Who Is “We”? Identity, Empire, and the Theft of Solidarity

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 20 Jul 2026

Raïs Neza Boneza – TRANSCEND Media Service

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

17 Jul 2026 – The word “we” appears to unite, but it often conceals the unequal distribution of power, suffering and responsibility. To ask how “we” arrived at the present crisis is therefore also to ask who was allowed to speak in humanity’s name—and who was excluded from it. A question now circulates through refugee camps, television studios, diplomatic summits and exhausted households: How did we get here? It appears to be a question about history. Before that, however, it is a question about language. Who is contained in the word we? Does it include the worker whose wages disappear before the month ends? The family fleeing war? The miner extracting cobalt from the earth? The shareholder calculating whether instability has improved quarterly returns? The minister announcing collective sacrifice from an armoured car?

The pronoun seems innocent. Politically, it is rarely so. “We must tighten our belts,” says the official whose comfort is untouched. “We are all in this together,” says the banker from a private lounge. “We must defend our values,” says the government preparing another weapons shipment. The political we creates unity without equality. It gathers the powerful and the powerless into the same grammatical body while leaving their actual circumstances unchanged. It is solidarity without redistribution, responsibility without consent, and sacrifice without symmetry. There are, then, at least two meanings of we. The first is the we of shared humanity: finite, vulnerable and dependent upon others. It recognises that no life is self-sufficient and that no society survives without mutual obligation. The second is the imperial we: a fiction through which a minority presents its interests as the will of everyone. The first expresses interdependence; the second disguises domination. The central political question is therefore not simply whether we belong together, but who possesses the authority to define the terms of belonging.

The False Universal

The imperial we finds its most refined expression in the phrase “the international community.” The phrase suggests the existence of a universal moral body. Yet this body has no clearly defined citizenry, no democratic mandate and no equal distribution of authority. It speaks frequently, but not everyone is permitted to speak through it. It condemns, it welcomes, it expresses concern, and it calls for restraint, but its voice is most confident when powerful states already agree. The international community is therefore less a community than a hierarchy presenting itself as consensus. It resembles a private institution that has declared itself a public conscience. Its members lecture other nations about civilisation, often in countries whose borders were drawn by empires, whose resources remain controlled through external markets and whose political futures are debated in distant conference rooms.

It praises sovereignty, but sovereignty is unevenly allocated. Some states possess sovereignty as power; others possess it as permission. The same contradiction shapes international law. Justice is celebrated when directed at enemies and questioned when it approaches allies. The law is said to be universal, but its application remains geopolitical. This produces something more serious than ordinary hypocrisy. Hypocrisy acknowledges a moral principle and fails to obey it, whereas strategic morality activates the principle only when it is useful. Under strategic morality, the same act changes meaning according to the identity of the actor. Violence by an adversary is barbarism; violence by an ally is complexity. The crimes of enemies are self-evident, while the crimes of partners require context, patience and procedural caution. The law is not blind; it sees power perfectly well.

The Architecture of Exclusion

The false universal did not originate in modern diplomacy. Its philosophical structure was prepared through slavery, conquest and colonialism. The transatlantic slave system was not merely an economic arrangement; it was an assault on the category of the human. It divided existence into persons and property, citizens and cargo, civilisation and raw material. The enslaved were not simply exploited as workers; they were expelled conceptually from humanity so that exploitation could appear legitimate. This required more than violence; it required law, theology, commerce, science, administration, and ritual. Atrocity on a large scale depends upon abstraction—a person must first be converted into a category before that person can be treated as an object. France’s Code Noir, promulgated under Louis XIV in 1685, helped formalise this logic by regulating enslaved human beings as property; its purpose was not merely to manage labour, but to organise dehumanisation.

The historical achievement of slavery was therefore not only the extraction of unpaid work; it was the construction of a moral world in which theft, torture and captivity could coexist with religion, refinement and claims of civilisation. The perpetrators did not need to abandon morality; they needed only to redefine its boundaries. The enslaved person became labour; the colonised person became a subject; the conquered territory became an asset; the stolen resource became commerce; the crime became policy; policy became history; and history became destiny. Language did not merely describe domination; it made domination thinkable. When reality becomes morally intolerable, power changes the vocabulary: conquest becomes exploration, theft becomes settlement, occupation becomes security, extraction becomes development—and the victim disappears behind the noun.

Memory and the Defence of Innocence

Every system of domination eventually confronts a problem: memory. Memory preserves what power attempts to rename; it recalls the violence beneath the monument, the theft beneath prosperity and the silence beneath national unity. This is why struggles over education are never only disputes about curriculum; they are struggles over moral identity. A society that suppresses the history of slavery, racism, dispossession or resistance is not merely removing information; it is defending a particular image of itself. The official language is usually protection—children must be protected from discomfort, citizens must be protected from division, and the nation must be protected from shame. But what is being protected is not innocence; it is the appearance of innocence. The child may inherit the consequences of history but must not be allowed to study their origins; the student may celebrate freedom but must not ask who was denied it; the citizen may admire national greatness but must not examine the conditions that produced it.

This leads to an extraordinary inversion: the original violence is treated as finished, while the account of the violence is treated as dangerous. Slavery is not said to divide society—the teaching of slavery is. Racism is not said to create discomfort—books about racism do. The injustice is historical; the memory of injustice is political. In this arrangement, the fire is acceptable, but the alarm is inflammatory. A nation that removes painful history from its classrooms is not protecting children from the past; it is protecting its mythology from the future.

Peace and the Administration of Violence

The false we speaks constantly of peace. This should make us cautious, for peace is one of power’s most effective words because almost any form of violence can be justified in its name. States arm themselves for peace; governments invade for peace; weapons are manufactured for deterrence, sold for security and used in wars later described as failures of diplomacy. The weapon remains innocent while diplomacy is accused of arriving too late. The contradiction is not accidental: peace, as used by power, often means the preservation of a preferred order rather than the absence of violence. A society can be called peaceful while its prisons expand; a region can be called stable while its resources are extracted through coercion; and a war can be called defensive while conducted far beyond the defender’s borders. The relevant question is therefore not whether peace exists, but whose peace is being preserved.

Conflicts in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Palestine and elsewhere are frequently described as complex. The description is accurate, but complexity can also become a political refuge that obscures weapons networks, competition over minerals, foreign sponsorship, historical interference and the economic interests sustained by instability. Some wars are not ignored because the world lacks knowledge; they persist because too many institutions have adapted to their continuation. Permanent instability creates its own economy: weapons dealers require markets, extraction industries benefit from weak negotiating states, political elites profit from emergency powers, foreign governments gain leverage, international organisations acquire mandates, consultants produce frameworks, and experts attend conferences. Everyone declares a commitment to peace, but peace that alters ownership, exposes complicity or redistributes power is far less welcome than peace as process. A peace process can continue indefinitely, whereas actual peace may demand that someone surrender an advantage. Management is often preferred to justice because justice changes relationships.

When Falsehood Becomes an Institution

How did we get here? Perhaps through the gradual institutionalisation of falsehood—not merely the lie told by an individual, but the lie embedded in procedures, ceremonies, laws and public language. The most effective political falsehoods are not complete fabrications; they are moral words detached from moral consistency. We say “freedom” while supporting repression, “human rights” while exempting strategic partners, “rules-based order” without identifying who writes the rules, “security” without naming who has been made insecure, “international community” when referring to a small group of powerful states, and “we” when we mean “our interests.” A lie told once may be exposed; a lie repeated by a government becomes policy; a lie repeated by several governments becomes consensus; and a lie taught in schools, displayed in monuments and performed through national ritual becomes identity. Eventually, the distinction between deception and belief begins to collapse; those who manufacture the story inherit it as truth.

This is how domination becomes virtue. The conqueror says, “We want peace,” then, “We must protect ourselves,” then, “They forced us to act,” and finally, “Why do they hate us?” The empire publishes a democracy index; the weapons manufacturer sponsors a peace conference; the predator writes a human-rights report on other predators. Satire becomes unnecessary because power has learned to parody itself.

The Moral Problem of “We”

The corruption of the word we does not mean that the word should be abandoned. Without some form of we, ethics becomes impossible. Moral responsibility begins when the suffering of another person is recognised as a claim upon us, and justice requires an identity larger than the isolated self. But the ethical we must differ radically from the imperial one. The imperial we absorbs difference into obedience; the ethical we preserves difference while recognising equal human worth. The imperial we speaks for others; the ethical we makes room for others to speak. The imperial we requires enemies in order to define itself; the ethical we begins from vulnerability shared across borders, classes and histories. This greater we includes the millionaire in currency and the millionaire in suffering; it includes the visible and the erased, the celebrated and the unnamed, the secure and the displaced. Its foundation is not sameness but moral equality.

To say that all human beings belong to the same moral world is not to deny history, culture or conflict; it is to deny that such differences can justify the conversion of persons into instruments. No human being can be removed from humanity without damaging the meaning of humanity itself. Consciousness preserves this truth when institutions abandon it; consciousness is humanity’s most durable archive. It remembers what official history deletes; it preserves the victim’s question after the monument has been built to the conqueror; it hears “peace” and asks who is being bombed; it hears “development” and asks who owns the mine; it hears “security” and asks who has been declared disposable; and it hears “we” and asks who remains outside the sentence.

Toward a Human “We”

A different world remains possible, but not through domination renamed as order or competition presented as destiny. It requires justice that does not inspect passports before recognising suffering; truth that does not change according to alliances; memory that cannot be legislated out of existence; and solidarity that remains after the cameras leave. The question is therefore not only:

“How did we get here? It is also: Who defined the destination? Who was allowed to speak for everyone?Who benefited from the journey? Who paid its cost? Who was erased from history and then accused of having contributed nothing to it? Can we construct a we that does not require an enemy in order to feel united? Can we imagine a civilisation that does not need a slave, a colony, a prison, a permanent war or a disposable population to confirm its own innocence?

The imperial we has answered these questions for centuries. Its answer is visible in plantations, borders, prisons, military complex and alliances, financial systems and mass graves. It has spoken in the name of humanity while excluding much of humanity from the conversation. Perhaps the task now is not to reject the word we, but to rescue it—to remove it from the possession of empires, to free it from the language of conquest, to make it large enough for those who were silenced, exploited and erased, and, at last, to allow humanity to speak without an impostor.

____________________________________________

Raïs Neza Boneza is the author of fiction as well as non-fiction, poetry books and articles. He was born in the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Former Zaïre). He is also an activist and peace practitioner. Raïs is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee and a convener of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment for Central and African Great Lakes. He uses his work to promote artistic expressions as a means to deal with conflicts and maintaining mental wellbeing, spiritual growth and healing. Raïs has travelled extensively in Africa and around the world as a lecturer, educator and consultant for various NGOs and institutions. His work is premised on art, healing, solidarity, peace, conflict transformation and human dignity issues and works also as freelance journalist. You can reach him at rais.boneza@gmail.com – http://www.raisnezaboneza.no

Go to Original – rboneza.substack.com

Share this article: email mastodon facebook 🔗 copy link

DISCLAIMER: The statements, views and opinions expressed in pieces republished here are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of TMS. In accordance with title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. TMS has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is TMS endorsed or sponsored by the originator. “GO TO ORIGINAL” links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “GO TO ORIGINAL” links. This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

There are no comments so far.