In a year saturated with politics in an ever more polarised world, where the obituary many feared they’d be reading would be that of democracy itself, one death seemed to encapsulate the historical moment we’re in: that of Alexei Navalny. A man of courage who championed democracy in his native Russia, a country that does all it can to suppress it, Navalny died in an Arctic prison as he had lived: as a ceaseless foe of authoritarianism and one of its most intractable practitioners, Vladimir Putin. Navalny’s death, at 47, set off a global wave of grief and anger and did precisely what he would have wanted it to: galvanise his fellow resisters to redouble their resolve.
Navalny was not the only righteous dissident to die in 2024. He had a counterpart in Nijole Sadunaite, a Lithuanian Catholic nun who took on Soviet totalitarianism in the depths of the Cold War. For years, she too had known the inside of a cold Siberian cell.
Half a world away, Shih Ming-teh died on his 83rd birthday, more than 60 years after he began agitating for democracy in a then-dictatorial Taiwan. Others were remembered for other causes that were no less political. Lilly Ledbetter campaigned so fiercely under the banner of equal pay for equal work that her name was memorialised by the US Congress, in the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.
Dorie Ann Ladner was a tenacious if unheralded fighter for civil rights in the Jim Crow South, shepherding Black Americans to a place many had never seen: a voti.