Who Gets to Lead a Movement?
Power, Proximity & The Myth of the "Global South Voice"
Movements begin in rooms without cameras, built through organizing that compounds over years before anyone outside notices. Then visibility arrives: funders, media, international conferences and suddenly the people on stage speaking about the work rarely match the people who built it.
This gap gets explained away as logistics, as media training, as "finding the right spokesperson." The language sounds neutral. The mechanics are anything but.
Institutions elevate spokespeople they can understand, fund, and feature. This means choosing people fluent in the languages power speaks: grant applications, panel discussions, diplomatic phrasing. Ugandan feminist Sylvia Tamale observes that "authenticity" in international spaces becomes a performance judged by whether someone fits the room. The person organizing on the ground often lacks the networks, English fluency, or institutional literacy that conferences require. So someone else steps forward, well-meaning, articulate, proximate enough to the issue to sound credible but distant enough from its daily reality to stay comfortable.
Movements become easier to fund when they're easier to digest. The spokesperson's job involves translation: rendering complex, uncomfortable resistance into something legible to donors who need clear outcomes and media who need simple narratives. This work requires skill. It also requires distance.
The Labor No One Films
Every movement runs on two parallel systems of work. One system produces visibility: panels, media interviews, social media presence, fundraising pitches. The other produces continuity: logistics, community organizing, emotional labor, strategy sessions that determine what the movement actually does when cameras leave.
Kenyan writer Nanjala Nyabola tracks how global attention follows people "legible to power" rather than those accountable to communities bearing the consequences of the work. Visibility rewards networks, English fluency, comfort with institutional spaces, qualities that correlate with privilege far more than with proximity to the issue being fought. Leadership becomes measured by how well someone performs for external audiences rather than how deeply they're embedded in the work itself.
The architecture of most movements depends entirely on people the public never sees. They hold the structure together while others collect the credit. This division persists because it serves institutional needs: movements with charismatic spokespeople photograph better, pitch better, scale better.
When Movements Go Viral
#EndSARS exploded across global media in October 2020, but Nigerian youth had been organizing against police brutality for years before international attention arrived. The movement's infrastructure, communication systems, bail funds, medical support, legal aid, existed long before the hashtag trended. When Western media finally covered it, they often centered voices already fluent in speaking to international audiences rather than the organizers who had built the networks that made the protests possible.
#MeToo followed a similar trajectory. Tarana Burke founded the movement in 2006, working with Black and brown girls in under-resourced communities. The phrase became globally recognized in 2017 when celebrities amplified it, and suddenly the origin story required constant correction. Burke remained generous about the expansion while repeatedly redirecting credit back to the communities she served. The hashtag reached millions. The original architects remained marginal to the mainstream narrative.
Tanzanian scholar Amina Mama writes about how global activism "sanitizes resistance for international consumption." The uncomfortable truth: movements emerge from tension, from people bearing risks most outsiders can't imagine. By the time a movement reaches international visibility, the parts that made it radical often get edited out to make it palatable.
The hashtag becomes the echo. It reaches further than the original sound, but something essential gets lost in the amplification.
How Proximity Determines Who Speaks
The people closest to donor networks become spokespeople. The people closest to daily risk continue the actual organizing. The people closest to institutional power shape how the movement gets described. The people closest to lived experience of the issue get consulted, then overruled when their analysis makes funders uncomfortable.
South African scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola calls this "symbolic inclusion", the appearance of representation without any transfer of power. Movements recruit people who look like they represent affected communities, then filter their input through institutional priorities. The result: leadership that reflects the room where decisions get made rather than the reality being organized against.
Movements fracture along this fault line. When people most affected by an issue watch others speak on their behalf at conferences they can't afford to attend, using frameworks that erase the complexities they live with, the gap becomes impossible to ignore. The work continues, but trust erodes.
What Movement Leadership Actually Requires
Lived proximity to the issue being fought. Accountability to communities bearing the consequences. The ability to hold complexity without simplifying for institutional comfort. Courage rooted in what you risk, not in applause you might receive.
Caribbean theorist Audre Lorde wrote that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Yet movements repeatedly use institutional criteria: charisma, English fluency, comfort with media to select leaders. These criteria measure someone's ability to navigate power, not their commitment to redistributing it.
The people most fluent in grant language and panel discussions often have the least stake in whether the movement succeeds at ground level. Their proximity runs toward institutions, not toward the communities most affected. This creates leadership structurally insulated from consequences.
The Mirror and the Question
Movements inherit the power structures of the world that shapes them. When those structures prioritize optics over accountability, extraction over sustainability, individual spokespeople over collective power, the movement mirrors those priorities back. The work becomes about performing change for external audiences rather than building it from the ground up.
Subtile finds the questions here more interesting than prescriptions: What would movements look like if proximity to an issue mattered more than proximity to funding? If the people bearing daily risks shaped the public narrative? If visibility followed accountability rather than replacing it? When does translation of a movement for broader audiences become betrayal of its original purpose?
Leadership lives wherever the actual work gets done in the organizing that compounds over years, in the risks people take when no one's watching, in the analysis built from lived experience rather than borrowed from conference circuits.
That spine holds everything else up. Whether it gets credited determines what kind of movement you actually have.
