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Movements, Justice and Collective Power
Resistance and Solidarity – Movements, Justice and Collective Power
RESISTANCE AND SOLIDARITY
COLLECTIVE STRUGGLE, MEMORY AND THE POLITICS OF ACTION
Resistance is rarely the work of individuals alone. It is built through solidarity across communities, generations and borders and is sustained through shared memory, language and action. Resistance & Solidarity gathers writing that centers collective struggle, historical movements, and the enduring fight against injustice. These articles do not romanticise resistance. They examine its conditions, its risks and its contradictions. They ask how solidarity is formed, how it fractures and how movements survive repression, erasure or co-option. This is where history and the present meet — not as nostalgia, but as continuum.
RESISTANCE IS RARELY SOLITARY
Resistance and Solidarity is where Pen vs Sword explores collective action, moral courage and the shared struggle for justice.
From civil rights movements to contemporary activism, this section examines how individuals and communities organise against oppression and how solidarity is built, sustained and tested. These articles focus not on spectacle, but on persistence: the slow, often difficult work of change. Pen vs Sword approaches resistance as both historical and ongoing. By tracing movements, figures and moments of collective defiance, we hope to highlight how social progress has always depended on organised pressure rather than benevolent power.
Resistance and Solidarity is not romantic. It acknowledges failure, compromise and internal tension. But it insists that resistance matters, not as purity, but as participation.
SOLIDARITY ACROSS DIFFERENCE
The articles here reflect and return to a central question: how do people act together in the face of injustice? Across different contexts, resistance appears as a collective practice shaped by history, culture and material conditions. Many pieces focus on figures whose work exemplifies sustained commitment rather than momentary visibility. Activism is presented not as a single act, but as a long process involving organisation, sacrifice and ethical clarity.
Another recurring theme is solidarity across difference. Movements succeed not by uniformity, but by coalition and by recognising shared stakes amid unequal experiences. Articles in this category explore how solidarity is built, where it fractures and why it remains necessary. Historical struggles appear not as closed chapters, but as resources. By revisiting civil unrest, revolutionary movements and campaigns for rights, we attempt to make connections between past and present, showing how patterns repeat and lessons endure.
Resistance and Solidarity ultimately positions action as relational. Change emerges not from isolated heroes, but from people acting together, imperfectly, persistently and often against overwhelming odds.
The Featured articles on collective strugglebelow trace how resistance is built, sustained and shared. Spanning labour movements, civil rights struggles and collective uprisings, these articles foreground solidarity as a practice rather than a sentiment — forged through common conditions, shared language and organised action. Read together, they reveal resistance not as isolated moments of rupture, but as a continuous, collective effort shaped by memory, strategy and mutual recognition.
The Womens March on Versailles – A Turning Point in the French Revolution
FEATURED THE WOMEN’S MARCH ON VERSAILLES
Hunger, anger and collective political force
The Women’s March on Versailles in October 1789 stands as one of history’s first mass expressions of organised collective power. Driven by food scarcity, economic desperation and political exclusion, the march brought working-class women into direct confrontation with France’s ruling elite. Far from spontaneous spectacle, this extraordinary mobilisation revealed how shared hardship and mutual recognition can transform despair into collective action and how solidarity across class lines can force power to reckon with popular demands.
Revolution and Civil War – Echoes in the Age of Global Upheaval
REVOLUTION AND CIVIL WAR
Historical lessons for contemporary resistance
Traceing the seismic moments when people in motion reshape the political order, showing how structural inequality, contested power and collective will can erupt into transformative conflict. By examining the forces that drive uprisings, resistance movements and sustained struggle, we highlight the interconnectedness of cultural norms, economic conditions and organised action — reminding us that resistance is often forged in the crucible of collective crisis rather than isolated individual effort.
Angela Davis – A Living Legacy of Activism and Academia
DEEP DIVE ANGELA DAVIS : A LEGACY OF ACTIVISM
Intellect, resistance and collective liberation
Angela Davis’s lifelong work as an activist, scholar and organiser illustrates how resistance is sustained through critical thought, collective struggle and intersectional solidarity. From confronting Jim Crow segregation to challenging systemic racism, sexism and the prison-industrial complex, Davis’s life embodies the idea that liberation is a shared project rooted in both ideas and action.
Howard Zinn’s work, from A People’s History to his lifelong engagement with movements for justice, exemplifies how resistance is rooted in the stories we tell about ourselves. Zinn argued that ordinary people, not elites, are the real makers of history, and that understanding this empowers collective action. His commitment to amplifying voices marginalised by dominant narratives reminds us that solidarity is not an abstract ideal but a practice grounded in shared experience, moral clarity, and sustained engagement with injustice.
Resistance is not spontaneous — it is cultivated. It grows from shared histories, inherited tactics, and the slow work of building trust across difference. These articles remind us that solidarity is not sentimental, nor abstract: it is strategic, relational and often hard-won. It emerges where people recognise themselves in one another’s struggles, across class, geography, race or generation and decide that survival and dignity are collective projects rather than individual achievements.
By placing historical and contemporary movements side by side, Resistance & Solidarity resists the comforting idea that resistance belongs neatly to either the past or the present. Instead, it traces continuities: how victories are partial, how gains are contested, and how lessons travel across time. This section refuses heroic simplifications and instead foregrounds endurance, the persistence of organising, the recycling of repression, and the ongoing need for collective response. Resistance here is not mythologised; it is studied, shared and kept alive.
The featured pieces here represent only a portion of Pen vs Sword’s writing on movements, justice and collective struggle linking histories, campaigns and acts of solidarity across time and geography.
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RELATED READING
Books about Resistance and Solidarity – Learn how movements sustain themselves through knowledge as much as action
Social movements and resistance history – Human rights and civil liberties – Feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle – Collective action and political change – These texts offer context, continuity and tools for thinking critically about resistance beyond headlines.
A Garland for May – As the burgeoning Arts and Crafts movement converged to create a powerful artistic and political force in Britain, a Garland for May Day was born
RELATED ARTICLE A GARLAND FOR MAY
Celebration, labour history and collective memory
“Garland for May Day” reflects on the cultural and political significance of International Workers’ Day — a moment rooted in the struggle for labour rights, solidarity and collective action. By tracing the rituals, symbols and histories that surround May Day, we highlight how workers around the world have repeatedly turned commemoration into mobilisation, forging bonds of solidarity that extend beyond workplaces into wider social movements.
Alice Walker A Life of Art, Activism, and the Pursuit of Justice
RECOMMENDED ALICE WALKER – DEDICATED TO ART AND ACTIVISM
Voice, empathy and the politics of shared struggle
Alice Walker’s writing and activism show how narrative can animate and sustain movements for justice. Across fiction and essays, she emphasises dignity, empathy and collective memory as foundations of resistance — confronting racism, sexism and exclusion not only through protest but through narrative reclamation. Her work demonstrates that literary imagination and social solidarity are not separate acts, but intertwined forces in the struggle for a more equitable humanity.
You might also be interested in these categories which offer different angles on power and culture – and how historical and contemporary movements confront injustice, power and inequality across borders.
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