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Ana Vilenica is a long-term housing, feminist, and no-borders activist in Serbia, the UK, and at the European level. Most recently, she has been organizing with an anti-eviction movement in Serbia, EAST (East European Essential Struggles Transnational), and The European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City. She also works as a journalist and analyst at Bilten and Mašina media outlets. She is a winner of the prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship for a project focusing on housing deprivation and citizen initiatives for change in Serbia and the UK.

Issue #192 of The Internationalist, we feature Vilencia's essay from Housing Justice. Here she argues that "international tenant power" is an emerging, decentralized, and grassroots form of internationalism where diverse housing-insecure communities build cross-border solidarities and resistance networks beyond traditional state-based alliances, to challenge global housing injustice.

The twenty-first century is well endowed in internationalism. Internationalism embodies the notion of transcending borders or boundaries, holding an inherent ambiguity as its politics are not prede- termined. Recently, alongside reactionary forms of internationalism, various types of internationalism within social movements have been identified, most notably anti-imperialist, feminist, pacifist, ecological, labor, and Indigenous movements. However, tenant internationalism has received considerably less attention. While there has been literature on international organizations advocating for housing justice and the international organizing of renters through unions, the complexities of international tenant power building, prominently evident in practice, have yet to be the focus of research. International tenant power, which has emerged from contemporary tenant struggles, offers a conceptual framework to name this emerging phenomenon and related practices of resistance to housing injustice. 

Tenants are outsiders in societies fixated on homeownership, as so many are today. As the global housing crisis escalates due to factors such as housing financialization, climate crises, and economic down- turns, both housed and unhoused tenants are once again mobilizing, often from increasingly marginalized positions. Who constitutes the tenants of contemporary tenant mobilization? According to the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), tenants are not solely renters but include anyone who is unable to control their housing circumstances. Because of the exclusionary nature of private property, renters (and specifically those leasing from private landlords) have long been the primary partic- ipants in tenant movements worldwide. However, in modern struggles, the definition of a tenant as a political actor has expanded to encompass all those experiencing extreme housing insecurity and lacking control over their living conditions. As Tracy Rosenthal notes, this encompasses incarcerated and unhoused individuals. We could also include tenants residing in single-room occupancy units, tents, and vehicles, as well as migrant tenants detained in immigration detention facilities.

Tenant power struggles are inherently and intentionally internationalist. As global housing markets become increasingly financialized and the migration patterns for work and livelihood bordered, interna- tionalism has become ingrained in tenants’ everyday lives and resistance efforts. Ongoing processes of financial globalization, (neo)colonialism, and imperialism mean that developments in one location significantly impact others, structuring relationships of inequality, dependency, and poverty. As exchange value increasingly dominates over use value in the housing sphere, people at the grassroots level are developing hybrid mechanisms for survival and resistance. This includes fostering cross-border solidarities and engaging in grassroots financial transactions, both formal and informal, such as remittances, as well as relying on traditional services on Indigenous lands such as usos y costumbres and tequio y cargo, practices that define rights and duties in the Indigenous communities of transnational incorporated migrants who have responsibility to give their work to their communities.

In parallel, tenants engage in grassroots organizations, campaigns, direct action, and protests against evictions and negligent landlords, and for dignified living conditions, often through land and housing occupations. On Turtle Island, a name for Earth used by some Indigenous peoples of so-called North America, tenants have increasingly organized during and after the pandemic in autonomous tenants’ unions. Unlike workers’ unions, whose primary focus is on labor conditions and workplaces, tenant unions prioritize the home as a site of financialization within social reproduction. Tenant unions encompass diverse communities in resistance that utilize various organizational models, many of which emphasize autonomy from both state and capital. These unions serve as repositories for broader social visions and are closely linked to their neighborhoods. Besides tenant unions, housed and unhoused tenants and their allies, including political workers, activists, and organizers, have organized in formal and informal groups, building alliances through local campaigns and networks. These include groups like Inquilinos Agrupados in Argentina, Our Homes Can’t Wait and Stop the Sweeps in Vancouver, and Red de Desalojados in Mexico City. These efforts address issues such as unaffordable rents, foreclosures, evictions, social housing, wealth accumulation via temporal rentals such as Airbnb, and gentrification and “whitening by dispossession”— racialized and class-based spatial reordering.

Simultaneously, tenants have been engaging in international solidarity, forging connections with other movements across borders, and building networks. Recently, a new type of brigade has emerged, expanding on traditional brigades that were organized between the so-called Global North and South, to demonstrate solidarity with countries affected by imperialist sanctions. Members of tenant unions from the US have initiated the first tenant brigade, consisting of people involved in tenant organizing, to express solidarity and gain insights from communal housing practices in Cuba and Venezuela. Transversal alliances like the international Palestine solidarity movement have also strengthened international tenant power despite constant attempts to divide political movements and communities. For instance, members of the South Central LA local chapter of the LATU have incorporated demands against the clearance of the USC student protest encampments, asking for ceasefire and disinvestment, while students have included demands against tenant displacement: “From South Central to Palestine, Displacement Is a Crime.” Some examples of building grassroots networks across borders are the Autonomous Tenant Union Network, which operates across Turtle Island and is committed to mutual learning and empowering tenants against racial displacement and the displacement of working-class people; the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City, dedicated to building the power of European grassroots housing struggles and building a front against real-estate capital consolidation; and the Shack Dwellers International, a global network of slum dwellers across Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

The emergence of international tenant power is also grounded in collective aspirations for freedom. The vision of tenant internationalism encapsulates a shared dream for a future where essential life infrastructures are accessible to all. Increasingly, the struggles of diverse communities—including Indigenous, Black, unhoused, piquetero, working-class, and queer groups—are acknowledged as crucial pathways toward addressing multiple crises and pursuing liberation. For example, Indigenous peoples across the Americas articulate plurinational demands that extend beyond mere criticism of existing settler colonial housing systems. They advocate for a radical overhaul of housing systems, prioritizing environments that sustain life and decolonial housing agendas over profit-driven models and exclusionary practices. These struggles prompt fundamental questions, including how to conceptualize housing justice on land seized through colonization.

As they engage in these varied campaigns and struggles, tenant power movements reflect an increasingly internationalist character. Initially, “internationalism” referred to interactions and alliances among nations and states. However, it has evolved to encompass political and practical connections among individuals and communities beyond national borders, transcending inter-state conflicts and economic rivalries. Talbot Imlay suggests viewing internationalism as “clusters of activity, some interconnected and others not, occurring in multiple spaces, at various speeds and intensities, and with different durations.” International tenant power, therefore, represents a complex network of interactions and interdependencies among actors forged in struggle and unfolding in different places despite and against borders. This form of internationalism is an informal and decentralized coalition of actors with extensive networks of contacts, institutions, and infrastructures provided by different members of this loose transversal alliance. It is also important to note that international tenant power movements can encompass those whose politics and actions exhibit only partial or temporary international perspectives or those collapsing scales in their local practices with international vision. This form of internationalism is decentralized and unfolds synchronously in different places. For example, there was an international call for rent strikes and halting evictions that unfolded globally during the pandemic, with many joining this call across continents. International tenant power is not equally distributed globally but instead is shaped by historical materialist conditions, including patriarchal racial capitalism and histories of tenant organizing.

This is not to suggest that internationalism is entirely new to tenant movements. There have been instances of international organizing and exchange within housing, habitat, and tenant movements in the past. Many of these organizations are now well connected institutionally with global international entities such as the UN and IMF. However, many such institutions have lost touch with their grassroots origins and increasingly serve the interests of capital through various compromises. International tenant power maintains transnational connections at multiple levels while retaining its local roots and decentralized management structure. These movements establish new frameworks for struggles around housing justice, generating analyses based on collective thought without uniformity or ideological control. They do not rely on representational structures but rather on situated power, which has the capacity to resonate elsewhere. International tenant power is not just about strength in numbers; instead, tenants forge connections beyond local power structures, creating a distinct form of power—tenant power—on their own terms.

Excerpted with permission from Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity, edited by Madeleine Hamlin and Carlos Delclós, published by PM Press, 2026. 

The Internationalist Archive