By Mercè Monje Cano, Secretary-General of UNPO

Thinking about solidarity, I look through the window of my office and see my son playing in the garden with a friend, both holding two pieces of wood and guarding a little refuge they have built for the tap out of stones. Watching them, I am reminded that long before humanity invented writing, states, markets, or human rights treaties, we invented something far more powerful: the instinct to help one another.

Long before any terminology, there was the practice, and long after the theory fades, the practice remains.

Anthropologists (and children) often remind us that early humans survived not because they were the strongest, but because they shared. If the hunt failed, the group still ate. If someone fell sick, others took over their tasks. No one called it “solidarity” then, but that is exactly what it was: an ancient survival technology woven into our earliest communities.

Communities with the least recognition often practice solidarity with the greatest clarity.

Fast-forward to today, and we find ourselves in a world where the ground never stops shifting. Wars multiply, civic space collapses, climate disasters pile up, and many governments drift toward authoritarianism. And yet, in the middle of all this fragmentation, something remarkable keeps happening: people reach out.

Working with more than 40 unrepresented nations and peoples at the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), I see this every day. Communities whose lands are under threat, whose languages are disappearing, whose political rights have been erased, instead of retreating inward, they extend their hands outward. Not as a feel-good gesture, but as a strategy. As a lifeline. As proof that isolation is not inevitable.

Solidarity is the quiet opposite of despair.

But why does solidarity still matter (and always has)?

As I reached this point in my reflections, I felt the need to go back to the origins. Origins  (and every step that brings us to the “now”) are essential to understanding both the present and the future. But the reality is that a day at UNPO is a day that never stops. How does one find time for etymological or philosophical research?

We now have the option of asking AI. But luckily, we also have the option of asking our elders, their memories, their knowledge. In my case, this meant calling my retired parents and kindly asking them to visit the library and spend a few hours looking through old books.

Then I waited patiently for what the wisdom of the elders—and the quiet peace of a library—would bring back.

And here came the surprise: we often treat “solidarity” as a soft word—warm, vague, moral. But its roots are anything but soft.

The term comes from Roman law: in solidum, shared liability for a common debt. If one failed, all were responsible. Later, French political thinkers transformed this into a social contract: since our lives are interdependent, we owe one another protection. Philosophers then turned it into a theory of what holds societies together.

Solidarity is what breaks the isolation that modern capitalism so effectively manufactures. It is what turns empathy into action. It reminds us that survival, whether in a prehistoric valley or a digital age, is never an individual project.

The view from the margins

When I joined UNPO in 2019, I stepped into a universe of peoples the international system largely refuses to acknowledge: Indigenous nations, stateless communities, occupied territories, de facto states. Peoples with no seat at the UN, no diplomatic corps, no official recognition, but with histories, cultures, and collective rights as old as humanity itself.

And here is the irony: the communities with the least recognition often practice solidarity with the greatest clarity.

I have watched a letter from one member in Asia arrive as a lifeline to another in East Africa. I have seen messages of support travel from Indigenous forest guardians to coastal communities defending their islands from erosion. Sometimes the notes are public; often they are discreet, shared only with those who need them.

Repression thrives on silence. Solidarity interrupts it.

Communities reach out among themselves, and they reach out to the organisation. And UNPO is an organisation in which the sun never sets. People write to ask for a hand, a word, advice, a moment of brainstorming, a moment of sharing.

On the website these appear as “statements”. In reality, they are pulses—signs that someone, somewhere, is watching, listening, witnessing.

Repression thrives on silence. Solidarity interrupts it.

But beyond that, solidarity is not a slogan. For unrepresented peoples, solidarity is profoundly strategic.

When one community speaks up for another, they:

  • Redistribute visibility, amplifying causes otherwise erased.
  • Share risk, diluting the danger for those who are most targeted.
  • Translate experience, helping others navigate repression, documentation, or community protection.
  • Build leverage, reaching institutions that would ignore them individually.

In an era of transnational repression, digital surveillance, and geopolitical realignment, solidarity becomes a kind of collective intelligence. Communities learn from one another how to stay safe, protect their identities, defend their land, and advocate for their rights in spaces designed to exclude them.

Solidarity is an operating system

Strategy explains solidarity’s strength, but it doesn’t explain its power. That lives elsewhere.

I have lost count of how many times I’ve heard the same sentence from members:

“We thought we were alone.”

Then someone writes. Someone calls. A delegation visits. A name is spoken aloud in Geneva (correctly pronounced). A story is echoed in our offices. And suddenly, a struggle becomes visible, shared, real.

This is the emotional truth of solidarity. For peoples facing cultural erasure, solidarity is not symbolic. It is evidence of existence.

The moral question in front of us

In this moment of isolation, fear, polarisation, and rising conflict, I believe solidarity is three things:

  • Strategic, because isolation is engineered and powerful.
  • Necessary, because global crises are interconnected.
  • A moral imperative, because it forces us to choose the world we want.

So my question is the following:

Do we want a world where rights become privileges for the geopolitically useful, and solidarity (and empathy) become outdated? Do we leave the hunter who had a bad day without food while concentrating everything on one individual of the tribe—risking one dying of obesity and the others of hunger?

Or do we want a world where we come together to face common challenges and defend common dignity?

Solidarity is the bridge between these worlds. Beyond declarations

The danger, of course, is that solidarity becomes a comfortable word. Easy to sign. Easy to tweet. Easy to forget.

Real solidarity demands more:

  • from declarations to presence,
  • from sympathy to resource-sharing,
  • from moments to long-term alliances.

Within UNPO, communities and the Secretariat know this instinctively. Those who speak today may need help tomorrow. Reciprocity is not abstract, it is lived.

Which brings us back, ironically, to the Roman origin: in solidum. A shared responsibility. A shared risk. A shared future.

In a world that refuses to stay still

Solidarity is often dismissed as naïve in a world obsessed with “hard power”. But nothing I see suggests this.

Solidarity is not soft. It is not passive. And it is not simplistic.

It is one of the hardest tools we have, because it requires courage, imagination, discipline, and the willingness to see beyond our own borders and fears.

Solidarity will not erase injustice overnight. But it refuses to let injustice write the final chapter. And in that refusal, something new is born: a different logic, a different kind of politics, a different world struggling to come into view.

The same instinct that saved our ancestors still runs in us. The same practice that allowed small communities to survive harsh landscapes is what will allow us to survive the global ones.

We have always lived—and survived—in solidum. The question now is whether we choose to remember it.