Students in Shkodër, Albania, October 15, 2026. The System Has Failed Us.
I want to push back on the meme that argues the US is not engaged in real social movements— like the French.
I agree that what is happening in France— and Albania, Serbia, India, Peru, Tunisia, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, and Chile — is inspiring. And I know that these movements are broader in strategy and depth than what TV covers.
Many are Gen Z-led, though not exclusively. They are addressing local issues–housing, education, corruption—while building on each other in transnational ways.
US movements past and present also inspire them.
Two years ago, it was students in the US, erecting tents on University lawns to demand an end to genocide in Palestine; that inspired students in Paris to occupy their campuses.
Last February my spouse and I were in Lima, watching with Peruvians the movement against Metro Surge in Minneapolis. We got credit we didn’t deserve just because we were from that place in the US northland where people were standing up for their neighbors in radical ways.
Here in Albania, the Flamingo Revolution showed a persistence similar to the Occupy Movement, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-6, the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011, the Occupy Movement of 2011-12, the neighbors in Ferguson, Missouri, who came out night after night, after the murder of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in 2014, the Standing Rock Occupation of 2016-17, and Indigenous nations and Black neighborhoods from Florida to New Jersey, who exposed, closed and provided sancuary for US immigrants in detention camps in 2026.
A couple of nights ago I was listening to an academic on Albanian television with a translation app. I didn’t get every word, but I understood he was drawing a trajectory of social movements that influenced Albanians. My ears caught phrases and a name in English:
Occupy, Black Lives Matter. George Floyd.
Nations have borders. Social Movements don’t. The powers that be will do everything they can to erase our movements and erect borders among them. It is up to us to remember and connect as we build.