Global Dialogues

In a world where even ICC-convicted leaders can get away with their crimes, states and official bodies no longer carry the legitimacy to execute moral authority. Thus, in our fragmented world, moral authority often emerges from the margins, where people live the consequences of structural inequality, fractured solidarity, and competing claims of justice.

Last week, I was in Washington, DC, representing GU-Qatar at the Jessup International Law Moot Court competition. On the metro, wearing a Georgetown t-shirt and speaking to friends in accented English, I was told by a passerby that I should be “grateful to be in the U.S.” The implication was clear: My belonging was conditional. This moment mirrored a broader trend I’ve studied and experienced—where nationalism and media-fueled suspicion shape attitudes toward international students and immigrants. This intensified during the Trump administration, when visa restrictions, travel bans, and trade wars framed foreigners as threats rather than partners. But the sense of otherness I felt is not unique to the U.S: It is mirrored in Türkiye, my home, where deepening polarisation pits conservative and secular identities against each other in a struggle over who gets to define national values.

In my course Resistance, Rebellion, and Revolution, we ask where people turn when formal institutions betray them. The answer, increasingly, is toward decentralized, lived expressions of morality. I have encountered this firsthand. In Peru’s Andes, I spoke with Kechua community members whose relationship to land and tradition was both ecological and spiritual. For them, environmental degradation is not just a policy failure—it’s a moral violation of ancestral balance. Their stories stayed with me, not as political theory, but as ethical clarity in the face of systemic neglect. Similarly, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, conversations with young peers revealed how, given the ethnically diverse nature of the country, remembrance and reconciliation—not nationalist rhetoric—shape their vision for a moral future.

These grassroots voices offer an alternative to the fading moral authority of international bodies, which too often remain silent in the face of global suffering. Amid conflict and inequality, it is the storytellers, the teachers and professors, the protesting Hoyas at the Red Square, the everyday resistors, especially from the Global South, who hold the ethical line. In an era when social media amplifies both division and solidarity under state and official directives, young people are forming cross-border coalitions grounded in empathy and shared frailty.

To restore moral authority in today’s world, we must stop searching for it in the halls of power and begin listening to those living its necessity. We should move beyond identity factors such as sex, religion, gender and political affiliation separating us, and we should feel as people who share commonalities. As someone shaped by global experiences, yet unsettled by the divisions at home and abroad, I believe the future of moral leadership will not be top-down. It will be relational, rooted, and radically human.

Aras Karlidağ (SFS'25) is a senior in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Qatar.