From the Stonewall riots to the Gdansk shipyards, from the Rosenstrasse to the school strikes – the history and practice of collective resistance
Resistance and Solidarity is where Pen vs Sword explores collective action, moral courage and the shared struggle for justice. Resistance is the refusal to accept what power insists is inevitable. Solidarity is the choice to make that refusal collective. Together, they constitute the most important political tradition in human history: the tradition of ordinary people, without resources or institutional support, deciding that enough is enough, and discovering, in the act of deciding together, a form of power that wealth and force alone cannot buy
This hub gathers Pen vs Sword’s writing on that tradition in all its forms whether it’s from strikes and marches to vigils and hunger strikes, from legal challenges to direct action, from the personal testimony of individual activists to the historical analysis of movements that changed the world.
It is also concerned with something that conventional political history tends to undervalue: the human cost of resistance. The people on these pages did not resist from positions of comfort or safety. They resisted at serious personal cost, in the face of violence, imprisonment, ridicule and worse. Understanding that cost is part of understanding the courage that made their resistance possible.
Solidarity is the other half of this picture. It is the recognition that resistance works best when people act together across the divisions that power uses to keep them apart: divisions of race, class, gender, nationality, sexuality.
RESISTANCE AND SOLIDARITY
COLLECTIVE STRUGGLE, MEMORY AND THE POLITICS OF ACTION
Resistance is rarely the work of individuals alone. It is built through solidarity across communities, generations and borders and is sustained through shared memory, language and action. Resistance & Solidarity gathers writing that centers collective struggle, historical movements, and the enduring fight against injustice. These articles do not romanticise resistance. They examine its conditions, its risks and its contradictions. They ask how solidarity is formed, how it fractures and how movements survive repression, erasure or co-option. This is where history and the present meet — not as nostalgia, but as continuum.
Table of Contents
What is resistance and why does it require solidarity?
Resistance takes many forms. It can be as visible as a march of thousands, or as invisible as a worker who decides to slow down, a journalist who decides to publish, a citizen who decides to remember. What all forms of resistance share is the fundamental refusal: the decision that what is being done is unacceptable and cannot simply be endured.
Solidarity is what transforms individual refusal into collective power. A single woman standing outside a prison demanding the release of her husband is easy to ignore. Two hundred women, standing in the street for a week in Nazi Germany, are considerably harder to ignore as the Rosenstrasse Protest of 1943 proved. The mathematics of solidarity are not simply additive. There is something qualitatively different about collective action that cannot be explained by simply multiplying individual courage.
Understanding why solidarity is both necessary and difficult is one of the most important lessons the history of resistance teaches. The Women’s March on Versailles in 1789, when thousands of Parisian market women marched to Versailles and forced the king back to Paris which remains one of the most striking demonstrations of what collective action, built across class and gender lines, can achieve.
FEATURED: THE WOMEN’S MARCH ON VERSAILLES
Hunger, anger and collective political force
The Women’s March on Versailles in October 1789 stands as one of history’s first mass expressions of organised collective power. Driven by food scarcity, economic desperation and political exclusion, the march brought working-class women into direct confrontation with France’s ruling elite. Far from spontaneous spectacle, this extraordinary mobilisation revealed how shared hardship and mutual recognition can transform despair into collective action and how solidarity across class lines can force power to reckon with popular demands.
REVOLUTION AND CIVIL WAR: ECHOES IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL UPHEAVAL
Historical lessons for contemporary resistance
Traceing the seismic moments when people in motion reshape the political order, showing how structural inequality, contested power and collective will can erupt into transformative conflict. By examining the forces that drive uprisings, resistance movements and sustained struggle, we highlight the interconnectedness of cultural norms, economic conditions and organised action — reminding us that resistance is often forged in the crucible of collective crisis rather than isolated individual effort.
The tradition of civil disobedience – from Gandhi to Extinction Rebellion
The theory and practice of non-violent civil disobedience has one of the longest and most carefully worked-out traditions in activist history. Gandhi developed it in South Africa and India as a strategic response to colonial power. Martin Luther King Jr adapted this tradition to the specific conditions of the American South, combining it with the legal strategy of challenging segregation in the courts and the political strategy of building alliances that crossed racial lines.
Angela Davis, who grew up in the segregated Birmingham of the 1940s, represents the strand of the movement’s evolution toward a more confrontational assertion of Black power, Black self-determination, and the systemic analysis of racism’s relationship with capitalism. Her case (placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, imprisoned, acquitted), became in the early 1970s a global symbol of resistance. She continues to argue that genuine liberation requires not just legal reform but the dismantling of the prison-industrial complex itself.
The tradition continues in the climate movement. Roger Hallam, who co-founded Extinction Rebellion, has developed a systematic theory of why mass civil disobedience, by accepting arrest in large numbers, disrupting daily life and absorbing state repression without retaliation is the only tactic that can produce rapid systemic change. The theory draws directly on the historical record of what has worked.
DEEP DIVE: ANGELA DAVIS : A LEGACY OF ACTIVISM
Intellect, resistance and collective liberation
Angela Davis’s lifelong work as an activist, scholar and organiser illustrates how resistance is sustained through critical thought, collective struggle and intersectional solidarity. From confronting Jim Crow segregation to challenging systemic racism, sexism and the prison-industrial complex, Davis’s life embodies the idea that liberation is a shared project rooted in both ideas and action.
FRENCH REVOLUTION PARALLELS: WHEN HISTORY REPEATS
Revolt, power and the cycles of upheaval
By tracing echoes between past and present, this piece examines how revolutionary moments recur across history. It asks what we learn from earlier uprisings, and how collective struggle continues to reshape political imagination.
Solidarity across borders – international resistance movements
Some of the most powerful acts of solidarity in history have crossed national borders. The Solidarity movement in Poland, which emerged from the Gdansk shipyards in 1980 under the leadership of Lech Walesa, survived martial law and the imprisonment of its leaders to become one of the forces that brought down the Soviet bloc. Its story is one of the great resistance narratives of the twentieth century.
Concepcion Picciotto‘s thirty-year peace vigil outside the White House – she conducted alone, in all weathers, from 1981 until her death in 2016 and it represents a different kind of international solidarity: the solidarity of the individual conscience with victims of state violence across the world. Her vigil was not strategically effective in any conventional sense. But it was present, visible, and unbroken and remains a reminder that some forms of solidarity are measured not in victories but in the refusal to look away.
The revolutionary tradition of Che Guevara, who argued for armed revolution as the only adequate response to colonial exploitation and imperial violence represents a different answer to the question of how change happens. His execution in Bolivia in 1967 made him a martyr for the global left, and the debate between his approach and the non-violent tradition continues to shape activist politics today.
MARSHA P JOHNSON: PRIDE, PROTEST & LIBERATION
Queer resistance and the fight for visibility
Marsha P. Johnson stood at the crossroads of LGBTQ+ liberation and street-level activism. This article explores her legacy, showing how courage, care and collective struggle reshaped the politics of identity and rights.
Workers’ resistance – the labour movement and its legacy
The labour movement is the longest-running and most practically consequential tradition of organised resistance in modern history. The Matchgirls’ Strike of 1888 was led by young women at Bryant & May’s factory in east London who walked out despite having everything to lose and was one of the founding moments of the modern British trade union movement. It is a story of courage, of organiser Annie Besant, and of the specific vulnerability of working women whose protest had to be twice as loud to be half as heard.
The Pankhurst sisters – Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia – embody both the power and the internal tensions of this tradition. Their divergence over tactics and the relationship between workers’ rights and women’s suffrage is a microcosm of a tension that runs through all activist history: between those who want to move fast and those who want to move together.
The artistic tradition that grew alongside the labour movement from the protest songs, the radical poetry, to the political murals, is an integral part of its history. A Garland for May Day was Walter Crane’s 1895 image for the socialist newspaper The Clarion and gave the movement language, imagery and emotional coherence. Understanding the labour movement means understanding this cultural dimension as seriously as the economic one.
HOWARD ZINN : A PURSUIT OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
People’s history and resistance narratives
Howard Zinn’s work, from A People’s History to his lifelong engagement with movements for justice, exemplifies how resistance is rooted in the stories we tell about ourselves. Zinn argued that ordinary people, not elites, are the real makers of history, and that understanding this empowers collective action. His commitment to amplifying voices marginalised by dominant narratives reminds us that solidarity is not an abstract ideal but a practice grounded in shared experience, moral clarity, and sustained engagement with injustice.
LGBTQ+ resistance – from criminalisation to pride
The history of LGBTQ+ resistance is a history of people who had to claim their right to exist before they could claim any other rights. The Stonewall Inn riots of 1969 became the founding moment of the modern movement. Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender woman of colour who was present at Stonewall, spent the decades that followed doing direct support work for the most vulnerable members of the community by housing LGBTQ+ youth who had been abandoned and providing practical solidarity to those the movement’s mainstream often overlooked.
Peter Tatchell, who has attempted citizen’s arrests of Robert Mugabe and disrupted the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter sermon, occupies the same tradition in British public life: the understanding that change does not happen by waiting politely to be included, but by making the status quo impossible to maintain. For over five decades he has combined media-savvy direct action with careful legal and political strategy.
Read the complete history of LGBTQ+ rights from criminalisation to marriage equality and understand how the gains of one generation have to be defended, again and again, by the next.
HIBAKUSHA: SURVIVORS OF THE ATOMIC BOMB
Nuclear trauma, testimony and moral witness
The voices of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors are more than historical records – they are moral warnings. This article explores how memory, trauma and testimony challenge militarism and demand a different understanding of human survival.
What resistance teaches us – lessons from history
Alexei Navalny‘s anti-corruption campaigns, his survival of a poisoning attempt, and his death in an Arctic prison in 2024 place him in a tradition of dissidence that stretches from the Soviet era to the present: those who confront authoritarian power from within, at extraordinary personal cost, and refuse to leave. His story is inseparable from the broader question of what resistance looks like when the state controls every legal avenue of challenge.
Darcus Howe was a broadcaster, journalist and activist, became one of the most important voices in British Black public life which traced a parallel arc through the same decades, confronting institutional racism with a combination of fury, intelligence and refusal: the refusal to be defined by what Britain said he was.
The history of resistance shows, consistently, that solidarity matters more than purity. The Stop the War Coalition‘s partial failure in 2003, (when between one and two million people marched in London and the invasion happened anyway), illustrates one of activism’s most difficult truths: that even the most successful protests do not always produce the outcomes they demand. But they change what is politically possible; they shift the terrain on which future battles are fought.
Greta Thunberg began striking outside the Swedish parliament in August 2018, alone, with a handmade sign. Within months, her Fridays for Future movement had spread to 180 countries and became one of the most rapid demonstrations in history of what individual refusal, expressed publicly and consistently, can become.
RELATED ARTICLE: A GARLAND FOR MAY
Celebration, labour history and collective memory
“Garland for May Day” reflects on the cultural and political significance of International Workers’ Day — a moment rooted in the struggle for labour rights, solidarity and collective action. By tracing the rituals, symbols and histories that surround May Day, we highlight how workers around the world have repeatedly turned commemoration into mobilisation, forging bonds of solidarity that extend beyond workplaces into wider social movements.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Resistance does not happen in isolation, and neither does the thinking about it. The movements traced on this page drew on visual artists who gave them imagery and identity, which is why Art and Power is the natural companion to this hub. They drew on journalists and truth-tellers who made their struggles visible, which is why Language, Media and Truth is equally essential reading.
They were shaped by the economic conditions that made their demands urgent – conditions examined in Culture and Capital. And they were sustained, again and again, by music: the solidarity song, the protest chant, the record that kept a community together through years of difficulty. That dimension of resistance is explored in Music, Sound and Cultural Memory. Resistance is not a single strand. It is a rope. This site traces all of them.
Read another resistance and solidarity deep dive try our article on History of activism – protests and movements that changed the world
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RECOMMENDED: ALICE WALKER – DEDICATED TO ART AND ACTIVISM
Voice, empathy and the politics of shared struggle
Alice Walker’s writing and activism show how narrative can animate and sustain movements for justice. Across fiction and essays, she emphasises dignity, empathy and collective memory as foundations of resistance — confronting racism, sexism and exclusion not only through protest but through narrative reclamation. Her work demonstrates that literary imagination and social solidarity are not separate acts, but intertwined forces in the struggle for a more equitable humanity.
Resistance and Solidarity Archive Suggestions
LANGUAGE, MEDIA & TRUTH
Counter-Narratives and Truth-Telling
CULTURE & CAPITAL
Systemic Injustice and Structural Power
FUTURE IMAGINARIES
Questions about Economic Justice, Agency and Community
ART & POWER
Visual Culture as Resistance
MUSIC, SOUND & CULTURAL MEMORY
Listening, Atmosphere and the Shared Memory of Sound
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