The year 2024 draws to a close under a horizon darkened by unbearable tragedies. Amid this tumult of suffering, there is, of course, the genocide in Palestine, the deadly conflicts in Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Afghanistan, the Sahel, Ukraine, and the mounting death tolls in the Mediterranean and elsewhere.
In Sudan, clashes between rival factions continue to devastate lives, leaving cities in ruins and millions of refugees in despair. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, violence in the East, fueled by geopolitical and economic interests, has transformed entire regions into perpetual war zones where resource exploitation takes precedence over human dignity. In Haiti, the violent spiral of gangs, compounded by a chronic political crisis, pushes a people battered by repeated natural disasters to struggle for survival, forgotten by the international community. Then, there are the silent tragedies in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Sahara deserts, and the borders of the United States. People fleeing war, poverty, and climate upheaval are met with insurmountable physical and political barriers. Seas, oceans, sands, and even the barbed wire of our states become their graves as xenophobic rhetoric normalizes these horrors.
Everywhere, the dehumanization of the world marches forward: walls rise to suffocate dreams, bombs fall to erase bodies, media distort truths and manufacture sinister consent, deadly ideologies and authoritarian regimes push racism into new frontiers, and multinationals perpetuate extractivism that devastates both humanity and nature, often externalizing its costs onto populations in the Global South. Thus, the powerful thrive on the bed of a premeditated disorder.
In Gaza, the ruins speak a language that Western powers feign to ignore: the language of genocidal crime as a technology of war. Why not raze everything if it can be rebuilt and further colonized? Why not kill if the executioner can claim the status of the victim? Why tell the truth when lies serve as the compass of the world’s geography? In Palestine, bodies have been piling up for decades, trapped between the walls of a racialist regime orchestrating a murderous blockade and the bombs of documented ethnic cleansing. Palestinians are fragmented, gathered in bags, and reduced to statistics feeding soulless spreadsheets.
We can no longer bear these images of fathers with hollow gazes mourning their children and mothers searching the rubble for a trace of hope. And then there are the children, the tens of thousands of children, crushed beneath the dust, ripped from life in schools and hospitals and turned into mass graves. This genocide reeks of anti-Palestinian racism and segregationism and, above all, the most abhorrent impunity.
In this locked field, envisioning an end or believing in one isn’t easy. By this, I mean that it is hard to imagine another fate for humanity when humans become desensitized to the suffering of others, to the deaths of others, to the tragedies of others, to the live-streamed genocide endured by other peoples. It is hard to rise amid this catastrophe and cry out in protest when all one hears is the echo of one’s voice and the deafening silence of those who claim to defend freedom, justice, and equality.
But this silence must not bury our anger, our faith in more just tomorrows, our ability to rise, again and again, against injustice. In the darkest moments, there are Palestinian, Haitian, Congolese, and other hands rebuilding, voices singing, souls resisting. There are mothers raising their children under the perforated roofs of tents. There are teachers in the camps of Kivu or Jenin who, even amidst the screams of weapons, redraw liberated worlds on half-burnt notebooks. Poets are arming their verses to defy death with the obstinacy of those who refuse to be erased.
In a world that crushes bodies and hopes, the only possible response is resistance. Resistance to indifference leads us to look away. Resistance to the apathy that anaesthetizes our consciences. Resistance to the idea that it is too late, that the fight is futile, that oppression is inevitable.
As Palestinian icon Leila Khaled recently said in an interview with Mondoweiss, “October 7 proved to the world the centrality of struggle.” In this sense, cracks are forming across the globe. In Africa, South America, Asia, and even at the heart of imperialist bastions in the Global North and South, voices are rising, networks are forming, and spaces are being created to dismantle colonial dogmas. These decolonial struggles are not abstractions. They are acts of survival, daily gestures of repair, and impulses to break the invisible chains that keep the wretched in conditions of systemic injustice.
Yet, these struggles rarely find an echo. Political systems conceal them to mask their fragility, and the media ostracize them to sustain the status quo. These reactions obscure emerging solidarities, blur understanding of the struggles, and prevent indignation from uniting. But even if truths are masked, they exist stubbornly among witnesses, in the accounts of survivors, and in the shards of a reality that no one can stifle.
In this crushed world, rising amidst the ruins is an act of faith: it means refusing to let the ruins speak alone, giving them a language of dignity, courage, and hope, and rejecting the order imposed by those who profit from chaos. In Palestine, Africa, South America, and all those spaces strangled by centuries of colonization and violence, the Global South rises and reclaims its memory, its narratives, and its right to a dignified future.
It would be easy to succumb to despair in the face of such suffering, the complicity of authoritarian states, the inertia of national institutions, and the discrediting of the international system. But history teaches us that the most just struggles were never “granted.” They progress, falter, and are reborn from their collapses. Every recorded testimony, every signed petition, every organized protest, every written word is an act of resistance. Every expression of solidarity is a step toward a world where humanity regains its authenticity. These gestures are precisely the foundation upon which the institutions, states, and international system to come—or rather, to be brought into existence—will stand.
As this year ends, let us refuse to bow. Let us refuse to look away. Let us refuse to remain silent. Let us honour the Gazans buried beneath the rubble, the Sudanese who perished in the desert, and the Haitians who fell to bullets by reaffirming that justice is our only compass. We are the heirs of past struggles, and we have the duty to be the builders of those to come. The dawn will break if we have the courage to make it break amidst the ruins, beyond the walls, at the very heart of the darkness. Because to resist is already to rebuild.
