Home as Liberation: in Partnership with AWID

At fifteen, my friend Ray struggled with questions of belonging in their own home, where their very existence as a nonbinary, trans person was rejected. Simply surviving there was exhausting. Ray grew up with an experience of home that fell short on respecting their right to live with dignity and freedom. Eventually, they left home and never looked back.  

Around the same age, I too struggled with defining what home represented for me. As a queer, first-generation South Asian immigrant, discomfort and ostracisation were all too common experiences in a space I felt deeply invisible in – carrying the weight of living without land to call my own and trying to understand how a heteropatriarchal version of home effectively erased my reality as a genderqueer person.  

As feminists, we don’t talk about this enough: the unprepared grief of losing your first family home. While, at a much larger scale, we witness this loss in the ongoing oppression of people whose homes and homelands are denied to them, or are violated, destroyed, or criminalised. Since the 1948 Nakba, millions of Palestinians have been forcibly dispossessed from their Indigenous land. Over 11 million people have been displaced in the ongoing 3-year-war in Sudan. Indigenous land sovereignty for First Nations communities in the US and Canada, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia, are threatened and criminalised. In Uganda, trans communities are attacked and have effectively lost access to healthcare, while in Assam, the Indian government is systematically expelling Muslim communities on the pretext of their “illegal” status.  

As feminist activists, we organise to break down the violent structures used to expand settler-colonial projects, seize territories and extract resources.

A multitude of global struggles for land back, and the access to justice for victims of gender-based violence, are intertwined with the deeply embedded, systemic problem of what home should represent. The people running the neoliberal capitalist systems we exist within decide who belongs and who doesn’t on this home/land by drawing ethnonationalist, colonial and settler-colonial borders.  

As feminist activists, we organise to break down the violent structures used to expand settler-colonial projects, seize territories and extract resources. We organise to expose the violence inherent in cis-hetero-patriarchal spaces that claim to be our homes and places of belonging, yet continue injuring us. We organise to create our own counter-cultures, and spaces of belonging, that in and of themselves are never perfect. But, rarely do we ask how this structural influence seeps into, shape-shifts and controls how we relate to one another in the intimate, personal and political spaces of our lives.  

Last month, I convened with a group of community organisers to strategise for a campaign protesting the entry of U.S. and European weapons manufacturing companies into Malaysia. Invited by the Malaysian government to flaunt their advanced artillery at an international arms expo, these corporations directly profit from arming militarised states to commit genocides in Myanmar, Palestine, Lebanon and Sudan. Our organisers went back and forth about whether to plan political education workshops for the larger public. Soon enough, a lead organiser began assigning tokenistic “roles” to people with ties to Lebanon and Palestine – without their consent – to quantify their pain and experience and make it palatable to emotionally appeal to the public and “move the needle”.  

A Palestinian activist in the room openly disputed that idea, pushing us to reflect on the extractive ways activists can also resort to treating knowledge-keepers and people holding lived grief through war as mere anecdotes.  

Mainstream development and NGO frameworks often romanticise “community” and take its existence for granted, but as feminists, we know that community never simply exists, it requires constant building and care work, and relational processes and social fabrics are the absolute foundation of any social and political transformation. 

This incident revealed, or rather, reminded, how even our organising spaces can be unsafe. It happened at a grassroots level, in a political community home where we often gather to organise, rest and mobilise from. Even in the intentional pursuit of creating that safe space – physical or virtual – any of us can be complicit in reproducing the hierarchical logic of exploitation, despite externally critiquing them.  

If we wish to establish our communities as a political home, it requires avoiding those traps. How? By honing in on shared responsibility and accountability to understand the varied injuries we and our communities have endured, when it comes to loss and denial of home and homeland. It requires understanding the types of violence and exploitation we are exposed to – whether it’s expulsion and exclusion from homeland or through normalised violent “inclusion”. In building a home that is a place of both care and liberation – a place of repair – while recognising the hierarchies between us may be unavoidable, but it is possible to learn how to deal with them openly and act from a place of responsibility.  

When Ray and I reconnected in Naarm, Australia, in the AWID Members Lounge at Women Deliver 2026, their latest life update in building a feminist community rooted in collectivism felt affirming, as they shared how they were called to act on their radical imagination even when this world tried to defer their dreams. 

We delved into how the practice of worldbuilding needs to underline the urgency of action in the same breath as compassion and care. At the heart of it all is liberation – not just in the sense of struggle and organisation, but also in confronting the questions of how we can decolonise methods of ownership, space-making and distribution.  

When we speak of building a global political home as a decolonial, feminist project, we’re tending to the soil where collective care can take root.

Ray shared with strong emotion how, over nearly a decade, trans and queer folks, human rights defenders and artists in their community built a local sanctuary that reimagines the values and principles of a home. If one needs immediate funds, a mutual aid drive is in motion. Someone needs help shaping their climate justice advocacy plan? A collaborative exchange of tools and resources is coordinated. This sanctuary is a living example of a feminist praxis that combines both care and action. In fact, they enable one another. From practices like collective care, mutual aid, accountability, and disability justice, hope and action grow – building economic and social models rooted in those values. 

Mainstream development and NGO frameworks often romanticise “community” and take its existence for granted, but as feminists, we know that community never simply exists, it requires constant building and care work, and relational processes and social fabrics are the absolute foundation of any social and political transformation.  

When we speak of building a global political home as a decolonial, feminist project, we’re tending to the soil where collective care can take root. Ray’s local community with its mutual aid networks and resource-sharing methods reminds us that political homes are not built with blueprints but through relationships. They emerge when we recognise that our liberation is bound to each other, when we reject the systems of exclusion and dispossession in which some belong more than others, and when we create avenues where accountability flows from reciprocal connections rather than a hierarchical system.  

Political homes are not destinations to arrive at. Building them is a daily practice, centered around possibilities of transformative change that arise from a feminist resistance oriented towards coalitions within and across borders. Through healing from and grieving the loss of our first homes, we find the strength with each other to build political ones that intentionally challenge, and cross borders. 

AWID has been expanding and deepening their focus on global membership engagement, establishing membership as a place of belonging. AWID aims to be a living, ever-changing global home for movements to ask the difficult questions about how we share power, tend to each other’s grief, and build communities where safety and care become the foundation of our collective action and liberation.