It's OK to be unreasonable

Student activism might sometimes seem confined to campus quads and social media hashtags – but the Global Student Forum (GSF) represents something more ambitious.

It’s a concerted effort to bring student voice to the highest levels of international decision-making:

“We believe that every student has the power to make a positive impact in our world. Your passion, creativity, and desire to drive change can create a ripple effect that extends far beyond your local community. It’s through our collective actions, big or small that we can truly transform the world.

Its Executive Director is Jacob Blasius – a Danish student activist turned global advocate, whose journey from local student politics to this international umbrella organisation offers insights into both the potential and the challenges of global student organising.

Blasius’s trajectory follows a familiar pattern – beginning at the local level before expanding to national and then international advocacy.

I come from Denmark and has grown up in the Danish student politics and worked my way up, first from a local level to a national level,” Blasius explained at The Secret Life of Students. “And I spent a lot of time working on a European level and how the EU institutions and a greater European collaboration on higher education functions.”

That progression – from local to national to European politics – demonstrates the nested structure of student representation that the GSF seeks to replicate globally. GSF functions as an umbrella for regional student bodies, which in turn represent national SUs. As Blasius puts it:

In the UK, you have NUS, which is a member of the European students union, which is a member of the global student forum.

But that neat organisational diagram belies the messiness and inequality of student activism across different contexts. Blasius recounted a revealing anecdote from his early international work:

We’re sitting in this meeting, and we’re talking about something as simple as the budget for this project. We had applied for some external funding and gotten it. And then one of the representatives from Zimbabwe…says, how much of this can we allocate for safe houses?

The Zimbabwean students’ matter-of-fact request for funds to establish safe houses – places where student activists could hide if they angered those in power – reminds us of the vastly different conditions under which student representatives operate.

For Blasius, coming from Denmark’s robust democratic system “where you absolutely could speak up to power,” this request provided a jarring insight into “a completely different reality.”

The contrast underpins one of GSF’s core purposes – creating solidarity among students facing wildly different circumstances while fighting for similar principles.

With a democratic governance structure, the GSF promotes networking, solidarity, capacity building, cooperation, analysis and strategy, advocacy, and values such as education, feminism, environmental justice, democracy, human rights, and global cooperation. Through collaboration, empowerment, and amplifying student voices, the GSF strives for educational justice, social equality, and the rights of students globally.

The institutional architecture of student voice

The Global Student Forum emerged from a long and complicated history of international student movements, whose development has often reflected broader geopolitical tensions.

During the Cold War, organisations like the International Union of Students and the International Student Conference mirrored the East-West divide.

Regional bodies such as the Organización Continental Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Estudiantes and the All-Africa Students Union developed their own distinct approaches to student representation.

The GSF itself was born from the 2016 Bergen Declaration, which established principles including education as a public good, equitable access, sustainability, and student safety.

Between 2018 and 2020, through collaboration among regional student organisations and with funding from groups like the Open Society Foundation, the Global Student Forum was formally established.

Today, the GSF pursues two interconnected missions. First, it brings student perspectives to global decision-making spaces – the UN, UNESCO, discussions about Sustainable Development Goals, and debates about the international financial architecture.

Second, it facilitates solidarity among students worldwide, enabling them to:

…learn from each other, support each other, show solidarity with each other.

More acronyms to learn

But these institutional arrangements, however necessary, risk reproducing the very bureaucratic structures that often stifle student input at the local level. Blasius acknowledges this tension:

If you feel like it is hard sometimes to navigate big systems and bureaucracies, I feel with you, because it really is, and the international system is nothing less. It is also big and convoluted, and there’s too many committees.”

His response – “but it’s also okay” – reflects GSF’s commitment to working within existing systems while also challenging their limitations. That balance between insider advocacy and outsider critique runs through much of the GSF’s work.

Throughout his talk, Blasius returned repeatedly to the limitations of committee-based approaches to student engagement. He described:

…that thing where you have so much great potential and so much great energy in so many places that are just killed and drowned, really, and buried in bureaucracy and processes.

His advice to student representatives facing structural impediments was refreshingly direct:

If there’s a space where there’s nothing happen and it’s clearly constructed for you to not have an impact, then leave that space that’s not a legitimate space for you to be in.

This willingness to abandon official channels that serve merely to contain rather than amplify student voices reflects a sophisticated understanding of power. It also explains Blasius’s insistence that “it is ok to be unreasonable” as a student representative – to reject ineffective consultation mechanisms and demand more meaningful engagement.

GSF’s work unfolds against a backdrop of escalating student protest movements worldwide. Blasius cited recent student-led actions in Bangladesh, Iran, and Serbia as examples of situations where students “felt no other option than to walk out on the street and demand change.”

Rather than portraying such protests as separate from or opposed to formal representation, Blasius presents them as points on a continuum of student action. Where official channels of representation break down or never existed, direct action becomes necessary.

GSF aims to support both approaches, recognising that different contexts demand different tactics.

Breaking the infantilisation of students

Probably the most telling moment in Blasius’s talk came when he described a visit to a wealthy American university (unnamed, but with “enough money and power to make Solomon blush”).

When asked how the university incorporated student input into its extensive student services, an administrator responded that American students weren’t “ready” for “that kind of sophisticated conversation about student participation.”

Blasius’s reaction – “my God, of course, they are” – captures the frustration many student advocates feel when faced with institutional infantilisation. Often universities position themselves as doing things for students rather than with students, treating them as beneficiaries rather than partners.

The paternalistic approach contradicts the GSF’s fundamental principle – that students possess the capacity, right, and responsibility to shape the educational systems they inhabit.

As Blasius puts it, many administrators haven’t…

…experienced… that kind of power, that kind of energy, that kind of will, that students have to take action and make changes now.

GSF’s work on education policy, human rights, sustainable development, and democratic engagement all aim to demonstrate this capacity – to show that students can contribute meaningfully to complex global challenges when given the opportunity.

Global solidarity in “interesting times”

Blasius acknowledges that we are “truly living in very interesting times” – a phrase that carries the weight of the apocryphal curse. Students now face daunting challenges, from accessing quality education to navigating increasingly uncertain post-graduation prospects.

The world students are preparing to enter presents even more complex problems – climate change, democratic backsliding, economic inequality, and technological disruption.

But GSF’s approach remains optimistic, grounded in a belief that global student solidarity can help address these interlocking crises. Connecting students across national and regional boundaries, the organisation builds capacity for collective action while also providing practical support to those operating in hostile environments.

For students in relatively stable democracies, Blasius offers a challenge:

How can we support them? How can we open up that space for other students to say that they can actually be part of helping other students be part of that shared conversation about rights?

The answer, he suggests, lies in recognising that “we really honestly, all of us in this together.” That captures both the GSF’s ethic of solidarity and its pragmatic recognition that today’s challenges transcend national boundaries.

Student movements that remain isolated within campus or national contexts risk missing opportunities for meaningful impact on the systems that shape educational opportunities worldwide.

The Global Student Forum offers not just a mechanism for representing student interests in international forums, but a model for how student movements might evolve to address increasingly global challenges.

Its success will depend on whether it can balance the bureaucratic requirements of international advocacy with the energy and urgency of grassroots student activism – a balance Blasius himself seems determined to maintain.

In a world where education systems increasingly reflect and respond to global forces, the GSF’s effort to globalise student voice represents a necessary evolution in student organising. Amplifying student voices from Bangladesh to Zimbabwe to Denmark, it has already begun to demonstrate the power of global student solidarity.

Take action with GSF

Some of GSF’s past events