The time is ripe and we have a brief window of opportunity. It is the moment for a strategic, movement-level intervention in Europe directed against militarization. This short note aims to present the diagnosis, show some possible pathways and explore how could march them.
This is not an article against militarization, which we assume as a given. It is also not about the connections between militarization and imperialism, climate crisis, patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism. This is a strategy article: it is about a concrete, current task that could improve the power relations in favor of anti-capitalist forces. We will argue for its relevance, analyse the status of the social movements, and discuss possible steps forward.
Five Reasons of Relevance
1. Agression towards Venezuela
(This section, written in December 2025, apparently did not have the pessimism/realism required by Trump’s imperial hunger.)
The grassroots movements in Latin America have their eyes fixed at US military operations taking place in the Caribbeans. US agression towards Venezuela is not a scenario, it is a reality. A further escalation would face not only Maduro’s government but also the grassroots organizations that have been building people’s power.
Our comrades will need our active solidarity.
If we don’t have a strategic tool that can create trouble in the core against militarization, then we will confine ourselves to sporadic, uncoordinated statements of support with perhaps some symbolic protests.
This is a serious risk. An attack on Venezuela would be the prologue of decades of extreme-right hegemony in Latin America. Climate emergency says we don’t have decades to waste.
2. Agression towards the Alliance of Sahel States
The ongoing anti-imperialist revolutions in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger are bothering European imperial powers who have invested interests in the region. From the perspective of the imperialists, the situation is still manageable. However, they do read a risk of a domino effect due to increased political instability in surrounding countries.
Grassroots movements within the countries of the Alliance of Sahel States are building people’s power and the imminent threat of an imperialist intervention (directly, semi-directly (through ECOWAS) or indirectly) is keeping them in check.
European movements and the general public are uninformed about the situation and its revolutionary implications. If an imperialist agression takes place in such a context, then the neocolonial status quo will resettle, closing many possible alternative pathways for the movements around the world. We desperately need these alternative pathways open as authoritarian governments tighten their ranks everywhere. So we need to change our context.
3. NATO spendings as austerity
Rarely is military spending so explicitly and publicy connected to austerity measures. This is already producing mass mobilizations in many countries, as it comes coupled with a cost-of-living crisis. From cuts in public services to more exploitative labor laws, the current social injustices are already connected, in people’s minds, with unnecessary public spending.
It is uncommon to have austerity measures that are not perceived as purely national policy. At the moment, it is relatively easy to connect concrete suffering with international politics. We have an opportunity to build a transnational movement that is deeply connected to immediate needs of people.
4. NATO spendings as Trump’s bullying
Among the center-wing leaning public, Trump’s bullying of Europe is frustrating. Forcing European governments to increase NATO contributions, Trump is humiliating European imperial powers. This bothers the general public. No one feels safer for having given money to Trump’s NATO – even those who have a securitarian mindset.
This is a crucial opening for us, because it is now possible to preemptively neutralize securitarian discourse by a careful framing.
5. War in Ukraine
The volatile situation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine paralyzed European governments for quite some time. Full-scale censorship of Russian state propaganda in all European countries was unprecedented, but what actually affected ordinary folks were the sanctions and divestment.
There are sectors of society in Europe that would prefer Russian influence, and this is a signification part of Eastern European populations. But even those who are in solidarity with Ukraine do not think that their economic hardship due to increasing prices, unavailable products, and reoriented trade routes. And they are right: European sanctions to Russia are not part of a bigger plan, they are passive moves within a strategy led by the US – and this is a problem because Trump administration is also not giving consistent direction to them.
Many people are sick and tired of war, militarization and its economic impacts.
There are more topics to cover about militarization (like US agression towards China, the ongoing civil war in Sudan, or the peace process in Kurdistan). We are only interested in those topics that are relevant from a strategy viewpoint for social movements operating in Europe. The above five items are crucial for building people’s power against capitalism today and they confluence towards the same direction.
Strengths and Weaknesses
One could say that the previous section was about opportunities and threats. The most important threat category is the climate crisis and the accompanying authoritarianism. Far-right governance will stop being exceptional. (The far-right parties being government might still be exceptional. Their politics and their policies, however, will be mainstream.) So, with the climate crisis, the main threat ends up being business-as-usual itself, rather than a deviation from it.
The anti-militarization focus can generate many intervention points and can tip the balance of hegemonic struggle towards anti-capitalist forces.
The next question is thus: why would we believe that we can seize this opportunity?
Here are a few important strengths that we as social movements have that can be mobilized to this effect.
To begin with, the pro-Palestine movement is looking forward.
The genocide ended: well, on television it did. The ongoing Zionist colonial process is less in the public agenda in Europe. However, the pro-Palestine movement remains strong. This movement politicized a new generation of activists who are radical, committed and anti-colonialist. In many occasions, the movement was also careful to insist in giving visibility to other massacres in Democratic Republic of Congo and in Sudan.
There are two angles to this maturation. 1) They feel the same frustration as any other movement reaching saturation feels: the problem continues but it is not fashionable anymore. 2) The organizers have learned too much to remain within a pro-Palestine silo.
So, they need a new framework that can articulate the demand for freedom for Palestine while augmenting the scope of the struggle. Anti-militarization can provide this framework.
Capitalism’s investment in destruction has been a key theme of many movements who have strong and stable organizations and experienced organizers. Just to name a few, in Europe,
– there are already solid organizations dedicated to the peace movements,
– the feminist movement has been consistently speaking out against wars and militarization, and
– the climate justice movement has been criticizing the military-industrial complex: in addition to immediate destructive capacity of the military-industrial complex, each cent spent on armament is a cent stolen from retrofitting houses, from public transport and public renewable energy infrastructure.
Finally, we are already seeing a ramp up in war and militarisation rhetoric, pushed both my technocrats and the far-right. The French General saying that Europe must be prepared to lose its children, the NATO secretary-General saying Europe a war is coming, the scale only our grandparents and great-grandparents endured. These rhetoric is the prelude for drafting and massively send young working-class people into the military. They will economically narrow even more people’s options into making being a killing soldier an push for a major cultural appeal for warring values. The young people will be their main target. Young working-class people who do not wish to die to make capitalists richer and empires more powerful will necessarily be the base from which a mass movement can be carved from. There are already mobilisations against military service in Germany and France. This must expand and it must have a strong cultural backing.
Our main weakness is that we don’t have a platform for movement-level collaboration that has legitimacy across movements and across countries.
This collaborative space needs creating.
So, the next question is: what could be the content and the form of such a space?
What to Pay Attention to
Before jumping into conclusions, we should make sure we make new mistakes rather than repeating old ones. For that, we should recover movement lessons from the near past.
The goal is not policy, it is counter-power. So called “winnable” demands leave the initiative on the rulers’ side (even when they are won). Any strategic movement-level intervention should serve to improve the balance of power in our favor.
Power is not a performance. Non-measurable and extremely fluid concepts like “shifting public narrative” are not sufficient, as they can be easily reverted. What we are looking for is to organize the unorganized (movement building) and to push the organized out of their silos (systemic approach)
Movement of movements is a tested framework. Many organizers from the alter-globalization movement know what works and what doesn’t. Some even wrote about it.
Addressing militarization permits going to the core of capitalism and patriarchy. But we will only get there if (1) we remained focused in that destination and (2) we build adequate means that actively avoid deviation. Along the way, we will be pushed to make “realistic” and “tactical” decisions for partial victories. Most of them will be about cooptation: some existing institution will offer a symbolic concession and we will lose momentum. (See the Eurovision discourse of centrist governments in Europe and how insignificant this is from a genocide perspective.)
An anti-NATO discourse will surely be central to our work, but we will have to build a frame that also works effectively in Central and Eastern Europe, where a purely anti-NATO position may play to the hands of right-wing political actors. (In fact, this is why we didn’t title this article as the Anti-NATO Moment.)
Vision-driven alliance building (as opposed to outcome-driven or tactics-driven) will be crucial for two reasons. Firstly, it would give us agility to address diverse public sensibilities (austerity, climate, Palestine) as well as respond to rapidly changing contexts. Secondly, values are much less cooptable than policy proposals. (As we saw painfully clearly: one can greenwash a policy alignment like “energy transition” but one cannot rebrand “an economy with zero fossil fuels”.)
A vision of defending life against a system of death and destruction has a strong resistance to capitalist cooptation attempts. (Life here explicitly includes ecological life, and it is not metaphorical or rhetorical. In the Sahel, in Venezuela, in Niger, people are defending rivers from bombs, forests from mines, and seeds from corporate control.)
These lessons (and many more that one can recover) could give us some guidelines of the what and the how of an anti-militarization strategy intervention. They wouldn’t give the answers, though. It could be an alliance, a campaign, a series of action days, an international organization. It could have a rigid or fluid structure. It could be permanent, temporary, intermittent, or a combination of these. This article cannot answer these questions. The reason for this is simple: the content and the form would be ultimately defined by whoever sets up the space.
This takes us to our final question: who is well-placed to do it?
Movement Agency for the Anti-militarization Moment
The central point here is this: We don’t need “unity of the left” for an anti-militarization campaign. In fact, the exact opposite might be true: If our intuition about the transversal and transnational potentials of the anti-militarization moment are true, then an anti-militarization campaign might contribute profoundly towards a more unified left.
It seems relatively clear that to seize this moment, a specific ideological orientation cannot lead the entire movement. We need movement-level thinking: the task is to construct an operational framework that engages the public in the movement (see Five Reasons of Relevance) while simultaneously holding the distributed movement capabilities (see Strengths and Weaknesses).
This means mobilizing, combining, directing and coordinating different strengths and weaknesses of different movement actors, and at the same time giving direction to the movement as a whole.
A decolonial practice can capture the full transnational potential by taking our European movements beyond our self-centered silos. This will require actual political work on centering our strategy and discourse. (In this moment, we have very concrete ways of building this structure, in Orinoco Mining Arc, the Niger Delta and the Sahel. There are grassroots actors internationally that can give consistency and direction to our more context-based activities in Europe.)
The conception of such a collaborative decolonial European space for the Anti-Militarization Moment would require organizers from different countries, from different movement backgrounds and with knowledge of the larger movement ecosystem putting their heads together to bring a proposal.
With this article, we hope to intrigue them to give priority to this task and to launch a strategy discussion at the movement level.
