Last week, I joined ActionAid Assembly members and colleagues from 47 countries who came together ahead of the Finance for Development Summit in Seville Spain. Had also the opportunity to join migrant African Workers labouring in the Strawberry fields of Huelva Andalucia, LGBTQI activists at Seville Pride, feminist sisters and brothers in discussions on financing for development at the Universidad de Sevilla, listen in powerful articulations by humanitarian workers and activists from Gaza, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Vietnam, South Africa, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo on their grounded efforts, while also walking around Seville to learn about its “golden” age – as the primary port for trade controlling all transatlantic trade and the first hoarding point for all colonial loot from the Americas.

Our coming together, inspired in the face of rapid tectonic shifts unravelling now, was deeply needed. At the current conjecture, militant imperialism attempts to decimate and weaken nation-states with wars. Across nations, we see attacks on peoples resistance, by actors who view vast majorities of people as “surplus”. We see naked repression and other sophisticated techniques for destroying emerging solidarities, including calculated campaigns of disinformation premised on the deliberate stoking of fires of hate. Amid all the killing fields, backlash on the rights of women, creating divisions amongst social and ethnic diversities and all the working peoples, there is an attempt to even shift the idea of truth, in the face of defiant lies and falsehoods. There is little surprise that the Seville Financing For Development conference seems unable to hold any creative energy. Development aid cuts have been phenomenal, with countries diverting development cooperation resources to their militaries, and a growing gap in annual development finance is increasing to USD 4 trillion.

There is little doubt left now that the attack on Gaza is a forecast for an attempted future, which has been done before. Iran (1953, 2025), Afghanistan (1979, 1992, 1996, 2001), Libya (2011), Syria (2011 onwards). “Recalcitrant” nation states are more vulnerable to the risk.

Yet, and perhaps more powerfully, this moment also marks one of the most incredible anticolonial resistance moments of the 21st century. Hope is epitomised in the resistance of people of Gaza and indeed the manifold resistances of people in the bellies of the beasts and their acolytes. We can see the assertions of indigenous peoples in the so-called “first nations enclaves” for total decolonisation, the working classes seeking dignified work and fair wages, women pushing to consign patriarchy to the dustbin, and activists seeking colonial and climate reparations, and the cancellation of debts. These movements have a common soul and hold a common promise – that of liberation.

From where I see the world, ecologies of liberation are being created by peoples solidarity struggles. It will take mobilisation on a scale of People Power never seen before, to make the dream of a just, equal, and sustainable world a reality. To that idea of social progress and liberation, we at @ActionAid Association remain committed.