Global Dialogues

This essay was selected as one of three winners of the 2025 Georgetown Global Dialogues Student Essay Contest.

In politics, love is often dismissed as weakness. Yet history suggests the opposite. The U.S. civil rights movement drew its strength not only from anger at injustice but from solidarity grounded in care. In South Africa, the decision to pursue reconciliation after apartheid was not sentimental. It was a survival strategy. Love, in these moments, was not soft. It was the force that made endurance possible.

Today the global mood leans in the other direction. Cruelty is rewarded. Leaders flaunt strength and mock compassion. Social media thrives on outrage, pushing people further apart. Wars, forced migration, and climate collapse feed fear more than empathy. Against this backdrop, Pope Francis’s call for “political love” sounds almost naive. But maybe what sounds naive is exactly what is missing.

Political love is not about affection. It is about commitment. It is the refusal to abandon each other even when institutions fail. During the pandemic, mutual aid groups formed in neighborhoods across the world, keeping people fed and connected when governments could not. Labor unions that organize across borders practice fraternity by protecting workers no matter where they live. Youth climate movements link villages in the Global South with cities in the North, proving that solidarity can stretch across continents. These are not gestures of charity. They are strategies for survival.

Fraternity should be understood as necessity, not luxury. Cruelty breaks communities apart. Love binds them back together. It creates trust across lines of race, religion, and nation. It offers movements legitimacy that fear can never secure. Even online spaces, often used to divide, can be reclaimed as digital commons where solidarity grows rather than erodes.

Fraternity does not erase conflict. It makes conflict survivable by keeping people inside the same moral frame. To choose love in politics is not to demand harmony or hand-holding. It is to insist that without solidarity, politics becomes violence, while with it, transformation remains possible.

Love, then, is not softness. It is stamina. It is the decision to keep showing up, even when outrage has burned out. In a fractured world, this is not the easiest politics. It is the only one that still holds a future.

Nafisa Sagdullaeva (SFS'26) is a senior in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.