Global Solidarity: Not What You Declare, Rather What You Share

Op-ed

By Md. Masud Parvez Ove and Zohora Binte Zaman (*) in Bangladesh 

Ago 2026 (CitiPlat)- We tend to think of global solidarity as a simple obligation, that people and nations owe each other something, even across borders they will never cross. If a community somewhere is facing injustice, that is not a distant tragedy to feel bad about from afar. It is something the rest of us are implied in too. 

The UN Human Rights Office frames it plainly, meaningful realization of human rights depends on genuine international cooperation, not goodwill dispensed at the margins. In principle, it rejects a top down, charity shaped relationship between nations for something closer to mutual struggle, people standing with each other, not simply for each other.

Structural imbalances

In practice, we are more skeptical. The world does not lack resources, food, water, energy, or capital. It lacks fair distribution. Some parts of the world sit on a surplus large enough to waste; others go without the basics, not because those basics do not exist, but because they were never shared to begin with. In practice, the powerful get to declare the principle without ever loosening their grip on the resources. Everyone else is just expected to keep believing in it.

None of these imbalances are accidental, it is structural. In climate negotiations, nations facing the worst consequences rarely get the final say. That power sits with the countries that emitted the most to begin with. The IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank run on the same logic, your voice depends on how much you pay in, not how many people you speak for. At the WTO (World Trade Organization), agenda setting has historically happened among a small circle of powerful blocks, with the rest of the membership handing a finished deal rather than a seat in the room where it was made. None of this gets framed as hoarding. It is usually called neutral policy or technical negotiation, but the effect is the same. One part of the world keeps more than it needs, and the arrangement is described as balanced.  

Youth inherit today’s decisions 

This is also, quite literally, a youth problem. Decisions on climate debt and resource access will play out for decades, made by negotiators who will not live with the outcome, while young people, who make up the majority in most Global South countries, including Bangladesh, inherit them without ever holding a vote. In the countries carrying the heaviest weight of this imbalance, young people are not a footnote, they are the majority. Which means decisions being made right now about debt, about climate finance, about who gets access to what, are decisions about young people's futures, made almost entirely without them in the room.

Bangladesh shows this same imbalance, just at a smaller scale. It does not hit every young person the same way either. Class, geography, gender, religion, ethnicity, they all stack on top of each other. A young woman in a coastal district and a young graduate in Dhaka both get counted as "youth" in the national data. Their actual lives look nothing alike. For the most marginalized, that gap keeps widening, until many of them simply stop expecting an equal share at all. That is a quiet kind of injustice. It never shows up in any policy report. Fair finance illustrates the pattern clearly. In 2025, Ukraine alone received more development assistance than all least developed countries combined. This is not an argument against supporting Ukraine, but evidence that resources follow political proximity, not need. Even the support that does arrive usually comes as a loan, not a grant. 

Countries facing a crisis they had no hand in causing are then expected to pay back the cost of surviving it.

What solidarity fails to deliver

Clean water is one of the most fundamental things a person needs simply to get through the day, yet coastal Bangladeshi communities still have to organize and fight for it, even though water is not scarce on a global scale. (watch Citiplat’s The Grab)

That contradiction shows exactly what solidarity fails to deliver, not an absence of resources, but an absence of any real mechanism to move them toward the people who need them. A young man in Dhaka, a gender diverse youth facing stigma, a grassroots organizer without transport to a training venue, a young pregnant woman from a remote char without a health facility nearby, a person with a disability navigating infrastructure that was never built with them in mind.

For refugees and stateless youth, this contradiction sharpens into something closer to erasure. A Rohingya youth in Cox's Bazar faces a system that has not even decided whether they are owed access in the first place. No citizenship means no clear path to education past a certain grade. Formal work stays out of reach, or barely within it. Movement is restricted, and legal identity itself is either withheld outright or handed over in some limited, provisional form that can be taken back. Their future is left undefined by design, a life held in suspension, waiting on a status that may never resolve. 

If global solidarity has a floor, it should be this: no young person's future should be treated as indefinitely postponable simply because their birth left them without a state to claim them.

Young people experience solidarity not as an abstract diplomatic term but as a plain, practical question. Is anyone holding more than they need willing to share it. Where the answer keeps coming back no, they have largely stopped waiting, sitting at the table with local authorities on their own terms, reclaiming what was taken, and documenting their own realities instead of waiting for someone else to notice.

Global solidarity must be measured by what moves. Water, finance, land, opportunity, voice, and whether these things flow toward the people who go without, instead of piling up where there is already surplus. None of this requires inventing a new theory of solidarity. The theory already exists, sitting in every strategy document and every summit declaration ever written. What is missing is not the idea. It is the will to share what has already been claimed as principle. This was never a request for charity. It is a claim to what was always meant to be shared, owed to every young person simply as a global citizen.

*Both writers are Development Professionals in the youth development sector in Bangladesh