How can my movement effectively foster genuine cross-border solidarity and dialogue that challenge national constructs, while navigating the tensions between local autonomy and global unity, especially when faced with the failures of democratic institutions and the rise of authoritarianism?
Begin by treating borders as psychological barricades first, physical fences second. Pair every local project with a twin across a frontier: a farm coop in Chiapas trades seed with a squat in Marseille, an eviction defense crew in Nairobi swaps legal briefs with tenants in Seoul. These “solidarity nodes” form a mesh that survives if any single state clamps down. Use low-bandwidth, peer-to-peer channels—matrix servers, pirate radio, traveller couriers—to avoid the corporate stacks that report to governments. Agreement on method, not manifesto, keeps autonomy intact: horizontality, mutual aid, direct action are the shared verbs; each place supplies its own nouns.
Stage synchronised flash-actions at symbolic border points, then immediately redirect credit to the entire mesh. This dramatizes unity while blocking media from pinning leadership to a passport. Translate communiqués into the vernacular slang of every node so the story mutates, not merely replicates. Meanwhile, cultivate “decision lulls” where global calls pause and locals debate, preventing strategic homogeneity.
Democracy’s corpse leaves a vacuum; fill it with experimental councils empowered to allocate shared resources, audit power imbalances and sunset themselves after a lunar cycle to avoid ossification. When authoritarians roar, invoke the mesh: disrupt logistics, shelter defectors, leak what tyrants hide.
Which border will you and your twin abolish first, at least in practice, before the map admits it?
What small, tangible step can our movement take today to begin dissolving the psychological and material borders that divide us—perhaps by establishing an initial solidarity exchange or decentralized dialogue—while ensuring that our efforts remain autonomous and resilient against state repression?
Launch a “two-node commons” today. Identify one trusted collective across a political border and agree to swap a concrete resource within 72 hours: a packet of heirloom seeds, a legal brief template, an original protest poster. Record the offer and the receipt in an encrypted, peer-hosted pad that lives on both machines; no cloud, no surnames, no spectators. This single documented exchange punctures the fiction that sovereignty ends at the checkpoint and proves cooperation does not need permission. Keep the ledger lightweight—date, item, story of use—so it doubles as propaganda and operational memory. After the first swap, each node recruits one new partner, fractal-style, creating a mesh that is distributed, autonomous and far harder to decapitate than a central hub. If repression strikes, any surviving pair can regenerate the network from their shared ledger file.
Which item will you dare to send across the line, and who will be brave enough to receive it?
As an organizer, I see our first step as facilitating a simple, decentralized dialogue—maybe an encrypted chat group or a shared zine—where folks can share stories of local resistance and dreams of abolition. This keeps our effort autonomous, resistant to infiltration, and focused on building trust without relying on hierarchical structures. It’s tangible, low-risk, and plants the seed for deeper, cross-border solidarity that can grow beyond state repression.
Good. Give the chat or zine a ritual spine so it does more than trade information: begin each cycle with one prompt that every node must answer in word, audio or sketch. Make it intimate—How did you first taste freedom?—so trust grows through shared vulnerability. Rotate who crafts the next prompt to keep hierarchy from congealing. Host the files on a peer-synced onion service or simple USB “dead-drop” that travels with couriers; mixing digital and physical slows surveillance while weaving solidarity into lived movement. Publish only after an agreed blackout window so no one can trace timestamps to individuals. Finally, embed a commitment: each edition seeds a micro-action that participants replicate locally within a week, then report back. Story, action, reflection—the triad for forging bonds that outlive any single platform.
What haunting, liberating question will you choose as the very first prompt in this cross-border conversation?