives summarizing geopolitical analysis for Eastern comrades, those living the conflict take the lead. They critique strategies proposed by distant allies, identify dangerous misreadings of the terrain, and redraw the contours of solidarity. By formalizing this inversion, movements ensure that power flows through listening, not through narrative control.

Reverse briefings transform solidarity into a feedback loop. Each cycle helps dismantle assumptions before they harden into dogma. When Ukrainian or Belarusian anarchists point out the shortcomings of pacifist orthodoxy under bombardment, for example, Western groups are challenged to distinguish between principle and privilege. To ignore such correction is to re-enact imperial arrogance under antiauthoritarian banners.

Resource Flows Without Strings

Funding and logistics are another site of decolonization. In too many alliances, resources follow ideological lines—grants conditioned on adherence to Western moral scripts. Genuine solidarity reconfigures that relationship. Money, communication tools, and gear must be delivered as modular resources that locals can reassemble based on immediate need. The supporter becomes a quartermaster for autonomy, not a benefactor scripting the revolution from afar.

To build trust, resource distribution should follow two complementary ethics: transparency and choice. Transparency ensures accountability for donors; choice guarantees autonomy for recipients. The moment a resource carries an invisible condition—“use it this way or not at all”—it shifts from solidarity to soft power.

The Texture of Voice

Listening also includes sensory nuance. Written updates flatten experience, while audio diaries, encrypted voice notes, and small video salons communicate emotional truth that text cannot. Voice texture carries hesitation, humor, exhaustion—the human signals that remind Western activists that their frameworks, however refined, operate in moral abstraction when divorced from frontline pulse. Incorporating voice exchanges into organizational routine anchors solidarity in affective empathy.

Listening, then, becomes a methodology rather than a virtue. It protects movements from arrogance disguised as certainty. Each act of hearing reorients the collective compass toward humility and precision. The next logical task is to transform that humility into structure.

Structures of Adaptive Coherence

Adaptability is often misread as indecision, yet rigidity is decay’s disguise. A living movement needs both skeleton and skin—something resilient enough to hold shape but flexible enough to absorb impact. The art lies in distinguishing core principles from peripheral doctrine.

The Vertebrate Model

Imagine strategy as a body. Its spine consists of non-negotiables such as mutual aid, anti-authoritarianism, and collective self-defense. Around that spine grow organs—campaigns, slogans, ideological nuances—that must regenerate with every new crisis. When unexamined doctrine ossifies within this body, the organism can no longer evolve; it becomes ritual without relevance.

To operationalize this metaphor, collectives can establish a living charter: a working document that codifies core commitments while subjecting all secondary principles to scheduled renewal. Every 28 days, or each lunar cycle, comrades review which positions still align with present conditions. Do they serve life on the ground, or merely the comfort of consistency? Principles that fail to meet both criteria expire automatically, making way for new insight.

Such a rhythm guards against ideological paralysis. Renewal becomes habit, not trauma. The cycle institutionalizes humility, ensuring that flexibility never degenerates into amnesia.

Red-Team Analysis: Critique Without Stagnation

Adaptation must coexist with action. During each moon-cycle sprint, critique is delegated to a specialized Red Cell: a mixed team of regional anarchists and home-base analysts. Their role is to stress-test ongoing plans without interrupting their execution. They gather evidence, flag contradictions, and feed these insights into the following renewal meeting. Because analysis and action run in parallel, movements avoid the trap of permanent deliberation.

Successful Red Cells thrive on trust. Members are not opposition but conscience. Their task is to preserve the dialectical energy between conviction and reconsideration. In this way, critique becomes structural rather than personal, liberating individuals from fear of disloyalty.

Ritual as Emotional Glue

Continuous adaptation carries emotional risk. Constant revision can feel like erosion of purpose. Ritual prevents fragmentation by maintaining a rhythm of collective meaning-making. Begin each plenary by reading a recently received dispatch from comrades under fire. This opening ritual grounds participants in shared reality and reasserts that every strategic shift serves a living struggle.

End each session by collecting one belief each member is willing to discard if the next message contradicts it. This public readiness to evolve strengthens coherence through vulnerability. The ritual reminds everyone that flexibility is a form of fidelity—to people, not to ideas.

Adaptability therefore becomes a culture rather than a crisis response. The next step is embedding that culture inside daily operations.

The Culture of Productive Doubt

Few movements fail for lack of courage; most fail from conviction untested by doubt. When organizations sentimentalize certainty, they create the conditions for alienation between theory and lived experience. Cultivating a culture of questioning does not imply indecisiveness; it signals maturity.

The Ritual of Doubt

One practice to normalize questioning is the Guardian of Uncertainty. At each meeting, one randomly selected participant openly challenges a particular axiom of the group’s current doctrine. Debate is deferred; the statement hangs in silence, acknowledged but unresolved. By treating doubt as sacred rather than subversive, the group immunizes itself against dogma. The ritual’s brevity—a few minutes at most—keeps momentum while preserving symbolic weight.

Over time, the Guardian’s role circulates through all members, redistributing critical authority. Doubt ceases to belong to any faction; it becomes a communal function. When disagreement is ritualized, conflict turns creative.

Institutionalizing Expiration

Another essential device is the automatic sunset clause. Every secondary policy or collaboration agreement carries an expiration date. To continue, it must be consciously re-ratified with evidence of both relevance and impact. This approach prevents zombie doctrines—ideas that persist solely because no one dares to kill them.

Expiration ensures that principles survive by merit, not inertia. Each renewal ceremony becomes a mini-festival of reflection, blending accountability with celebration. Dissenters are encouraged to present counterarguments publicly before renewal, maintaining agility within unity.

Conflict as Lifeblood

A unified movement is not one without conflict but one that can metabolize conflict into creativity. Standing Red Cells serve as internal organs of debate, transforming criticism from poison into nourishment. By assigning official space to dissent, the collective separates critique from sabotage. Members learn that to question is to care.

This reframing strengthens unity because it aligns integrity with inquiry. In a movement capable of self-critique, fragmentation diminishes; gossip and resentment lose their fuel. The guiding ethic becomes transparency over consensus.

Accountability Through Acts

Words mean little until acted upon. When a frontline comrade exposes a strategic flaw—such as reliance on compromised funding sources or inconsistent messaging—the only sufficient response is visible change. Committees can formalize this by setting a rule: every critique adopted must trigger an observable adjustment within a specified time. Implementation demonstrates sincerity, converting dialogue into tangible solidarity.

The practice also reverses the traditional hierarchy where Western activists lecture others while exempting themselves from revision. By institutionalizing responsiveness, movements replace rhetorical humility with operational accountability.

Through these rituals and systems, doubt becomes a stabilizing force. The next challenge is to connect internal regeneration with broader political context.

Decolonizing the Mental Map of Solidarity

Solidarity collapses when it serves to reaffirm the helper’s identity rather than alleviate the other’s struggle. Many Western collectives still harbor unexamined savior reflexes: they romanticize distant revolutions yet hesitate to relinquish interpretive control. Decolonizing solidarity means reconstructing the mental map that organizes empathy and authority.

Humility as Infrastructure

True solidarity accepts asymmetry without fetishizing it. An anarchist collective in Central Europe or North America cannot fully comprehend life under occupation or police-state terror, but it can design structures that center those who do. Decision hierarchies should reverse by default: analysis flows upward from local cells to international partners, not the other way around.

This inversion dissolves the illusion of the West as theoretical headquarters. Instead, it becomes one node among many, offering tools rather than paradigms. Translators, logisticians, streamers, and fundraisers all serve a bigger design: giving those on the ground agency to self-define their tactics and stories.

Broadcasting Contradiction

Western audiences crave clean narratives. Yet real movements thrive on ambiguity—the push and pull of contradictory voices. Rather than sanitizing differences among Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian anarchists, solidarity networks should publicize them. Presenting a spectrum of perspectives not only reflects reality but also inoculates against ideological colonization.

When contradictions remain visible, no single faction can monopolize authenticity. The Western role shifts from curator to amplifier. Complexity itself becomes pedagogy, teaching global audiences that unity need not equal uniformity.

The Emotional Politics of Distance

Decolonizing solidarity also demands introspection about emotional economies. Western activists often process guilt by overcompensating—sending unsolicited advice or moral verdicts disguised as concern. A better approach replaces guilt with curiosity: instead of asking “how can we help,” ask “what should we unlearn?”

Unlearning directs empathy away from performance toward transformation. It reframes solidarity as co-evolution rather than charity. The outcome is modest but profound: movements that adapt their ethics as diligently as they adapt their tactics.

In this cultural reorientation, learning from the peripheries revitalizes the core. The anarchism that emerges is less of an export product and more of a multilingual dialogue in perpetual reinvention.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To operationalize decolonized solidarity and adaptive strategy, consider the following steps:

• Establish Reverse Briefings: Create regular encrypted calls where local comrades critique your planned actions before execution. Treat their feedback as mandatory peer review.

• Implement the Lunar Charter: Draft a living charter that renews secondary principles every 28 days. Use these reviews to discard obsolete doctrines.

• Rotate the Guardian of Uncertainty: At every assembly, appoint one participant to name a fragile belief without debate. Document the doubts for later consideration.

• Activate Red Cells: Form a parallel critique group composed of regional activists and your own members to analyze ongoing actions. Ensure they report findings openly.

• Publicly Act on Critique: When feedback identifies a failure, implement visible change within a set timeframe. Transparency sustains trust.

• Broadcast Contradictions: Publish divergent testimonies from local anarchists side by side rather than synthesizing them into uniform statements.

• End Every Meeting with Commitment: Each participant names one tangible task linked to immediate solidarity. Action restores coherence after introspection.

Together these mechanisms create a rhythm of reflection and response, protecting movements from both rigidity and drift.

Conclusion

Decolonizing solidarity is not a moral accessory; it is a strategic imperative. Movements that cling to inherited frameworks risk reenacting the very hierarchies they condemn. Listening to comrades in conflict zones transforms solidarity from sentiment into intelligence gathering, from projection into partnership. Adaptive coherence—the capacity to evolve without losing purpose—emerges when humility is built into structure.

The practices outlined here—reverse briefings, living charters, rituals of doubt—redefine what it means to act in common cause. They remind us that theory serves life, not the reverse. The revolution worth pursuing is one that can change its mind without losing its soul.

So, if humility is the new strategic weapon, what belief are you willing to reforge in the fire of another’s reality?