The Global North faces a moment of reckoning; a moment the Global South knows well. The rise of leaders with authoritarian leanings, the spread of disinformation , and the erosion of democratic norms – as epitomized by the return of Donald Trump, shadowed by billionaire oligarchs like Elon Musk, to the U.S. presidency – have created a climate where human rights are increasingly under threat. Populations that once considered themselves insulated from human rights violations and the fear of political uncertainty are now confronting these crises within their own borders. Many are at a loss as to what to do.
The answer: look to the Global South for guidance.
Afghan human rights advocates, and others from the Global South, carry a legacy of resistance and resilience forged in the crucible of systemic injustice. We are prepared for whatever trials this new era of rights retrenchment may bring; for us, it is simply another chapter in a long struggle.
The real question is how long the Global North will take to summon the confidence to confront that struggle head on.
In recent months, from Geneva to London to The Hague, I have met scores of Western advocates, scholars, activists, and journalists – people visibly shaken by the democratic unravelling around them. What once seemed like a distant problem, easily dismissed as happening “somewhere else,” is now knocking at their own doors.
My counsel to each has been consistent: look southward, not with pity but with humility. Learn from our hard-won experience. We will wear as a crown of honor the chance to stand beside you and help equip you for this fight — not out of any feeling of superiority, but as fellow human beings who share the same planet and the same conviction that every life holds equal worth.
The Farsi phrase “az bala be pain” — meaning “from above to below” — perfectly captures the paternalistic posture baked into today’s human rights architecture. For decades, the narrative has often been one of the Global North extending a helping hand to the South, as if human rights issues were unique to what once was called the “Third World.” This helping hand came a presumption: that the Global North was obliged to manage our crises for us, rather than with us, as if the Global South could not survive without the North’s assistance.
At no point since modern human rights law was codified has the Global South felt such acute estrangement from it. This has fueled a growing discourse among academics that these norms serve less as a means of liberation than as a neocolonial collar that keeps us subordinated. According to Makau wa Mutua, these norms are “Eurocentric constructs for the reconstitution of non-Western societies and peoples with a set of culturally biased norms and practices,” a judgment that B.S. Chimni extended when he argues that those constructs “have now spawned neocolonialism.”
This cannot resonate more loudly than when a majority White U.N. staff debate the fate of Kabul or Naypyidaw from air-conditioned conference rooms in Geneva or Brussels, an arrangement so unequal that a 2024 survey found over one-third of employees in those very offices reporting racial discrimination within the institution itself.
Perhaps, then, the tumult now unsettling Berlin, Ottawa, and Washington is not the prologue to collapse but an unexpected opportunity through which a truer, less hierarchical human rights order might at last emerge.
For the first time since 1948, citizens of the Global North confront the same vertigo that has long been a daily reality in the Global South. It is now their courts as well that have been defanged by populists, their journalists hounded by troll farms, their neighbors suddenly disappeared because of the passports they carry or the kind of prayers they utter.
Yet within that vertigo lies a possibility that the old architecture never imagined: the possibility that the “universal” can finally be universalized through equal engagement rather than prescription, through dialogue rather than diktat.
To seize this opportunity, the Global North must abandon the conceit that wisdom flows only downhill. We have practiced, out of grim necessity, modes of survival that fuse rights-defense with community self-reliance.
In Afghanistan, we establish underground schools for girls when decrees closed classrooms in the name of religion. We stand in front of bullets when gender apartheid is implemented.
In Iran, we burn hijabs in sight of the morality police in open defiance. In Syria, phone trees warn whole villages before air raids.
In Bangladesh, even after hundreds of students were killed, we continued to protest an autocrat; in Rohingya refugee camps, we draw on YouTube and each other for education.
These are not romantic tales of endurance; they are laboratories of democratic muscle-memory, forged where formal protections failed. They remind us that the precondition of rights is not paperwork but collective imagination – what the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire called the “practice of freedom,” a pedagogy in which teacher and student learn together and power is perpetually re-negotiated. That practice can travel northward, if the Global North is willing to sit, listen, and learn.
Such learning demands epistemic humility. It requires U.N. agencies and European ministries to stop listing us in footnotes and instead replace the aerial map with the round table. It means inviting Maasai land defenders, Rohingya archivists, Afghan women rights and gender apartheid campaigners, and others as co-authors of policy. It means funding structures that channel resources directly to grassroots networks, instead of padding the budgets of contractors whose PowerPoint presentations have little connection with the ground reality. Above all, it entails recognizing that resilience is not a consolation prize for the poor; it is a reservoir of political technology that the wealthy Global North now needs.
If the Global North can muster that humility, a revolution of parity becomes conceivable: one in which Kabul is no longer merely the object of resolutions drafted in Brussels but a source of jurisprudence cited in Brussels; one in which “capacity-building” ceases to be a euphemism for tutelage and becomes a two-way current of skills, stories, and strategies.
The road will be long for the Global North, yes, but we have traveled longer roads. Let this moment of shared uncertainty be the forge of a shared future, an architecture built not “az bala be pain,” but shoulder to shoulder, each seam strengthened by the hands of all who will live beneath its shelter.
