Bodies and Borders: Transnational convening in a polarizing world

The world that young LGBTQI+ activists and feminists across the Global Majority are navigating in 2026 is one of escalating danger, deliberate destabilisation, and deepening inequality. The global polycrisis, the steady rise of authoritarianism, and the weaponisation of borders have made movement  – literal and political – more fraught than ever.

This is not hyperbole, it is the operating reality of our movements and at CHEVS, we refuse to pretend otherwise.

Across the globe, authoritarian and anti-rights forces are not retreating, they are advancing, coordinating, and consolidating. As the Journal of Democracy has documented, opposition to LGBTQI+ rights has become a primary instrument of authoritarian legitimacy, used by illiberal leaders to polarise public debate, undermine democratic institutions, and build cross-border alliances of repression. This is not an isolated trend. It is a global strategy.

The United States, once positioned as a defender of human rights globally, is undergoing a rapid and alarming regression. The US is now part of the problem: criminalising dissent, detaining immigrants without due process, and rolling back protections for LGBTQI+ communities at home while reducing its commitment to human rights abroad. What happens in the US does not stay in the US, it sets precedents that embolden repressive governments around the world.

This year, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) convenes at the United Nations in New York,  a critical gathering for feminist and LGBTQI+ movements. Yet the atmosphere surrounding it is one of deep anxiety. As documented by CIVICUS LENS, CSW 2025 unfolded against a backdrop of "unprecedented tension" as a broad coalition of states mounted coordinated attacks on gender rights, with the US under the Trump administration and Saudi Arabia as chair both actively working against progress.

For CHEVS and the communities we work with,  young LGBTQI+ Africans, queer feminists, frontline activists from the Global Majority,  this is not an abstract geopolitical concern. It is a lived reality that shapes who gets to be in the room, whose voices are heard, and whose bodies bear the cost of global advocacy.

Passport inequality, racialised border enforcement, and the constant risk of detention, deportation, or worse mean that many of our most critical voices are being filtered out of global spaces before they even arrive. Children are being detained. Documented immigrants are being treated as criminals. The lines between legality and illegality are being redrawn overnight,  by executive order, by social media posts, by the stroke of a pen.

The threats to movement safety extend beyond US borders. Europe's eastern flank is under renewed pressure. Rhetoric around Greenland, escalating militarisation in Arctic corridors, and the unresolved tensions among NATO allies all point to a geopolitical moment in which war is not an abstraction. Conflict in Sudan continues to devastate the continent. The Democratic Republic of Congo remains in crisis. For activists from Africa and across the Global Majority, geopolitical volatility is not background noise,  it is a direct determinant of whether travel is possible, whether visas are granted, whether bodies arrive safely.

At CHEVS, we have always believed that the answers to our liberation lie within our communities, our continent, and our collective power. This moment deepens our conviction. We are seeding new ways for LGBTQI+ groups to move, coordinate, and build advocacy power from the ground up, centred on African realities and led by African voices.

But building at home does not mean we do not feel what is being taken from us.We grieve what is lost when our people cannot physically be present: the hallway strategies, the embodied solidarity, the friendships built across movements in the same room. These losses are real and they are unequally distributed. Frontline activists from the Global Majority;  those who most need access to these spaces , will be even fewer this year.

The polarisation of the world is also, paradoxically, a call to deepen our roots. When global convening spaces become inaccessible or unsafe, the question is not whether to stop organising,  it is how to organise differently, more powerfully, and closer to community. CHEVS is committed to moving resources closer to the frontlines, building decentralised infrastructure, and challenging the model that asks the most marginalised activists to pay for justice work with their bodies, their freedom, or their lives.

Collective Responsibility Is Not Optional

This moment demands something from all of us,  from funders, from UN agencies, from international partners, from peer organisations. It demands that we stop treating risk as acceptable collateral in justice work. It demands that we redesign participation to reflect who actually bears the cost of global advocacy. It demands that we name clearly how privilege, resources, citizenship, and institutional backing shape whose voices reach the world's stages and whose do not.

Our movements are built on the labour, courage, and creativity of young feminists and queer activists across the Global Majority. Our institutions must reflect that truth, not in mission statements alone, but in budgets, in security provisions, in travel policies, in the design of every convening that claims to represent us.

The world is fracturing. But fracture is also where light comes in. At CHEVS, we are building, in the fire, as we have always done , and we invite our partners, allies, and the movements we love to build with us.