"With tiny seeds in the broken grounds, we connect the future to our roots and breathe life towards the sky, unyielding in our shared manifestations, where the root, the trunk, and the flowers bloom as one. Online." – Kalkidan Tesfaye (Ethiopia) 

What does it mean to hold the line when the world demands your silence? 

In this anthology, Unyielding – Personal Essays from WHRDs, women human rights defenders from across the Global Majority speak the unspeakable. They write from exile and ancestral lands, from underground networks and forgotten courtrooms, from the deep fatigue of burnout and the unrelenting will to keep going. 

This anthology, developed through APC’s Safety for Voices initiative, captures the stories rarely included in policy reports or human rights frameworks: the psychic cost of disinformation, the humiliation of body-shaming attacks, the pain of losing your homeland to war, and the injustice of being rendered voiceless unless you translate your trauma into Western palatable formats. 

The essays, spanning Syria, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Pakistan, and beyond, reveal the shifting forms of violence WHRDs face: surveillance and smear campaigns, political repression, legal persecution, displacement, and digital hate. Yet these stories also uncover what persists: the quiet power of community, the memory of justice movements, the longing for futures where dignity is non-negotiable. 

Here, vulnerability is not weakness, but a method of resistance. In Unyielding, these WHRDs narrate their own stories in their own terms, through reflection, rage, humour, and heartbreak, and insist that power must always be held to account.