The World Economic Forum in Davos began this week under the slogan “A Spirit of Dialogue.” But we must ask - who gets to speak? Who is heard, and who is systematically excluded?
If Davos truly believes in dialogue, it must confront these five realities:
1. No dialogue is meaningful without those most affected.
Powerful governments and donor institutions are redirecting public resources toward militarisation and security while gutting international development funding. As aid budgets shrink, women, LGBTQI+ people, sex workers, migrants, and people in poverty bear the brunt.
HIV cases are rising. Sexual and reproductive healthcare is being stripped away. Yet the communities most impacted remain excluded, criminalised, or underfunded.
2. A dialogue that ignores imperial violence is complicit.
Wars and neocolonial extraction for oil, land, and rare earth minerals are driving climate injustice, destroying lives, displacing indigenous communities, and destabilising regions.
We bear witness to a geopolitical era defined by impunity, where powerful states and corporations have unilaterally removed all limits on themselves, operating without constraint or accountability in a deeply fractured global system.
What kind of dialogue is possible while genocide, occupation and forced displacement continue?
Who speaks for those buried, disappeared, or silenced?
3. A true “spirit of dialogue” must defend bodily autonomy and reproductive justice.
Across the world, anti-gender and anti-rights groups are rolling back the rights of women and LGBTQI+ people, fuelling stigma, violence, and restricting bodily autonomy. They are enabled by the same political and economic actors driving privatisation, border militarisation, and corporate impunity.
Many of these actors are still welcomed at Davos.
4. Dialogue without truth, accountability, and justice is another form of erasure.
The same economic and political systems celebrated at Davos continue to enable sexual and gender-based violence and barriers to sexual and reproductive healthcare. Militarisation, displacement, labour exploitation, and austerity strip survivors of protection while shielding those in power.
5. Dialogue that excludes grassroots movements is power talking to itself.
Feminist, LGBTQI+, and sex worker movements are not fringe voices: they are on the frontlines of defending sexual and reproductive health and rights amid criminalisation, backlash, and shrinking civic space.
Davos does not need new slogans. It needs accountability.
We demand dialogue that confronts power, centres justice, and protects bodily autonomy.
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