The year 2024 saw a critical conjuncture for democracy as 3.7 billion people took part in the biggest election year in history, with almost half of the world’s population going to the polls in 72 countries across different continents.[1] This took place in an era of multi-layered and interlocking crises of climate breakdown, wars and regional conflicts, economic instabilities and inequalities, geopolitical upheavals, democratic backsliding, and the rise of fascist and authoritarian regimes. As governments from both the Global South and North have increasingly become repressive, corrupt, and brazen with impunity, democracies across the globe have faced tremendous and intense challenges over the years.
Today’s world is plagued by increasingly complex and intertwined crises that have become both structural and systemic. At the same time, the dominant neoliberal-authoritarian order has continued to subject both people and the planet to such a state of deep distress. Unabating attacks on fundamental rights and freedoms through domination and blunt-force approach by both states and corporations have deepened the crisis of legitimacy and confidence in the existing order, including in supposed democratic systems.
Authoritarian rulers and oppressive regimes, sanctioned by flawed electoral exercises, have exploited populist-nationalist narratives to suppress civil liberties and justify restrictive policies in the name of ‘security’ and ‘peace’ (that is, of the elites). Propped up by the disenfranchisement and disenchantment of peoples and communities, the economic elites who in most cases are one and the same as the political elites have been voted into positions where they are able to employ various forms of violence and harm—direct, structural, gender-based, cultural, and legal—against peasants, fisherfolk, Indigenous Peoples, workers, women, journalists, activists, and the youth. This has also involved continued and escalating harassment and attacks through the abuse, manipulation, and weaponization of laws and legal systems.
But peoples and communities have not remained quiet.
In various struggles for the true meaning of democracy, justice, and peace, they have mobilized to defend their rights through direct action through peaceful assemblies and occupations, utilizing their rights to freedom of expression and to information, and campaigning in social media. They have sought solutions, urged governments and courts to act by lodging complaints and petitions, and articulated their critiques and demands at ‘formal’ and multilateral spaces such as the United Nations (UN) and its related agencies.
Fighting back and advancing the struggles
At the global level, following the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) rulings on South Africa’s genocide case versus Israel and the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) decisions and issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leadership for war crimes, various states have signed on to the Hague Group convened by Progressive International (PI) in January 2025.[2] The Global South is spearheading this coordinated push for collective action through international law to ensure that Israel and its complicit backers—in their more than a year of relentless levelling in Gaza, occupation of Palestinian territories, and apartheid against Palestinians—will be made to fully account for their deeds. This, with the view of ending Israeli exceptionalism, settler-colonialism, and systemic impunity.
Early this year, through the collective efforts by KATARUNGAN (Movement for Social Justice and Agrarian Reform) and solidarity groups, seven farmer leaders were provisionally freed after posting bail for trumped-up charges. This temporary win for SANAMABASU (United People of Barangay Sumalo) came after receiving an important international support in the form of a joint communication sent to the Philippine Government and the concerned company by various UN Special Rapporteurs (UNSR) and Working Groups (WG).[3] It highlights just one of the many emblematic cases of a rising number of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) thrown against land, Indigenous, women, human and environmental rights defenders in recent years, and how communities and movements worked together in resisting lawfare and criminalization.
Similarly, across national levels in South and Southeast Asia, several peoples’ victories were also attained.
In the Philippines, since the passage of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 under Rodrigo Duterte’s despotic regime, cases filed against human rights defenders and activists under the draconian law have been dismissed by the Supreme Court. This was a result of the sustained efforts of progressive lawyers, human rights organizations, and peoples’ movements working hand in hand in the defense of rights. According to the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL), “at least five anti-terrorism cases have collapsed in court due to the state’s inability to provide sufficient evidence to support their claims.”[4]
In Cambodia, despite the worsening human rights situation and shrinking civic spaces, the forced closure of independent media outlets, crackdowns and dismantling of opposition parties, communities are fighting back to defend and assert their rights. More than 50 peoples’ movements and civil society organizations stood in solidarity against the sentencing of ten young environmental activists from Mother Nature Cambodia last year for “plotting against the government.”[5] They have also condemned the heavy-handed arrests of almost one hundred people for opposing the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam Development Triangle Area (CLV-DTA).
In India, hundreds of thousands of farmers camped around the capital to pressure the government to repeal the three Farm Bills (Indian Agriculture Acts of 2020) that were aimed at overhauling India’s agricultural economy.[6] Subsequent to this historic Farmers’ Protest in 2020, thousands of farmers, agricultural workers, and women in Karnataka—many of whom lost their lands to big mining companies—launched an indefinite dharna (protest sit-in) in February 2025 to fight back against the corporate plunder of their livelihoods and resources and to demand socio-economic justice and just compensation.[7]
Recent cases of peoples’ victories in the realm of compensatory justice and criminal justice would also show that while the wheels of justice turn slowly, they grind exceedingly fine.
After 21 years of legal struggles with the Marcopper Mining Corporation (MMC), a landmark court decision awarded damages to mining-affected communities in the Philippines. The Marinduque Regional Trial Court found MMC liable for the 1993 discharge of toxic mine waste that rendered the Boac River biologically dead.[8] While the disaster caused irreparable environmental damage and the decision took decades, it nonetheless delivered partial justice to the communities who were displaced and had lost their livelihoods. Moreover, it exposed the underlying issues and pitfalls of the 30 years of ineffective, inequitable, and neoliberal mining regime under the Mining Act of 1995.
Likewise, in what was described by Global Witness as the “deadliest place to defend the planet,” there was a partial delivery of justice when after more than six years of waiting, the Supreme Court of Justice of Honduras sentenced Sergio Rodríguez Orellana to 30 years in prison for the aggravated murder of Berta Cáceres.[9] At the time of her death, Berta was the General Coordinator the Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) and a key Indigenous leader in the Lenca struggle against the Agua Zarca Dam. COPINH considered this a ‘popular victory’ attained in the long and winding road for justice for Berta and other Indigenous Peoples, women and environmental rights defenders, and climate justice activists killed worldwide.[10]
Taking the long view
A peoples’ ‘victory’ can also mean planting the seeds of other ‘wins’ for the future and would necessitate patient and sustained peoples’ struggles for them to bear fruit and deliver concrete outcomes in the longer term.
In May 2022, the National Inquiry on Climate Change (NICC) under the Commission of Human Rights (CHR) of the Philippines released the report of its investigation into 47 corporations for human rights and climate change-related harms resulting from their actions (and inactions) and found legal grounds to hold them accountable.[11] The landmark inquiry has underscored the climate crisis as a human rights crisis, building on seven years of public hearings with civil society and affected communities, consultations with experts, and in-depth research. Riding on the momentum of the CHR’s report examining the climate change-human rights nexus, a new proposed law seeking to establish a legal framework for climate loss and damage accountability has been filed before the Philippine Congress in 2023. The historic Climate Accountability Act (CLIMA) puts a spotlight on corporate climate accountability and with it, outlines concrete mechanisms to exact reparations from those most responsible for worsening the climate crisis, including peddlers of climate denialism and greenwashing.[12]
In Nepal, after years of collective struggles by various peoples’ movements of small-scale food providers, scholar-activists, and progressive lawyers, food sovereignty was enshrined as a fundamental right in the Constitution. While implementation remains a challenge, the popularization of the concept and practice of food sovereignty, as well as the formulation of relevant laws and regulations represent significant achievements.[13]
‘Love wins’ in Thailand after decades of steadfast advocacy and commitment by LGBTIQ+ and human rights movements, as the new Marriage Equality Law came into effect last month, a historic first in Southeast Asia.[14] The law guarantees that all people have equal access and treatment regardless of their Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression, and Sex Characteristics (SOGIESC), and all can live with pride and dignity.
In all these victories, new waves and generations of activism have emerged, happening in a decentralized patchwork of rainbow collectives of diverse peoples and communities working for all rights and freedoms of all.
Converging hopes and counternarratives
Grassroots and broad-based social movements for peace, democracy, social and ecological justice, massively embraced by the youth, have also sprouted across continents. Together with artist collectives and cultural workers for solidarity and resistance, they all keep hopes and dreams alive of radically alternative futures. They persist in weaving progressive ideas and practices, advancing systemic alternatives, and linking campaigns across various peoples’ struggles, like what the ‘network of networks’ Global Tapestry of Alternatives, transnational exchanges such as the World Social Forum, and other ‘movements of movements’ have done and strive to do under present-day conditions.
Each of them feeds into rivers and tributaries of progressive change and systemic transformations, whose waters oftentimes are made murky, invisibilized, and erased by dominant narratives of devastation and regression. Their protests and campaigns, mutual aid and solidarity initiatives, and continuing acts of resistance go against the engulfing tides of corporations and elite political systems. As these movements converge, strategize, and confront challenges together—moving away from a position of (learned) helplessness and hopelessness that the prevailing order wants to preserve—seemingly ‘insurmountable storms’ become catalysts for systemic change and transformation.
Thus, celebrating these peoples’ victories, while going through recurring cycles of critical reflection and action towards a praxis of knowing, doing, and being, remains imperative.
Three days ago, on the 39th commemoration of the People Power Revolution that toppled the Marcos dictatorship, schools, communities, and movements in the Philippines stood in steadfast and defiant resistance to the insidious attempts to deny, distort, downgrade, and devalue its significance. As intergenerational movements collectively remember and reignite the diwa (spirit) of resistance for truth, accountability, and justice, democracy finds a more fertile ground for cultivation in these times of great distrust, division, and polarization.
An equally important task is continually documenting and learning from the ‘positives struggling to be heard,’ providing spaces for their articulation, and amplifying grassroots narratives from below. This includes recognizing the “power of the small” and creative innovations and acts of resistance that “strengthen peoples’ agency and foster their autonomy, while at the same time respect and uphold their dignity.”[15]
For these counternarratives, rooted in the recognition of shared struggles, also serve as a testament to the refusal to accept the status quo and to give up on the visions of a more just, equitable, sustainable, and decolonizing world, in which genuine democracies—in the true sense of the word—are collectively developed and nurtured.
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[1] United Nations Development Programme. (2024 June 4). A Super Year for Elections. New York, United States: UNDP. Retrieved from https://www.undp.org/super-year-elections
[2] The Hague Group includes Belize, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal, and South Africa. For further information, please go to https://thehaguegroup.org/
[3] Joint communication by the UNSRs on the Right to Food, Adequate Housing an Adequate Standard of Living, the Right to Non-discrimination, and on the situation of human rights defenders, alongside the UNWG on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises and the UNWG on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas (UNDROP).
[4] Bolledo, J. (2024 November 22). Under Marcos Jr., terror cases on the rise against ‘easy targets’. Pasig City, Philippines: Rappler. Retrieved from https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/in-depth/ferdinand-marcos-jr-terror-cases-rise-easy-targets/
[5] Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights. (2024 July 4). Joint Statement: Conviction of Mother Nature Activists is a National Shame. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: LICADHO. Retrieved from https://www.licadho-cambodia.org/pressrelease.php?perm=529
[6] Focus on the Global South. (2022 April 5). Indian Farmers Inspire Fight Against Neoliberalism. New Delhi, India. Retrieved from: https://focusweb.org/indian-farmers-inspire-fight-against-neoliberalism/
[7] Rahman, A. (2025 February 12). Karnataka: Farmers Launch Indefinite Protest Sit-in. New Delhi, India: NewsClick. Retrieved from https://www.newsclick.in/karnataka-farmers-launch-indefinite-protest-sit
[8] Mangosing, F., & Lagran, M. (2022 May 25). Groups praise court decision holding Marcopper liable for 1993 disaster. Makati City, Philippines: INQUIRER.net. Retrieved from https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1602074/court-finds-marcopper-liable-for-1993-disaster
[9] Global Witness (2017 January 31). Honduras: the deadliest country in the world for environmental activism. London, United Kingdom: Global Witness. Retrieved from https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/land-and-environmental-defenders/honduras-deadliest-country-world-environmental-activism/
[10] Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras (COPINH). (2025 February 7). COMUNICADO N°1 2025: Corte Suprema de Justicia confirma sentencia de Sergio Rodríguez Orellana, empleado de la familia Atala, como autor del asesinato de Berta Cáceres y condena a 30 años de prisión. La Esperanza, Intibucá. English translation of the communiqué retrieved from https://aplaneta.org/6-years-after-the-sentence-against-one-of-the-murderers-of-berta-caceres-is-confirmed/
[11] Greenpeace Southeast Asia. (2022 May 6). Landmark inquiry finds legal grounds to hold climate-destroying corporations accountable. Quezon City, Philippines. Retrieved from https://www.greenpeace.org/southeastasia/press/45336/landmark-inquiry-finds-legal-grounds-to-hold-climate-destroying-corporations-accountable%ef%bf%bc/
[12] Taqueban, E.M. (2024 December 5). The urgency of climate accountability. Quezon City, Philippines: Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center – Kasama sa Kalikasan / Friends of the Earth Philippines. Retrieved from https://www.lrcksk.org/post/the-urgency-of-climate-accountability
[13] Pokharel, P. (2024 August 23). Food Sovereignty as a Constitutional Right in Nepal – Evolution and Challenges. All Nepal Peasants’ Federation. Retrieved from https://viacampesina.org/en/2024/08/food-sovereignty-as-a-constitutional-right-in-nepal-evolution-and-challenges/
[14] Friberg-Storey, M. (2025 January 23). Thailand’s Marriage Equality Law: Love wins and no one is left behind. Bangkok, Thailand: United Nations. Retrieved from https://thailand.un.org/en/287933-thailand%E2%80%99s-marriage-equality-law-love-wins-and-no-one-left-behind
[15] Castillo, G.D.G. (2021 May 18). Dis(seed)ence. Manila, Philippines: Focus on the Global South. Retrieved from https://focusweb.org/disseedence/
