Building Transnational Antifascist Solidarity

How decentralized alliances reinvent resistance in a new authoritarian age

Introduction

A new authoritarianism shadows the globe. Armored in nationalism, nostalgia, and digital deception, it deploys the symbols of antifascism while exiling the spirit that once animated them. In this environment, Ukraine’s resistance against invasion stands as a rare, vivid contradiction—a nation where antifascism lives not as an academic debate but as a daily practice. The spectacle of civilians defending their cities crystallizes a universal truth: fascism’s return is not confined to Europe; it emanates from the same global machinery that fuels surveillance, extraction, and fear everywhere.

But solidarity cannot survive as slogans in another language. The challenge for activists worldwide is to transform empathy into structure: to build alliances that amplify Ukraine’s defiance without erasing other frontline struggles, and to confront the underlying authoritarian logic that transcends flags and borders. Binary narratives—East versus West, democracy versus despotism—flatten complexity and corrode real solidarity. They reduce world history to a morality play, while power coordinates through finance, technology, and propaganda infrastructures that cross every boundary.

The task, then, is reinvention. Antifascism must decentralize, dissolve old hierarchies, and emerge as a living network of mutual learning. Its purpose is not to mimic Ukraine’s resistance but to translate its courage into a grammar of transnational cooperation. The thesis is clear: the only antifascism adequate to our century is planetary, networked, creative, and self-aware. Every movement that resists domination becomes part of one continuum. Antifascism, if reborn, will speak many languages and act in many rhythms.

The New Authoritarian Convergence

Fascism never disappears; it mutates. Today it arrives wrapped in memes, electoral mandates, and claims of defending tradition. The Russian invasion of Ukraine displays its most overt form, mixing expansionist violence with a perverted memory of antifascist victory. Yet the same ideological DNA appears in surveillance capitalism, police impunity, and the cult of sovereignty over humanity. What connects these variants is not geography but worldview: the glorification of obedience, the myth of national innocence, the fear of difference disguised as patriotism.

Authoritarian systems thrive on disconnection. They rely on populations that feel isolated and powerless, convinced that solidarity is futile or foreign. Propaganda’s purpose is not persuasion but paralysis. By monopolizing attention and saturating it with contradiction, regimes convert uncertainty into submission. Each crisis becomes an opportunity to consolidate control, while dissent is dismissed as chaos. In such a climate, antifascism must offer an alternative cosmology: the rediscovery of agency through collective creativity.

From Ideology to Infrastructure

Traditional antifascism often limited itself to symbolic opposition—marches, slogans, moral appeals. Yet opposition without infrastructure is exhaustible. The current moment demands what might be called infrastructural antifascism: building autonomous channels of information, logistics, and cultural production that bypass captured institutions. Ukraine’s resistance exemplifies this shift. From encrypted communication networks to mobile medical units and self-organized art initiatives, it fuses military and civic innovation into survivable autonomy.

For global movements, the analogy is strategic. Decentralized infrastructure is both shield and amplifier. Independent media collectives, open-source intelligence groups, refugee aid mosaics—these form the scaffolding of real-world solidarity. They render antifascism not as moral outrage but as operational competence. Where authoritarianism centralizes, antifascism must distribute. Where power divides by identity, antifascism must connect by common risk.

Historical Memory as Field of Battle

Every fascist project feeds on rewritten memory. It portrays empire as protection and dissent as betrayal. The Russian government’s invocation of antifascist heritage to justify invasion is textbook inversion: the weaponization of remembrance. This manipulation clarifies a lesson for every country facing its own revisionists. Memory, like any resource, demands collective stewardship. Movements that neglect it lose control of their moral terrain.

Hence, a crucial task for transnational activists is to reclaim antifascist history as a plural narrative. The Spanish, Italian, and Latin American struggles, the anti-colonial risings, the Jewish partisans, the Mau Mau rebels, the Kurdish autonomists—all belong to this shared lineage. Recounting them together breaks the monopoly of any single nation’s myth. No one owns antifascism; it is a method of conscience that must continually recompose its roster of heroes.

Transitioning from memory to practice, the next question emerges: how can solidarity circulate without breeding hierarchy or simplification?

Decentralization as Strategic Necessity

Centralized solidarity reproduces the very logic it seeks to fight. Hierarchies attract surveillance, rivalry, and burnout. Bureaucracies, even noble ones, neutralize spontaneity. The alternative is to organize as constellations—clusters of autonomy orbiting shared values. Such movements accept chaos as creative tension. They trust coordination to emerge from resonance rather than command. Ukraine’s volunteer networks, which link small supply circles into battlefield logistics, illustrate this principle at industrial scale.

The Constellation Model

A constellation starts with a shared gesture rather than an order. Imagine a global campaign where groups across continents perform synchronized acts of remembrance or defiance. Each node adapts the format—street mural, silent march, encrypted broadcast—to local conditions. The point is simultaneity without uniformity. When recorded, translated, and circulated through decentralized servers, the gesture becomes a cultural chain reaction.

This model has historical precedent. During the 2011 cycle of uprisings, from Tahrir to Zuccotti Park, a simple template—the occupation of space—propagated faster than any manifesto. The tactic’s power lay in its universality and openness to remixing. The lesson remains: when movements share a template that invites reinvention, their diversity becomes a multiplier, not an obstacle.

Information Sovereignty and Security

Fascism’s neural network is the global disinformation apparatus that manufactures fear and fatigue. Countering it requires sovereignty over channels of communication. Corporations that control digital platforms now play the role once held by state censors. They feed outrage, monetize confusion, and algorithmically hide nuance. Therefore, activists must cultivate secure, peer-to-peer infrastructures: federated social networks, encrypted message bridges, and community servers immune to centralized shutdowns.

Such setups not only protect information but democratize decision-making. When nodes exchange through transparent, encrypted networks, narrative control becomes impossible. Every participant can verify data, critique messaging, and prevent co-option. This transparency deters corruption and facilitates trust—the most scarce resource of any movement.

Local Autonomy, Global Synchronicity

Decentralized solidarity does not imply fragmentation. Synchronization gives scattered acts their global resonance. Time-based coordination—monthly rituals, shared lunar cycles, or synchronized silence—creates rhythm. The Québec casseroles protests achieved near-total neighborhood participation through sound alone; similar innovations could scale across continents. A single minute of global quiet, properly contextualized, can echo louder than a thousand statements.

Transitional focus: from structure to story. How can decentralized design connect with emotional imagination, avoiding cold technocracy?

Storytelling Beyond Binaries

Fascism depends on binary myths. It divides the world into pure and impure, hero and traitor, motherland and other. To resist fascism at the level of imagination, movements must craft stories that exceed binary form. Ukraine’s resistance, while grounded in national survival, carries a subtext of humanity’s reassertion against domination itself. The danger for allies is to flatten this complexity into a cinematic script of good democracy versus evil dictatorship, erasing internal contradictions and peripheral wounds.

Polyphonic Narrative as Cure

The most resilient myth is a choir, not a solo. A polyphonic narrative aligns struggles without forcing sameness. It allows a Standing Rock water protector, a Syrian exile, and a Ukrainian medic to speak through overlapping metaphors—defense of life, dignity, land, and truth. Each voice modifies the whole. Such polyphony resists appropriation because it cannot be narrated by a single ideology.

Artists historically performed this work. From Grozny’s underground poets to the Chilean singers who turned protest into hymn, art articulates common emotion faster than policy statements. Transnational antifascism should therefore invest in cultural exchange—zines, mixtapes, visual art, collaborative streams—designed to evoke shared feeling. Culture leaps through firewalls that politics cannot breach.

Avoiding Moral Hierarchies

Another trap is comparative suffering. When solidarity becomes a contest of victimhood, authenticity replaces empathy. Movements must instead prioritize the exchange of tactics over the ranking of pain. What matters is transfer of skill: how Ukrainian digital educators secure communications can serve feminists in Tehran; how Sudanese youth hide servers can inform journalists in Kyiv. Mutual aid in knowledge dissolves hierarchy.

Narrative Infrastructure

To institutionalize this diversity, activists need narrative infrastructures as robust as logistical ones. Translation cooperatives, decentralized media relays, and multilingual archives convert isolated testimonies into global memory. Each translation is an act of resistance against the hegemony of a single language. Building these systems turns storytelling into strategy, making pluralism tangible.

Movement from story to practice requires understanding culture as logistics, not ornament.

Cultural Collaboration as Tactic

Culture is not propaganda; it is infrastructure for morale. Authoritarianism attacks art because imagination breeds defiance. Therefore, cultural collaboration across borders is not auxiliary—it is the medium through which solidarity breathes. Joint creation fuses symbolic and practical resistance.

Shared Rituals

Consider the power of synchronized ritual. Instead of mass petitions, imagine an international festival of antifascist creativity occurring on the same weekend in dozens of cities. Each site features performances, memorials, and skill-sharing workshops co-designed with Ukrainian artists. Documentation flows peer-to-peer, feeding new waves of collaboration. The ritual’s repetition in variant forms undermines censorship; its beauty signals that joy, too, is defiance.

Skill Barter as Solidarity

When fascism isolates, skill barter reconnects. A drone-awareness workshop from Kharkiv can be traded for digital‑security training from Lagos, mural design from Oaxaca for protest legal support from Berlin. This reciprocity transforms gratitude into partnership. It proves solidarity’s value through competence. Over time, a distributed university of resistance emerges—one without campus or rector, operating through trust and curiosity.

Micro-Funding without Hierarchy

Money corrodes solidarity when it pools. The alternative is circulating micro‑grants governed by rotation. Each month, a different collective manages a small pool of funds, distributing them according to emergent priorities. Decision cycles stay fast, corruption minimal. The economy of resistance then mirrors the politics it preaches: dynamic, transparent, and accountable. Financial decentralization becomes another layer of antifascist defense.

These cultural circuits make antifascism emotive again, preparing ground for actionable coordination.

The Cross-Border Operational Blueprint

Antifascist solidarity succeeds when it performs three parallel operations: linking, learning, and launching. Linking happens through shared gestures; learning through mutual skill transfer; launching through synchronized risk-taking that targets global enablers of authoritarianism. The goal is to expose the infrastructure of repression rather than its figureheads.

Identifying Global Enablers

Every dictatorship drinks from the same wells: fossil‑fuel capital, surveillance technology, and disinformation platforms. Coordinated campaigns that pressure these nodes hit multiple regimes simultaneously. For instance, actions exposing the complicity of data‑broker firms or energy traders align climate and democracy activism under a common banner. By targeting structure instead of symbols, movements multiply relevance.

Rapid Diffusion Logistics

Speed is the modern amplifier. Digital channels allow a tactic piloted in one country to replicate within hours. The secret is to build diffusion mechanisms intentionally: open‑source toolkits, translated templates, and modular action kits that other groups can adapt. Each iteration spreads antifascism not as ideology but as protocol—a set of repeatable gestures that encode courage into form.

Protecting the Psyche

Sustained struggle demands ritual decompression. The psychological cost of witnessing atrocity, especially through constant imagery, breeds detachment or despair. Movements must integrate mental‑health practices into their core design: reflection circles, rest rotations, artistic therapy. This is not indulgence; it is armor. Fascism thrives on exhaustion. Guarding the psyche is guarding the revolution’s continuity.

With emotional resilience secured, practical steps become clearer.

Putting Theory Into Practice

Building enduring, decentralized antifascist solidarity requires deliberate structure. The following steps outline a replicable framework for those ready to act:

1. Design a Shared Gesture
   Choose a minimal, adaptable symbol—a joint day of silence, a recurring art motif, a synchronized candle vigil—that encapsulates defiance and unity. Publish open guidelines allowing local reinterpretation.

2. Build Federated Communication Infrastructure
   Establish encrypted, peer-to-peer networks (Matrix, Signal clusters, cooperating Mastodon servers). Avoid single-platform dependence. Assign rotating moderators to sustain democratic coordination.

3. Cultivate Skill Exchange Loops
   Pair collectives across global regions to trade expertise: cybersecurity, trauma first aid, citizen journalism, 3D printing repair tools, or counter‑disinformation tactics. Document each exchange and translate summaries.

4. Launch Cultural Cross‑Pollination Projects
   Host transnational art residencies, hybrid festivals, or collaborative zines linking protesters, refugees, and creatives. Let emotional resonance precede political explanation; beauty recruits faster than argument.

5. Establish Rotating Micro‑Funds
   Pool small recurring donations in cryptocurrency or ethical banking cooperatives. Hand control of funds to a new collective each lunar cycle. Publish transparent transaction ledgers; prioritize urgent grassroots needs.

6. Synchronize Global Action Windows
   Pick symbolic dates, ideally tied to historical antifascist victories or shared astronomical events, for coordinated pressure on authoritarian infrastructure. Examples: mass data dumps on propaganda outlets, artistic occupations of embassies, boycott launches targeting complicit firms.

7. Institutionalize Decompression Rituals
   After each high‑intensity action, schedule collective rest. Online gatherings for storytelling, remembrance, music, or meditation sustain moral clarity and prevent burnout from media fatigue.

Each step seems small, but together they render antifascism fluid, adaptive, and almost impossible to repress.

Conclusion

The twenty‑first century’s defining struggle will not pit isolated nations but interlinked movements against a planetary web of control. Ukraine’s defiance reminds humanity that antifascism is not history’s relic but its renewal. Yet victory will not come from mimicry of state wars. It will arise from alliances that treat creativity as strategy and empathy as infrastructure.

Decentralized solidarity is the revolution’s mature form. It does not ask permission from governments or corporations; it prototypes a parallel world where cooperation outpaces coercion. If fascism is the worship of power, antifascism becomes the practice of shared vulnerability transformed into courage. Every encrypted message, every translated poem, every cross‑border act of care chips away at tyranny’s totality.

You now inhabit a moment when the map of resistance redraws itself daily. The question that matters is not whether you support Ukraine or oppose authoritarianism but how you will operationalize connection. What new bridge can your movement build this month that forces power to respond on three fronts instead of one?