We no longer live in a world where courts reliably enforce limits on executive power; where media calls out abuse as abuse or where politicians depend on legitimacy to hold power. These conditions are eroding, and power is becoming more and more centralized. 

In the U.S., the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States in 2024 significantly expanded presidential immunity for official acts, raising concerns about accountability. Globally, ruling parties in Hungary and Poland have reshaped judicial systems through court-packing and disciplinary regimes that weaken independent checks on executive authority. And in countries such as India, new laws restrict freedom of the press. 

In response, we see a grinding pattern of reaction from pundits and resisters, but the power of centralized authority remains. Trump has retained power despite his involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, as well as his name being all over the Epstein files. Leaders in Turkey and Egypt have been accused repeatedly of inciting democratic backsliding, yet they maintain power. At the same time, ecological, economic, cultural and political crises expand. 

This moment demands more than opposition. What is needed is not just resistance against corrupt centralized systems, but to create new, local systems that restructure power so it is dispersed throughout society. Because the problem is not only that those in power abuse it. The problem is that power is concentrated in the first place.

The work of Gene Sharp stands apart in the field of nonviolent theory for one central reason: his understanding of power. For Sharp, justice, equality, freedom and any meaningful form of democracy do not exist simply as ideals or constitutional rights. They exist only when power is actually dispersed throughout society — embedded in the daily practices, institutions and relationships of ordinary people. Without that dispersion, democracy is little more than a substanceless claim.

Many nonviolent activists and scholars have embraced part of Sharp’s insight. They recognize that governments do not rule by force alone, but by the cooperation and support of institutions, organizations and individuals. From this perspective, power is contingent. If people withdraw their cooperation strategically and nonviolently, regimes can be forced to concede, reform or even collapse. This understanding has shaped movements across the world, from civil resistance campaigns to election protection efforts.

And yet, there is an equally important part of Sharp’s insight they are missing.

The problem of concentrated power

We are seeing how deeply dependent we have become on centralized systems that do not have our best interests in mind. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how centralized healthcare and supply chains have become, leaving many without timely access to care and essential goods. And recurring, large-scale electrical outages, such as the 2021 Texas power crisis, show how dependent millions are on centralized grids that can fail. 

When power is concentrated — whether in governments, corporations or some fusion of the two — corruption is not an accident. It is a structural inevitability. Systems organized around concentrated power will, over time, bend toward the interests of those who hold it. Policies, resources and decision-making processes become oriented toward preserving and expanding that power, often at the expense of the broader population.

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Even the most well-intentioned leaders operate within structures that reward consolidation, control and self-preservation. For example, in an effort to make the U.S. government more efficient and effective, President Barack Obama reinstated presidential authority, ushering in an era of consolidated executive power. The result is an unfortunate recurring pattern: Inequality deepens, accountability weakens and public institutions drift away from the people they are meant to serve.

When decision-making is centralized, the distance between those who hold power and those affected by it widens, often to the point where meaningful feedback becomes filtered, delayed or ignored altogether. Over time, this creates an environment where leaders are not only insulated from consequences, but are also operating with an increasingly distorted understanding of reality. Citizens, in turn, become disengaged or disempowered, sensing that their voices carry little weight within systems designed to concentrate authority rather than distribute it. The result is not just corruption in the traditional sense, but a deeper erosion of responsiveness, adaptability and trust — conditions without which meaningful reform from within is exceedingly difficult.

Activism as external correction

In response to the erosion of democracy and the increasing inaccessibility of necessities like food, healthcare and housing, activists organize. They build networks to monitor elections, serve as watchdogs on corporate behavior, defend civil rights and provide essential services where governments fail. These efforts are vital. They protect people from immediate harm and at times, win meaningful reforms.

But rather than transforming how power is organized within society, these efforts often function as external correctives. They attempt to restrain abuse, mitigate harm and fill gaps left by failing institutions. In doing so, they implicitly accept the continued existence of centralized power structures, even as they resist their consequences.

This creates a paradox. Activists devote enormous energy to building parallel systems. Yet the underlying structures that concentrate that power remain largely intact.

The burden of endless resistance

Over time, this dynamic places an unsustainable burden on civil society. Activists become responsible for preventing abuse by those in power, holding institutions accountable and providing services that those institutions fail to deliver.

This is, in effect, a permanent state of resistance. It is also a reactive posture. Each new harm requires a new response, a new organization, a new campaign. The work expands endlessly, while the root cause — the concentration of power — remains unaddressed. 

One example of this is the environmental justice movement, particularly the coordinated pushback against federal rollbacks. Coalitions such as We Are Still In and the U.S. Climate Alliance mobilize states, municipalities, businesses and civil society to uphold the commitments of the Paris Agreement. Additionally, environmental groups repeatedly challenge deregulation, while states advance their own regulations. This created a multi-level infrastructure of resistance. Yet, even these efforts are forced into a constant defensive posture, expending vast energy to block or mitigate harms rather than dismantling underlying structures that enable federally sanctioned reversals of policy. 

While it’s true that it matters who holds office — we know that Trump’s policies are far more harmful to the environment than were Biden’s — this distinction does not resolve the deeper problem. The structure of centralized power remains unchanged, meaning that environmental policy can be rapidly advanced or dismantled with each shift in administration. As a result, even hard-won gains remain fragile. This volatility prevents the kind of long-term, consistent action required to address the climate crisis at scale. 

The question that follows is both simple and profound: Why do we accept a system in which people must constantly organize to defend themselves against the very structures meant to serve them?

Reimagining the mainstream structure

If we take Sharp’s theory of power seriously, the answer cannot lie solely in resistance.

Withdrawing cooperation from unjust systems is a vital tool. But it is only half of the equation. The other half is construction: building a society in which power is distributed from the outset, rather than concentrated and then contested.

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This requires a shift in orientation. Instead of asking how to better monitor and constrain centralized power, we must ask how to redesign the structures that produce it. What would it mean to organize political, economic and social systems so that decision-making authority is broadly shared? So that communities have direct control over the conditions of their lives? So that power is not something granted from above, but something exercised collectively?

In such a system, the need for vast external networks of resistance would diminish. Not because injustice would disappear, but because the mechanisms for addressing it would be built into the fabric of society itself.

And this is key. When power is disbursed throughout society into local communities — for example, when food is grown locally, housing is owned by cooperatives, health care is operated by neighborhood clinics, and so on — then community members can withdraw from or reduce their dependence on centralized, mainstream agribusinesses or real estate corporations or medical institutions. Empowering communities to take care of more and more of their own essential needs is a grassroots process that restructures how power is distributed in society. And the more communities that are empowered by these local initiatives, the more dispersed and decentralized power becomes. 

Addressing concerns of centralized power

The task ahead then is not only to resist concentrated power, but to replace it with distributed forms of governance and organization. To shift from a model of external oversight to one of internal design. In other words, the goal is not merely to challenge power, but to reconfigure it.

Around the world, communities are already doing this. They are realizing Sharp’s theory of decentralized power. By developing community gardens, housing coops and health centers, people can opt out of mainstream institutions and systems, greatly weakening the power those systems have over them. This is not merely an effort to fill in gaps. Instead, it deliberately shifts how power is distributed in society. Because, as dependency decreases, so does the ability of centralized authorities to command compliance. What emerges is not a parallel safety net, but a reconfiguration of power itself, one in which legitimacy flows from local and collective production and governance rather than from those who live far away.  

In the examples below, we see communities around the world building local control over essential needs such as housing, food, health care, energy, technology and safety. Each project that enables people to meet these needs locally — rather than through international corporations or federally controlled institutions — is a step toward local empowerment. As more communities adopt this approach, power becomes increasingly distributed across society.

Housing: Community control over land and shelter

In southern Spain, the town of Marinaleda has created a radically different housing model. Following the election of Mayor Manuel Sánchez Gordillo — a labor leader pivotal to the town’s fight for self-governance — Marinaleda expropriated a significant amount of land from the state and launched a de-commodified housing system. Residents build their homes on collectively owned land; the town supplies construction materials and labor while occupants pay minimal mortgage payments tied to maintenance rather than profit. While operating within a broader national system, the town has effectively removed housing from market forces, placing control in the hands of the community itself.

In Jackson, Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson is working to build a solidarity economy rooted in worker ownership and community land control. Based on the model of Mondragon, Spain, residents are reducing dependence on both state and corporate systems.

Food: Feeding communities without external control

Few examples demonstrate community power more clearly than the Zapatista Autonomous Communities in Chiapas, Mexico. There, Indigenous communities have built autonomous systems of governance and agriculture, producing food collectively on communal land. In food forests, families and collectives farm milpa plots (corn, beans and squash) alongside cooperative coffee production. These systems operate independently of state programs and corporate supply chains, ensuring that communities can feed themselves on their own terms.

Community control goes beyond food. Volunteer medical professionals provide training for locals and help operate small community clinics that provide basic care, vaccinations and maternal support. Local community-run schools provide education that includes Indigenous languages, history and agroecology. And security as well as justice issues are brought before community assemblies. 

Power is dispersed by rooting it in the community itself and sustaining it through ongoing practice rather than reliance on institutions organized and controlled far from the people they are meant to serve. This reduces residents’ vulnerability to political shifts, market fluctuations and external control. Participation is embedded into daily life, making autonomy a lived reality rather than an abstract ideal. 

Likewise, in India, Navdanya, a woman- and Earth-centered movement to protect biodiversity, supports networks of farmers who preserve and share native seeds, rejecting dependence on corporate-controlled agriculture. Though funded in part by donations from corporate partners, they maintain seed sovereignty, which allows them to retain control over the very foundation of food production.

Health care: Care as a collective practice

Across many Indigenous communities, healers and midwives operate within community structures where knowledge is passed through generations. Care is often relational, land-based and spiritually integrated. For example, within the Navajo Nation, Diné traditional healing is an active, community-embedded system. And in Maya Ixil regions, comadronas (traditional midwives) guide pregnancy, birth and postpartum care using herbal remedies and spiritual practices. While outside funding supports this work, it nevertheless provides examples of how traditional and alternative healing can replace total dependence on mainstream health care systems. 

These health care practices are examples of mutual aid networks — many of which have expanded rapidly in recent years — in which communities can organize care without institutional backing. Funded through direct contributions and relationships of trust, these networks provide medical support, caregiving and essential supplies outside formal systems.

Energy and technology: Infrastructure in community hands

Energy and technology are often treated as inherently centralized, but communities are challenging that assumption. For example, Barefoot College trains local residents in the Global South — often women — to build and maintain solar infrastructure themselves, placing both knowledge and power in community hands.

Digital infrastructure is also being reclaimed. Community-built mesh networks, such as Guifi.net, provide locally owned internet systems governed by its users rather than corporate providers. These networks demonstrate that even complex technological systems can be decentralized and collectively managed.

Safety: Community-based security and governance

In the Indigenous Mexican town of Cherán, residents expelled external political authorities and established their own system of governance and security. Community patrols replaced state police, and decision-making shifted to local assemblies.

Similarly, within Zapatista communities, systems of justice and conflict resolution are handled collectively, without reliance on external courts or enforcement structures. Safety, in these contexts, emerges from shared responsibility rather than imposed authority.

From meeting needs to redistributing power

It’s worth noting that not all community-based efforts are entirely self-sufficient. Some, like community land trusts, rely heavily on ongoing government funding. And Germany’s energy democracy movement makes use of public grants and corporate support. Additionally, community safety groups provide programs that interrupt violence and reduce harm, but still depend on local police. Yet, they are models for systems and structures that can and sometimes do transition to total independence.

What unites these examples is not perfection but a desire to reduce their dependence on centralized institutions. They demonstrate that communities can meet essential needs through systems they control. That reduction matters because dependence is the mechanism through which power is maintained.

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A fair critique of decentralizing power is that it can fragment capacity and deepen inequality between communities. Not all localities begin with the same resources, skills or cohesion, and without coordination, decentralization can produce uneven outcomes, duplication of effort or gaps in essential services, especially in moments that require large-scale response. It can also risk exclusion or local capture if decision making is dominated by a few voices. 

These are real concerns. But they point to the need for networking, not isolation. They reveal the importance of shared standards, mutual aid across communities and federated structures that allow coordination without recentralizing authority. In this model, power is distributed, but not disconnected. Communities retain control over their systems while participating in broader networks that pool knowledge, redistribute resources and maintain accountability.

When communities no longer rely on governments or corporations for housing, food, energy or care, their participation in those systems diminishes. And their withdrawal is not merely tactical. Rather, it becomes a condition of life that rebuilds societal power structures from the ground up. 

And when this is multiplied across communities, something larger begins to emerge: a society in which power is not concentrated and contested, but dispersed and practiced. This is what it means to take Gene Sharp seriously — not only to withdraw cooperation from unjust systems, but to build the capacity to live without them. 

This article Resistance is only half the equation was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Last November, Hrag Balian and Emily Chu were in a group chat on the secure messaging app Signal to monitor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the San Gabriel Valley. Someone sent a message asking if anyone knew about a data center proposal in Monterey Park. No one did, so Balian and Chu, a married couple with backgrounds in technology, set out to do some research.

They read more than a thousand pages of documentation around the proposed data center from the developer, StratCap, some of which they obtained by public record requests, and calculated that the data center would triple the power that the city of 60,000 consumes. 

Balian and Chu attended a public hearing on the project and found the council chambers empty. “We needed to raise the alarm because nobody in this community seemed to know anything about this,” Balian said. 

The couple reached out to long-time local activists at San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action (SGVPA), who helped Balian and Chu start a campaign called No Data Center Monterey Park backed by SGVPA. Joining with community groups, they launched social media campaigns, held dozens of teach-ins, collected thousands of petition signatures and knocked many doors in December and January. 

By the next Monterey Park City Council meeting in January, the chambers were filled with more than a hundred residents who wanted to stop the data center from being built. They came with concerns about the data center’s around-the-clock power usage, the 12 million gallons of water per year required to cool down servers, and the potential for air pollution from the diesel generators and groundwater pollution from forever chemicals used in the cooling system. 

Monterey Park residents were successful in their opposition: At that meeting, the City Council passed a moratorium on data centers. In March, the council approved a ballot measure to ban them completely. Later that spring, the developer withdrew its proposal.

Now a broader coalition, No Data Centers San Gabriel Valley, is advocating for Monterey Park residents to vote “yes” on the June 2 ballot measure and is working to help the rest of the SGV fight data center proposals.

“We’ve seen not only [Monterey Park] residents be mobilized to come out to these council meetings, but neighbors from other cities joining us in the fight, providing testimony to say we don’t want a data center in Monterey Park and in this region as a whole — in the San Gabriel Valley,” said Amy Wong, co-founder of SGVPA.

Mobilizing community members

The San Gabriel Valley, which comprises much of eastern Los Angeles County, is the largest majority Asian and Latino region in the United States. Half of the valley’s population are immigrants, and it is home to many festivals, foods, parks and cultural traditions, including equestrian culture rooted in the Mexican tradition of charrería.

Balian believes that developers looking to build data centers in the Los Angeles area targeted the SGV based on racist assumptions. 

“I think it’s targeted because this is kind of improperly classified as like a sleepy town or predominantly immigrant community where people just won’t fight,” Balian said. 

Founded in 2019 around racial justice organizing and the Black Lives Matter movement, SGVPA decided to take on the data center when it came to members’ attention in November. 

“This data center issue has become a platform for people to exercise their activism muscles, because it intersects with so many other social issues in the community,” Wong said. “It touches on land use, environmental justice, public health, infrastructure, quality of life and also this fight against big tech and AI.”

Wong said that the fight against the data center has activated many residents, some of whom attended a City Council meeting for the first time. Organizers canvassed and went door to door, speaking in Spanish and Chinese to reach the diverse community. 

“This has been a unifying movement,” Wong said. “We’ve had folks who are organized and who have continued fighting back against different threats in our community since 2020, but we also have a lot of newcomers who are just now engaging in activism.”

Nicholas Rabb, a SGV resident and community organizer, said that SGVPA’s teach-ins gave residents critical guidance on how to fight the data center — one of the largest had about 200 attendees. These events were held in community spaces where organizers informed residents about risks associated with data centers and explained how to submit a public comment at a City Council meeting. The teach-ins included strategizing about how to stop the proposed data center and brainstorming what the space — a vacant business park — could be better used for. 

No Data Center Monterey Park informed residents about when data centers were on the City Council agenda and encouraged everyone to attend, and once-empty Monterey Park City Council meetings began overflowing. The January meeting ran until 1 a.m. because nearly 100 people had shown up to give comments.

Wong remembers those long meetings fondly. “Some of the meetings went past midnight, but I was so energized hearing residents’ testimonies about why they don’t want a data center, and they were authentic stories as to why,” Wong said. “I think those moments of unity have really been memorable.” She recalled one family who stayed late at the City Council meeting so they could speak about their fears about air and water pollution and their desire to protect wildlife and ensure access to nature. Others said they didn’t want their health negatively impacted by poor air quality. Some were concerned about the impact on equestrian centers, as increased industrial noise, mechanical operations and construction activity can create stress conditions for horses, which are highly sensitive animals.

Wong was also moved by the solidarity from residents of other cities who came to the Monterey Park City Council meetings to show support. 

Rabb said that it was after one of those four-hour meetings that Monterey Park Mayor Elizabeth Yang declared her opposition to a data center in the city. Not long after that came the moratorium, then the ballot measure for a permanent ban.

“I think this is a really empowering example of how people can take control of their lives and fight for their community,” Rabb said. “I think this is gonna keep having wins all over the SGV, which would be even more empowering.”

Echoing through the valley

Other cities in the San Gabriel Valley followed Monterey Park’s lead. This spring, Baldwin Park, Montebello and El Monte passed data center moratoriums and Alhambra banned data centers through zoning changes.

Sam Brown Vazquez, an environmental justice advocate in the SGV, has been one of the lead organizers fighting against a data center at the Puente Hills Mall in the City of Industry (made famous as the fictional Twin Pines Mall in “Back to the Future.”) The data center hasn’t been formally approved yet, although a battery center that organizers assume will power the data center has already been approved, after zoning changes.

Inspired by the way No Data Center Monterey Park’s teach-ins raised awareness and created a public forum, Brown Vazquez conducted one to alert residents about the proposed City of Industry data center. He also took inspiration from No Data Center Monterey Park’s information table and lawn signs outside City Council meetings. He began holding “art builds” where those fighting against the City of Industry data center could gather with art supplies to create lawn signs, posters and buttons. 

He said that No Data Centers Monterey Park has been supportive. “They gave us some of the first blank signs that we had, and then they gave us our first stencil that we used, because everything’s been very DIY,” Brown Vazquez said. 

Brown Vazquez said that in a larger sense, No Data Center Monterey Park’s victory has been significant in proving that the organizers can be successful in banning data centers.

“I think that there’s a sort of theory that AI data centers are inevitable and that this is the future, and that there’s nothing we can do to stop it, but I think that working with No Data Center Monterey Park has shown me that really we should be challenging the notion of AI hyperscale data centers being a part of our urban infrastructure,” Brown said.

One barrier organizers must overcome is that some cities in the San Gabriel Valley are unincorporated, meaning they do not have a city council to pass a ban. Rabb says that this underscores the need to keep the momentum going and organizing at the county level, where an ordinance can prevent data centers in unincorporated areas.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors discussed a moratorium at its April meeting but did not have enough support to pass it. Instead, the board approved a motion for an environmental and health report on data centers, and noted that a ban was not off the table.

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Wong said it is important for people organizing against data centers to stay engaged, vocal and strategize: “It’s really about understanding who your targets are and then deploying different strategies to ensure that you’re effective.”

She said she hopes that Monterey Park residents will vote to ban data centers on the June ballot, and that the space will instead go to something where the city’s cultures can be embraced. She sees the coalition continuing to build throughout the SGV.

“I’m really hopeful and optimistic that this movement will continue to inspire folks to fight against data centers,” Wong said. “I hope folks stay engaged and that we continue building regional solidarity and power in working class communities in the San Gabriel Valley, because we deserve better. This fight is just one of many that I foresee us having.”

This article The ripple effects of organizing against data centers was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

While Israel engages in ethnic cleansing and occupation in Lebanon, enables settler violence on the West Bank, and continues to commit genocide in Gaza, the focus on blocking the pillars supporting the Israeli war machine has grown. This has resulted in protests against the shipment of weapons and weapons components to Israel at ports in France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Oakland, Calif.

Israel could not conduct its repeated exercises in mass slaughter without U.S. arms and aid. My colleague Stephen Semler estimates that the U.S. has provided Israel with $350 billion in military aid (adjusted for inflation) since its founding. And I determined that during the first year of Israel’s attacks on Gaza, U.S. aid to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) increased fourfold, to over $18 billion. Israel’s entire inventory of combat aircrafts consists of U.S.-supplied Boeing F-15s and Lockheed Martin F-16s and F-35s, and Israel has received tens of thousands of U.S. bombs and missiles since the start of the war on Gaza.

Given this reality, stopping new sales to Israel, as Bernie Sanders has tried to do with several resolutions of disapproval in the Senate, is only part of the story. It is also necessary to stop U.S. actions that help Israel sustain its current arsenal. That’s where the port protests come in.

The latest port action occurred on May 22, when activists were arrested in Elizabeth, New Jersey trying to block an arms shipment to Israel from the Maher Terminals of the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, which is routinely used by Maersk and the Israeli-owned company Zim to load and transport tons of weapons and weapons spare parts to Israel. 

The protesters chanted “Zim and Maersk you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!,” and called on the International Longshoreman’s Association, which represents North American dockworkers, to refuse to load Zim ships destined for Israel, as has happened in Italy and other ports around the world.

Last year, activists in Oakland attempted to blockade the Port of Oakland and called on city officials to stop military cargo shipments out of the city’s airport, which is run by the port. A report by the Palestinian Youth Movement documented at least 280 shipments of military equipment to Israel in calendar year 2025 routed through the Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport, mostly via FedEx. Shipping documents showed that the shipments appeared to include parts for U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets, which Israel has used in aerial bombardments in Gaza.

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Although neither effort achieved the immediate objective of blocking one specific arms shipment, they underscore the degree to which actions enabling genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon are firmly embedded in the routine operations of ports and warehouses throughout the U.S. and the world. 

Similar actions during the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and 1980s were integral to the fight to impose comprehensive sanctions on the South African regime, which passed in the U.S. in 1986, overcoming a veto threat from Ronald Reagan. It was a long struggle, but it helped accelerate the demise of the apartheid regime, in support of on-the-ground action by the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement inside South Africa. 

No single action brought down South African apartheid, just as no single action will end U.S. support for the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon. But the port action in Elizabeth is a strong link in a chain of events that can bring an end to U.S. support for the mass slaughter inflicted every day by the IDF.

This article Pro-Palestine activists arrested blocking New Jersey port was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Memorial Day, it is my family’s practice to remember and honor all those who have died in war — including but not limited to those who have served in our country’s military. This broader act of memorialization is both truer to the history of Memorial Day, and more responsive to the moral imperative that all humans — and especially U.S. citizens — face as a result of the suffering and risk that organized violence causes throughout the world.

Like Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day has been gradually co-opted as an opportunity to show unquestioning, blank-check support for the U.S. military. We think participating in these commemorations is just being a good citizen, but in truth by participating we are adding our voice to a highly organized political message that speaks very loudly to the rest of the world. The political message we help send is that we value the lives of U.S. military personnel thousands upon thousands of times more than we value the lives of all others.

This is not my family’s belief, and therefore we cannot participate in Memorial Day in this way.

Historically, like Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day started as an expression of the strength of human desire for peace and respect for all life. The roots of the holiday began in the days following the end of the Civil War by those wanting to honor the fallen in the name of preserving the peace which had been achieved. Formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina held perhaps the first documented memorial day on May 1, 1865. While focused on honoring those who served as soldiers for the Union, these early commemorations also remembered and mourned all who died in the fighting, including civilians on both sides and soldiers for the South. So strong was this tendency to name and recognize the harm on both sides that some historians have critiqued these early Memorial Days as having the effect of whitewashing the moral battle that did take place as each person chose which side they were on in that critical time.

Yet today our Memorial Day celebrations have the exact opposite problem. We dedicate so much time and resources and emotional energy to remembering the fallen soldiers and servicemembers on “our side,” while we willfully decline to mention the exponentially outsized larger picture: the uncountable lives lost, the incalculable cost, and the sheer depth of human suffering caused by war and organized violence around the world. This tendency, to honor the lives of our own military above all other lives, is deeply morally and psychologically dangerous. It trains our minds to accept the unnamed tens of thousands as correctly, reasonably invisible; to consider those whose names and ranks we can recite to be the only losses deserving of pause, mourning and honor.

This is a deep error and our souls know it. Every single person who dies in any war is a human being with a family. Every single loss rips a hole in the hearts of those that loved them. For each soul lost there is unfathomable pain that can never be fully understood or articulated.

But it can and should be recognized. To remember, to memorialize, does help.

Yesterday, Ms. magazine published an article that points to this need for a broader understanding of Memorial Day. It specifically named the women and children whose deaths and suffering in war are often invisibilized. In particular, they name the horrifying deaths of the 165 Iranian girls who were killed when our military, in an apparent but as of yet unacknowledged error, bombed their school. To hold an ethically honest Memorial Day, we could start by naming these children, these innocents – and turning our eyes and our hearts to the unfathomable suffering of their mothers.

Veterans for Peace has also consistently lifted up a call for Memorial Day to acknowledge the full cost of war and affirm the strength of our desire for peace. In their 2025 statement, they include a quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a World War II veteran: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

The will of the people

I believe that a huge number of Americans hold a similar opinion of war, even those who participate in Memorial Day commemorations. Despite decades of efforts to bake blank-check militarism into U.S. culture, most people are implicitly aware that the entire game serves the interests of the political elite and the very rich, while demanding sacrifice mainly from working class people. Research shows that antiwar sentiment was one of the primary motivations of a subset of Trump voters. A decisive number of voters withheld votes from Kamala Harris due to horror at the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Neither group of voters has seen their will expressed. 

I myself feel agonizingly helpless by the current news, and I can only imagine how a peace-motivated Trump voter must feel. Far from holding to his antiwar plank, Trump has acutely escalated both the culture and the practice of endless war. He renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War and has run it in a way that eviscerates all subtlety and respect for human rights. Far from resolving the genocide in Gaza, he has escalated it into a regional conflict that could easily lead to nuclear war. Trump has made numerous horrifying threats, including “that a whole civilization will die,” which is the definition of genocide. He is implementing automatic draft registration for our sons ages 18 to 26, so none can refuse to register as an act of conscientious objection. One is reminded of God’s warning through the prophet Samuel: “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.”

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In the midst of this, we are all being encouraged to accept these escalations as normal and continue to join in and march and smile and show unquestioning respect and approval of such behavior. No! We must forge a better way.

What we need is an ethically honest Memorial Day. What the human spirit needs is a Memorial Day infused with heart and thoughtfulness, a Memorial Day that harnesses the power of our remembrance toward our deep desire for peace and well being for all. We can start by naming all those we know who have died in war — including soldiers and civilians who were killed in visible, recognized wars; soldiers and civilians who were killed in small conflicts; unofficial military actions that don’t make the news; and all victims of organized violence. We can name each soul whose names we know, and light candles for them.

But we should not stop there. We should also name in some way the unnameable. We should all visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in our hearts, and in doing so consider consciously not just those on “our side,” but all the loss of life that our global community has suffered because of war and organized violence. We can mark those uncountable deaths whose names we don’t know, but of whom we are aware. Doing so is an act of psychological honesty; it gives voice to our soul’s knowledge that their lives and their deaths do matter. In doing this we may not change anything outwardly, but we do change the rhythm of our own awareness, and the power of such a shift should not be underestimated.

Art by CODEPINK

This article An ethically honest Memorial Day was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When public dissent is risky or impossible, resistance does not disappear. It often becomes quieter, more practical and harder to recognize. For many working-class women in Egypt, it takes shape not in slogans or demonstrations, but in the daily tactics they use to protect income, reduce dependence, share care work and move more safely through public space.

Samah, a worker in Cairo, offers one example. (The women featured in this article are identified by their first names only, with surnames omitted to protect their privacy.) On her way to work, she buys vegetables for dinner and carries them with her in a plastic bag. During breaks, she and her coworkers prepare the meal together, saving time later when she returns home to cook for her family. The routine is simple and may be entirely overlooked, but it helps her resist the exhaustion, time pressure and economic strain created by the double burden of paid work and unpaid domestic labor in a system that treats both as her sole responsibility. 

Simple everyday acts of financial self-protection, mutual support and safer mobility can become forms of resistance when taking public action carries too high a cost or is out of reach. They are subtle, almost invisible in their execution, and precisely for that reason, they endure. 

The invisible politics — and why invisibility is strategic

What Samah and her coworkers are doing can be easily dismissed as mere coping. Yet they belong to what political scientist James C. Scott describes as “everyday forms of resistance.” In contexts where openly confronting authority can be risky, costly or simply unthinkable, resistance rarely appears as dramatic dissent. It shows up instead as small, repeatable practices that shift how constraint is managed and how power is negotiated in ordinary life.

This resistance is not always directed at the state directly. More often, it operates within the wider informal systems through which domination is organized and reproduced, where women’s spending, mobility and respectability is routinely monitored and policed. For working-class women under scrutiny from employers, supervisors and family, overt confrontation can carry economic, reputational or physical costs. Autonomy is easily recast as deviance; small gains in money, time or independence can be questioned, moralized or withdrawn. Discretion, then, becomes both protection and strategy. By staying within the ordinary rather than stepping outside it, women carve out narrow margins of autonomy that are difficult to punish without revealing the very mechanisms of control that sustain them.

The quiet work concentrates in recurring arenas where pressure is constant and small shifts matter. What follows traces three stories from these arenas: financial autonomy within monitored household economies, informal networks of mutual support that reduce exposure to dependency, and everyday practices of safety that expand women’s movement through public space. Together, they show that resistance is not always loud, collective or publicly legible. It is often incremental, discreet and embedded in the daily management of money, risk and life.

Financial autonomy as resistance 

At 23-years-old, Shahd works as a nail technician in a small salon. Her main financial challenge is not low income, but limited control over it once it enters the household. Her wages quickly enter a shared economy of obligation where groceries, utilities and family needs take priority and personal spending is weighed against collective responsibility.

“I once wanted to buy a jacket with my own money,” Shahd recalled. “I had the cash, but my father asked if it was really necessary when we still had other obligations, like my little brother’s lessons, so I gave the money to my mother instead.” Control is rarely dramatic. It works through quiet moral accounting that makes self-spending feel like something you have to justify, until you start policing yourself in advance. Visibility is where it tightens most. “If I leave cash in my wallet, it will disappear overnight. That’s normal,” she said, a reminder that cash is not treated as private savings so much as household money that can be absorbed without confrontation.

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Her response is not refusal, but reconfiguration. Instead of keeping savings in visible cash or relying solely on bank transfers that are easily monitored, she quietly diverts small amounts into a separate Vodafone Cash — a secure e-wallet service — account that only she manages. It’s easy to set up, requires little documentation and leaves fewer household-facing traces than bank transfers. “I move small amounts somewhere no one thinks to check before they ultimately disappear,” Shahd said. The sums are modest, but they create a private margin with real consequences. It gives her a small reserve to cover needs as they arise, and even unused, it eases constraint by keeping options open and giving her a sense of control. “I’m not saving for something dramatic; I’m saving so I don’t have to depend on anyone,” she added. 

The impact is less about dramatic transformation than about a gradual widening of what becomes doable under pressure. As these tactics spread, institutions begin to mirror them. For example, Vodafone Cash launched the Maaki initiative in July 2025 to train one million women in Upper Egypt in digital and technological skills. Likewise, the Central Bank of Egypt’s report that women’s financial inclusion reached 70 percent as of June 2025 points to a broader expansion in access to formal tools, and to the growing significance of mechanisms that women can deploy on their own terms.

This is what financial autonomy looks like as resistance, because it breaks the link between earning and control. Even small, privately-held reserves reduce dependence, widen what is possible under pressure and protect the ability to act without permission.

Networks as resistance

At 32-years-old, Noura works as an office secretary and raises her child alone. Her biggest challenge is not always money, but what happens when time and responsibility collide. A late meeting, a sick day, a school call can unravel the whole day if there is no one to hand things to.

So, she relies on an informal infrastructure of women who operate like an always-on relay. Someone steps in for pickup, another covers an hour, another brings food, another comes along to a clinic, another makes the calls and finds the workaround. Most of it is coordinated through WhatsApp, a steady stream of voice notes and quick asks that keep the day from falling apart. “I don’t have the option of doing everything alone,” she said. “If I try, I lose something, the job, the child or my mind.” This is not occasional help. It is a shared system of coverage that turns potential crises into manageable problems.

Money runs through the network too, and for Noura the gam‘eya is at its center, a rotating savings circle where women pay in monthly and take turns receiving a lump sum. Because it is predictable, she can plan for fees, rent gaps or emergencies without asking the wrong person at the wrong moment. “The gam‘eya is what saves us,” she said. “I know my date. And if an emergency hits early, the girls start a new one and I take the money first.” 

Outside the circle, the urgent need for money can come with predatory lenders that require wosolat amana (trust receipts), which easily turn a missed payment into a legal threat. “You sign one paper and suddenly it’s not just debt, it’s a knife to your throat,” she said. “If you’re late once, you can end up in jail.” The gam‘eya keeps her out of that trap. For her, it is not about getting rich, it is about not being cornered. 

Information moves too, with price intelligence, job leads, warnings and quiet knowledge-sharing that helps women navigate risk without generating a visible target. Through these overlapping exchanges, the network becomes a low-visibility welfare system, one that redistributes resources, absorbs shocks and builds a form of collective capacity. 

The impact of this kind of networked resistance is quiet but immediate. It resists the everyday power that scarcity creates for those who control access, whether that is employers who can punish absence, intermediaries who profit from inflated prices and informal credit, or household dynamics that enforce dependence by making women ask, explain and wait. 

These systems have been increasingly formalized in digital form, where platforms like MoneyFellows digitize gam‘eyat into app-based “money circles,” and initiatives like Tahweesha are designed to formalize women’s group savings and link them to banking services for rural women. These formalizations show that these circles are not a cultural leftover. They are an essential infrastructure that women built long before institutions learned how to name it.

Mobility as resistance

At 25-years-old, Salma works in an all-women clothes factory, and her shift ends at the hour when the city’s social contract quietly changes. Getting home is not a neutral transition between places so much as a second shift of calculation, where the price of a commute is not only time, but also attention, where routes are chosen for lighting and exits, and where a woman’s presence in public space is treated as negotiable. “The job finishes,” Salma said, “but the day doesn’t end until I close my door.” 

To navigate that pressure, Salma relies on tactics designed to look ordinary enough to survive scrutiny. She makes herself “known” on purpose, greeting the building porter by name, buying small things from the same kiosk so the shopkeeper recognizes her, choosing drivers she trusts when she can, and arranging check-ins that last until she is indoors. “If something happens,” she said, “I don’t want to be a stranger in the street.” This is the steady refusal to disappear.

But these manoeuvres do more than reduce risk. In a context where harassment is normalized and women are expected to adjust their lives around it, they become a form of everyday resistance to the informal rules that try to shrink the women’s movement. The point is not only to avoid danger, but also to refuse the quiet curfew that says women should not be outside, should not be alone, should not be moving freely on their own terms. 

Much of it is collective, because safety becomes sturdier when it is shared. Around the time the factory releases them, a WhatsApp thread starts moving with the kind of messages that sound casual until you realize they are building a distributed escort system with systemic check-ups. Meanwhile, a friend stays on the phone as Salma walks, a coworker waits for the double-check.

What they are producing is more than reassurance. It is witness, the small social infrastructure that makes harm costlier because a woman is less isolated even when she is physically alone. In a country where a U.N. Women study found that 99.3 percent of women and girls surveyed reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment, this web of recognition is not paranoia. It is adaptation under constraint.

While she is in transit, Salma also uses her phone to make her movements more visible to others and to create a record if something goes wrong. Sometimes she fakes a call and speaks loudly enough to imply that someone is tracking her route and expecting her; other times she quietly records, not to go viral but to make denial harder. “It’s not for drama, it’s so the person knows there will be a trace,” she said. In early 2026, when an Egyptian commuter filmed a man harassing her on a public bus and confronted him on camera, the clip went viral nationwide. Women watched, shared and repeated the lesson, turning filming into peer-to-peer knowledge and making harassment harder to erase. 

The circulation of “self-protection hacks” on social media follows the same logic. In one widely shared TikTok, an Egyptian woman holds up a small spray bottle and explains that because pepper spray can be hard to obtain in Egypt, she carries a homemade substitute made from ordinary kitchen and cleaning items. The point is less the bottle than the reality it exposes: When formal protection is inaccessible, women improvise deterrence from whatever is already within reach and circulate that knowledge peer-to-peer.

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This is why it counts as resistance. Salma is not only protecting herself. She is pushing back against the normalization of women’s vulnerability and the impunity that comes with it. She is refusing the idea that safety is an individual responsibility solved through silence, avoidance or self-blame. Through small, repeatable tactics, women like Salma convert safety into collective power, embedding themselves in networks of recognition so that harassment becomes riskier for the perpetrator than for the woman trying to get home.

Hope is a shared system

These stories are easy to overlook because they do not look like the forms of resistance people usually expect. They are made up of small, practical actions, like preparing dinner during a work shift, quietly setting aside a little money in a phone wallet, using a WhatsApp network to share care and support, or turning on a phone camera to make harassment harder to deny. But when visibility can bring punishment, ridicule or the loss of resources, quieter tactics matter. They help women reduce dependence, protect some control over their lives and push back against everyday pressures without exposing themselves to greater risk.

Shahd creates a private margin inside a monitored household economy, Noura builds welfare through women’s mutual infrastructure, and Salma creates more accountability in public space by staying connected to others and making harassment harder to deny. Their tactics do not overthrow systems in one decisive moment, but they alter the terms on which those systems extract, police and intimidate. The victories are modest and often temporary, yet they accumulate into something sturdier than they appear, a set of survival infrastructures that keep women moving, working, feeding their families and claiming space. 

In periods when public protest is impossible, these quiet practices keep the muscle memory of resistance alive, preserving networks, confidence and small forms of autonomy that can later feed more visible collective action. That is why the plastic bag matters. It is not just lunch. It is a quiet map of power, and a reminder that when resistance cannot be loud, it does not disappear. It changes form, becoming ordinary enough to pass, collective enough to endure and deliberate enough to count. 

This article The quiet resistance of working-class women in Egypt was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Proponents of war and militarization often invoke common memories of Hitler and World War II to argue that we are now in a similar moment. Whether it is with Saddam Hussein in 2003, al Qaeda during the “war on terrorism,” Iran’s Supreme Leader in 2017, or Putin since 2022, a classic trope is to compare enemy leaders to the Nazis. In the lead-up to the Iran War this February, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham likened Iran’s religious leaders to Hitler and argued for regime change by any means. 

It is only a matter of time before Hitler is invoked again to justify yet another war or yet more militarization. How can those who are uneasy with war and militarism prepare to counter such arguments?

The “Hitler question” — what would you do if faced with Nazi aggression? — has certainly long functioned as a rhetorical trump card against pacifism and nonviolence. It is usually posed as a trap. If pacifists concede violence might be necessary, their principles are revealed as hollow. If they reject violence even then, they are exposed as naive or morally indifferent. 

Look closer, however, and it turns out that this framing rests on shaky assumptions and questionable simplifications. Even on as serious a challenge as the “Hitler question,” pacifism and nonviolence offer far more serious and practical insights than usually given credit for. 

As I examine in greater depth in a recent academic journal article, there are 10 ways in which the conventional assumptions behind the “Hitler question” can be challenged. 

Resisting the Nazis 

On the specific historical context of the Nazi question, first, framing the question in 1939, with war underway or imminent, bypasses or ignores the decades of political choices, structural violence, and missed opportunities that made that crisis so acute. 

From the punitive settlement after World War I, to the nationalist backlash and wider repercussions of the 1929 economic collapse, to imperial rivalries and militarized politics across Europe, decisions were made and particular paths were chosen. Different choices might have prevented the rise of Nazism in the first place. The crisis by 1939 was not caused by pacifism, but by decades of violence and militarism that helped create the conditions in which Hitler thrived.

Second, even if one accepts that war ultimately contributed to defeating Nazi Germany, an honest account would include a more critical look at what violence did — and did not — achieve. Military force did not prevent Hitler’s rise, nor did it stop the early expansion of Nazi power. 

War also did not protect Europe’s Jews from genocide; in fact, the Holocaust escalated under the cover and brutality of wartime conditions. Nor was the Allied war effort primarily motivated by a desire to stop genocide. Strategic priorities focused on territorial and political competition, and opportunities to disrupt the machinery of mass murder were often not taken.

This complicates the popular narrative of World War II as a clear-cut moral triumph. The same states that defeated Hitler tolerated or ignored other atrocities before and after the war (Gaza providing a recent example). Moreover, the conflict itself involved massive civilian casualties, indiscriminate bombing and forms of collective punishment that blur the line between justice and destruction. War may have brought down the Nazi regime, but it did so at enormous human cost and without eradicating the underlying ideologies of fascism and militarism, which persist in various forms and have become particularly revitalized and threatening in recent years.

Third, violent resistance was not the only form of resistance that ultimately defeated the Nazis. Nonviolent resistance contributed, too. Across occupied Europe, ordinary people and institutions engaged in acts of civil defiance, including strikes, bureaucratic obstruction, clandestine publishing, education boycotts, and networks that hid and protected Jews. In countries like Denmark and Bulgaria, public solidarity helped save large numbers of Jewish lives. Even within Germany, protests such as the Rosenstrasse demonstration, where non-Jewish wives secured the release of their Jewish husbands, forced concessions from the regime. (Incidentally, examples of nonviolent resistance and defense can be found in the current Ukraine war, too.)

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These efforts were rarely coordinated on a large scale, and they did not defeat Nazism on their own. But their contribution challenges the idea that nonviolence was absent or irrelevant. Such examples, however, were also largely spontaneous (as they have been in Ukraine since 2022). The populations that resisted nonviolently have not benefited from systematic training and investment in such methods. Yet, just as military success depends on training, resources and coordination, so too does effective nonviolent resistance.

Fourth, as we know from plenty of recent scholarship and hundreds of examples, nonviolence operates differently from violence. Rather than seeking to overpower an opponent physically, it aims to undermine the social and political foundations of their power. Authoritarian regimes — even brutal ones — depend on compliance, legitimacy and the participation of ordinary people. When those forms of support are withdrawn, the regime’s capacity to function erodes. Nonviolent resistance can also create what is often called a “backfire effect,” exposing the injustice of repression and turning it against the oppressor by mobilizing public opinion.

Even the Nazi regime was not immune to these dynamics. It paid attention to public sentiment and adjusted policies when backlash threatened stability. The visibility of violence mattered: After the widely condemned brutality of Kristallnacht, antisemitic policies were implemented more discreetly. Nazi authorities went out of their way to hide practical elements of the “final solution” from public view. Where Jewish communities were less isolated and enjoyed broader solidarity, such as in Denmark and Bulgaria, survival rates were higher. These examples suggest that public opinion and social ties were not irrelevant, even under totalitarian rule.

Fifth, World War II is often remembered as being against “the Germans,” as a total war pitting entire populations against each other, as if all Germans were equally guilty. This obscures the fact that many non-Nazi Germans were victims of Nazism, too — such as civilians, conscripts and dissidents. Military conflict tends to turn entire nations into enemies. War dehumanizes, reinforcing binary identities and legitimizing large-scale destruction (as the genocide in Gaza illustrates all too clearly). Pacifism and nonviolence, by contrast, insist on recognizing the humanity of all involved, even while resisting injustice.

Resisting war 

Beyond the specifics of the Nazi context, it is worth also interrogating some of the assumptions with which the “Hitler question” tends to be asked. Five challenges to conventional wisdom emerge here, too.

First, pacifism is often over-caricatured and misunderstood. For one, it is often assumed that pacifism is a single, absolutist doctrine that rejects all forms of violence under any circumstances. Yet pacifist thought is diverse. Some strands are principled, others pragmatic; some oppose all war, while others argue that specifically modern warfare — especially in the nuclear age — is too destructive to justify. Many pacifists engage deeply with questions of strategy, effectiveness and political responsibility.

Another misconception is that pacifism equates to passivity. To the contrary, nonviolent action often involves risk, disruption and courage. It can include strikes, civil disobedience, boycotts and other forms of active resistance that challenge power structures directly. Far from being passive, such actions often require significant organization and personal sacrifice.

Second, nonviolence is more effective than its detractors often seem to assume. Studies have found that nonviolent campaigns have historically been more successful than violent ones, even against authoritarian regimes, and that they tend to produce more democratic and stable outcomes. While these findings have attracted some debate and certainly do not guarantee success in every case, they undermine the assumption that violence is inherently more effective.

There is, admittedly, no clear historical example of a society successfully defending itself against a full-scale invasion using only nonviolent methods. However, cases can be found of civilian resistance to occupation and authoritarian rule, suggesting that nonviolent defense could function as an extension of these practices. The idea of “civilian-based defense” involves preparing entire populations to resist through non-cooperation, making occupation difficult or unsustainable. This approach has never been systematically implemented, making it difficult to evaluate — but its potential cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Third, the “constitutive” impact of war is also not to be neglected. Violence, even when effective, does not simply achieve objectives; it reshapes societies (as evident with those countries affected by the Ukraine war, and in Israel and Palestine). War strengthens militarized institutions, normalizes hierarchy and cultivates cultures that are more accepting of violence. It leaves deep psychological and social scars, and it often fuels future conflicts. The economic and political systems built to support war — arms industries, military alliances, security infrastructures — take on a life of their own.

This raises a different kind of question: not just whether violence can defeat a particular enemy, but what kind of world it creates in the process. If war fosters the very conditions — militarism, dehumanization, authoritarianism — that enable regimes like Nazi Germany, then relying on it as a solution may be self-defeating.

Fourth, any assumption that violence can be controlled is also questionable. War is often imagined as a precise instrument, but in practice it is chaotic and unpredictable. It escalates, generates unintended consequences and often exceeds the intentions of those who initiate it, as we’re seeing with the ongoing U.S. and Israeli war on Iran. Civilian casualties, environmental destruction and long-term instability are not anomalies but recurring features. Once unleashed, violence is difficult to contain.

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Fifth, it is worth reflecting on the cultural and political uses of the “Hitler question.” It is often invoked not only in historical debates but in contemporary conflicts, where enemy leaders are recurrently cast as yet “another Hitler” to justify yet another military intervention. This framing simplifies complex situations and encourages a moral narrative in which violence appears as the only responsible choice. It also reflects a particular perspective, rooted in Western experiences and dominant memories of World War II, that obscures other histories and viewpoints, such as those of conscientious objectors, dissidents, women, racial minorities or colonized people.

As a result, a romanticized vision of war as a moment of heroic and hypermasculine struggle against evil, where violence is regrettable but necessary, gets reproduced. This narrative overlooks the broader consequences of war and the voices of those who experience its costs most directly — civilians, marginalized communities and those outside the centers of power.

All this is not to say that nonviolence would certainly have stopped Hitler or that all wars are avoidable. What I do mean to say, however, is that the “Hitler question” is not as decisive an argument against pacifism and in favor of the next war as those who ask it often seem to think. By examining its assumptions and revisiting the historical record, the choice between violence and nonviolence emerges as more complex than the question tends to allow. Pacifism and nonviolence offer not a simplistic rejection of force, but a set of critical tools for thinking about power, resistance and the long-term consequences of political action.

In a world where calls for war continue to be justified by invoking existential threats and moral urgency, advocates of pacifism and nonviolence should not feel disarmed by the “Hitler question.” The challenge is not to provide easy answers, but to broaden the conversation — to consider alternatives, question assumptions and invite to take seriously the possibility that resisting violence does not always require more of it.

This article The “Hitler question” should never justify war was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Young people in the U.S. have won a major unsung victory: Starting in December, they will no longer be required to register or report their addresses for a possible military draft. But Congress has given the agency tasked with “readiness” for a draft a second chance to find a way to sign young men up for a future draft involuntarily and “automatically.”

To understand how this victory was won and how young people and their allies can fight the plan for “automatic” registration, we need to look at 45 years of forgotten history of draft registration and resistance during a time when there was no active draft.

In December 2025, Congress finally voted to end the requirement in effect since 1980 for male U.S. citizens and residents to register with the agency that would administer any military draft — the Selective Service System, or SSS — within 30 days of their 18th birthday and report to the SSS within 10 days of any change of address until their 26th birthday.

This is an extraordinary and largely unrecognized victory for pervasive noncompliance with the registration law. This spontaneous, silent resistance has been sustained by generations of young people for 45 years, during which there has been essentially no visible or organized anti-draft movement. 

But Congress remains so unwilling to admit to failure in the face of popular resistance, and so intent on preserving the fiction of readiness to activate a draft, that it included a provision in this year’s annual “defense” bill, at the urging of the SSS, that gives the SSS a second chance. The agency is instructed to try to register potential draftees “automatically” by using information from other federal agencies. 

The SSS has already drafted regulations for “automatic” registration that are currently under review by the White House. The change in the law will take effect in December 2026 unless Congress takes action before then to repeal the Military Selective Service Act. 

“Automatic” registration will be a fiasco. Mining data collected by other federal agencies for other purposes won’t produce a list of young men and their mailing addresses that’s any more accurate or complete than self-registration. But it will enable continued planning for endless, unlimited wars without the need to consider whether enough Americans will be willing to fight them, and will create a database that can be weaponized against vulnerable young people. 

Because only men are subject to the draft, the SSS must track gender, and because the agency interprets “male” to mean “as assigned at birth” for the purposes of the draft, it may seek to obtain information on the sex assigned at birth of all young people. And since U.S. residents are subject to being drafted regardless of citizenship, the SSS will have a mandate to try to compile a list of the names and addresses of all male immigrants ages 18-25, including undocumented immigrants. Those lists will likely be available to ICE, DOGE and other agencies.

Why, though, is the SSS getting a do-over from Congress despite such abject failure? And if there’s been such widespread resistance to draft registration, why haven’t we heard about it? 

The power of silent resistance

The dynamics of draft resistance and anti-draft activism since 1980 follow a pattern that was articulated perhaps most clearly by the late James C. Scott. Scott was a political scientist and ethnographer who backed into anarchism through his fieldwork on the forms of subaltern resistance to authority and oppression. Scott situated his work within the “subaltern studies” movement, which seeks to center and uplift the voices, actions and interests of those who make up the underclasses in structures of domination and subordination.

Throughout his work on the forms of resistance, Scott took it for granted — as have many others — that resistance is a phenomenon defined by actions, not by ideology or organizational affiliation. As Joan Baez described it while introducing her band at Woodstock, “We … are members of the Resistance, which simply means that you have to turn your [draft] card in, or put ketchup on it and eat it, or burn it or flush it or whatever you want. … So, that’s what it takes to be in the Resistance.”

Acts of resistance are sometimes open, organized and accompanied by protest — but not always. One of Scott’s key points is that too narrow a focus on elite organizations and open defiance can blind us to the underlying phenomenon of quiet resistance, its subaltern character, and its power. 

“Quiet, unassuming, quotidian insubordination, because it flies below the archival radar, waves no banners, has no officeholders, writes no manifestos, and has no permanent organizations, escapes notice,” Scott notes in “Two Cheers for Anarchism”. “[But] more regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by … the silent, dogged resistance … of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”

Scott describes as typical a symbiosis between a small, visible, vocal, organized, largely elite “movement” and a vast, mostly silent, largely subaltern phenomenon of mass resistance. And he defends the meaning and significance of “self-serving” acts of resistance, such as desertion from the military or draft “evasion,” that may have no explicitly political intent.

How this played out with draft registration is a case study in the effectiveness of quiet, passive direct action, and of the need for organized solidarity and allyship to realize the full potential of that otherwise invisible undercurrent of insubordination.

The response to  draft registration

When President Carter proposed resuming draft registration in 1980, the response was an immediate wave of public protest. There were rallies on campuses across the country within days, and tens of thousands of people took part in marches against the draft in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco just two months later — a remarkably rapid mobilization in the pre-Internet era.

For understandable reasons, only a few thousand young people publicly announced that they wouldn’t register. (I was among them.)

The erroneous impressions this gave were that 1) opposition to the draft could be equated with protest or complaint, and 2) most of those who opposed the draft would, despite their objections, comply with the law.

The reality, though, is that most of those who didn’t want to be drafted stayed home. They didn’t protest or publicly confess to a crime, but neither did they sign up for the draft. Most remained uncommitted, taking a wait-and-see attitude toward whether they would register. 

There were many exceptions, but the broad pattern was what Scott has described as typical: Those with the least financial or social capital to lose were generally those least likely to register. Those with more privilege were more likely to decide that they could afford to take the risk of publicly refusing. The press looked for visible anti-draft protest — and found it, initially, in the early 1980s — among the most privileged potential draftees at elite colleges. But few observers looked for, noticed, or recognized the significance of the passive resistance of much larger numbers of marginalized youth.

Registration began in July 1980. At the start of the school year that September, The Boston Globe — in the first independent attempt to collect compliance statistics — reported that perhaps a million men, a quarter of the initial cohort, hadn’t registered. By June 1982, even the SSS admitted that at least half a million potential draftees had failed to register.

Faced with an unexpected crisis of noncompliance, the Department of Justice had little choice but to make examples of a few of those whose public statements could be used to prove in court that our refusal to register was “knowing and willful,” as the law required. One DOJ strategist expressed the hope that “an initial round of well-publicized prosecutions” might “yield sufficient registrations to maintain the credibility of the system”. 

That didn’t happen. I was one of just 20 non-registrants who were prosecuted in the early 1980s (perhaps 1 percent of those who had publicly announced our refusal to register). Those of the 20 who didn’t register after being indicted were all convicted, and nine of us were eventually imprisoned. But these show trials called attention to the extent of the resistance and the inability of the government to enforce the law against those who stayed home, stayed quiet, and didn’t publicly confess to criminal intent.

These trials were highly publicized, as the government wanted to achieve maximum intimidation. But the legal issue that dominated press coverage for the next several years was whether the government could constitutionally prosecute only those who had publicized their refusal to register.

In 1985 the Supreme Court, in a poorly-reasoned decision over a dissent by Justice Thurgood Marshall, upheld this selective prosecution scheme. For the government, this was a legal victory but a practical loss. The silent majority of non-registrants got the message loud and clear that there was safety in silence as well as safety in numbers. The risk was in speaking out, not in skipping registration.

Decades of noncompliance

After this brief and counterproductive experiment, the DOJ abandoned any attempt to enforce the registration law against even the most flagrant violators. Nobody has been prosecuted since 1986, and nobody could be prosecuted without proof that their noncompliance is “knowing and willful.” The SSS sends a hundred thousand or more threatening letters every year to names and addresses obtained from data brokers and others sources. As decades passed, however, these empty threats were less and less effective.

In the aftermath of the test cases, fewer and fewer people either registered with the SSS or spoke publicly about their refusal. This was a rational response to the government’s pattern of selective prosecution. Organized opposition to the registration requirement also faded away. Why would activists prioritize organizing against a law that isn’t being enforced?

The public and most of those who could have been allies to the resistance wrongly interpreted the disappearance of public proclamations of resistance and visible anti-draft protests as indicating that the vast majority of potential draftees had been cowed into compliance.

This misimpression was heightened by measures to require registration with the SSS as a condition of eligibility for federal student loans (a requirement that was quietly repealed in 2020) and, in some states, driver’s licenses.

These laws were less effective than most people thought, especially because not all states have enacted laws like this. “California does not share driver’s license [information with the Selective Service System] — so, hey, move to California and you’re basically exempted from being drafted,” as a former director of the SSS testified in 2019. 

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Nevertheless, these laws helped prop up the myth of compliance as the norm, even while compliance continued to fall. By 2023, fewer than 40 percent of men turning 18 had registered by the end of the year, much less within 30 days of their 18th birthday. “Absolutely nobody” tells the SSS when they move, as the chair of the House Armed Services Committee noted at a hearing in 2021.

The failure of draft registration was obvious to anyone who scrutinized the program. Yet in the absence of a movement shouting, “The emperor has no clothes!”, it took another 40 years for Congress to seriously consider admitting failure. It was only a misguided push to expand draft registration to include women as well as men (prioritizing a false notion of “equality” in war over real equality in peace and freedom) that drew enough attention to the issue to prompt Congress to seriously consider action. The bipartisan Selective Service Repeal Act to abolish the SSS was introduced in 2019 and reintroduced in each session of Congress since.

In response to this existential threat to their own jobs, the staff of the SSS — not the Pentagon or anyone in Congress — came up with the idea of trying to “automatically” register potential draftees.

Congress approved the SSS proposal without any hearings or debate. Most Republicans and most Democrats in Congress want the draft available as a “fallback” when their party is in power, just as most of them want to keep nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal of threats. The availability of a draft enables planning for larger, longer wars, without having to consider whether enough people will be willing to fight them. This, of course, is why it would be so significant a constraint on “forever” wars to take the draft off the table as an option for any president.

Stopping “automatic” registration

Well-meaning but ageist older people often conceptualize anti-draft activism as protecting weak and vulnerable young people against being drafted. In reality, it’s the young people on whom the government depends to fight its wars who hold the power. They are wielding their power of noncooperation to protect us all against military adventurism. We should thank them for their service.

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Uncovering Americans’ long history of hostility to conscription

More concretely, if we want to be allies to young people in their struggle against conscription and war and for youth liberation, we should work to expose the dangers of “automatic” draft registration and its inevitable failure.

In the event of a draft, the government will have the same difficulty enforcing induction orders that it has had enforcing registration. But if young people are registered involuntarily, their unwillingness to fight old people’s wars won’t become visible until after the country is militarily overcommitted and a draft is activated. That’s a dangerous scenario, even if you support U.S. plans for wars and a draft.  

“Automatic” draft registration is a bad idea, and it won’t work. But it’s not yet a done deal. We still have a chance to get Congress to repeal the draft law before the attempt at “automatic” registration begins in December. On May 14, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Sens. Ron Paul of Kentucky and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming reintroduced the Selective Service Repeal Act.

A diverse coalition of anti-war, religious, feminist and civil liberties organizations has already announced its opposition to “automatic” registration and its support for the Selective Service Repeal Act. Much more educational outreach and organizing is needed to get this issue on the agenda and into the demands of antiwar organizations and activists.

Young people have done the heavy lifting. They have brought us to the brink of victory over the draft and the threat it poses to everyone around the world against whom draftees would be weaponized. Our task as older allies is to amplify their continued resistance, whether it takes public or quiet forms, and to pressure Congress to include the Selective Service Repeal Act in this year’s defense bill.

This article Automatic draft registration undoes a victory decades in the making was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

One hundred fifty people holding tulips stand in formation on the marble floor of the Cannon House Office Building, until Capitol Police arrest over a third of them and remove them in cuffs. 

Maybe you saw an image of these veterans with their flowers — the red tulips that are an Iranian national symbol honoring martyrs. Perhaps you saw a photo of a disabled veteran’s wrists being handcuffed while leaning on a cane. You may have caught a video where a mother or a partner of a deployed soldier spoke about wanting their loved one back from this unconscionable war.  

When 66 protesters from a coalition of veteran and military family organizations were arrested on April 20, these images went viral worldwide. This attests to not only the specific weight given to veterans who speak out against wars, but also the deep hunger to see any kind of tangible action against the United States and Israel’s profoundly unpopular war with Iran.

One of those arrested was Katie Chorbak, president of 50501 Veterans, which organizes more than 2,000 members into policy fights, nonviolent direct action and sustained advocacy. Chorbak, a fifth-generation combat veteran, chose to bring her concerns directly to lawmakers out of the belief that veterans have a “responsibility to speak plainly” when the country is moving toward war without transparency or congressional debate.

“Veterans showing up in that space matters because we understand the realities of war beyond headlines and talking points,” Chorbak said. 

Despite decades of demonization of Iran by U.S. politicians, amplified by mainstream media, Trump’s war on Iran was met with immediate disfavor in March (a Reuters poll found that only 27 percent of voters approved of the initial strikes). Still, there has been little substantive resistance in Congress and relative quiet in the streets of cities that saw record-breaking protests against President George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s.  

Yet, over these last 20 years, veterans never stopped organizing against U.S. wars and militarism. The organizers of the April 20 action — About Face Veterans Against War, Veterans for Peace, 50501 Veterans, the Center on Conscience and War, Military Families Speak Out and others — are building antiwar veteran and service member leadership, offering a vision of how we could end this country’s marriage to reckless, crushing militarism.

Where did this come from?

GI resistance is the tradition, dating back to the Revolutionary War, of American soldiers choosing to stand on their conscience and withdraw their consent to carry out the orders of commanding officers. The spectrum of resistance has encompassed the Vietnam War era’s more visible draft dodging and widespread disobedience in the ranks, and the quiet, mostly unseen refusal of soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars to execute civilians, load their guns, carry out missions, report for duty or even to deploy. 

Now, military resistance to the war on Iran is beginning to take publicly visible forms. Hundreds of complaints were filed by troops in every branch of the military when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a Christian nationalist, directed his commanders to inform their units that the Iran War is a holy war anointed by Jesus. And in the theater of war, service members whose labor enables the war machine can always find ways to clog the gears (sometimes literally). Rumors abounded of sailors clogging toilets and starting a fire on the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, which had to retreat for repairs in March.

Public acts of refusal are vital to building a movement. Many soldiers can’t imagine refusing orders or deployment until they see someone else doing it. But courage is contagious, and an opportunity to join a collective action can offer the necessary bridge to take that risk. 

Antiwar groups offer two core ingredients to transform spontaneous individual acts of refusal into a movement: visibility and access to support. Kelly Dougherty, who co-founded About Face in 2004 after returning from a year in Iraq in the Army National Guard, now serves as the counseling director for the Center on Conscience and War, or CCW, supporting service members seeking separation from the military, information about their rights or conscientious objector status. Dougherty says that while the Iran War has prompted a recent surge in calls to CCW’s hotline, “most service members I speak to have been questioning the system of war and whether or not they can morally participate in it for months or years.”

About Face has carried the banner of supporting GI resistance since its founding by Iraq War veterans with the support of seasoned organizers from Veterans for Peace. The group launched a Right to Refuse campaign after the 2024 election to bring renewed attention to the long tradition of refusal of illegal and immoral orders. To get the word out, Right to Refuse uses visibility efforts, direct actions, social media, on-the-ground outreach and word of mouth. An encrypted support form allows for anonymous inquiries. The campaign works in tandem with the GI Rights Hotline, which has fielded calls from active duty questioners and emerging conscientious objectors since 1994.

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What happens when soldiers stop believing in war?

As mainstream media conglomerates continue to shift rightward, so grows the importance of direct actions that alert soldiers to their options, as well as pressuring elected officials.  This is why the CCW chose to have its executive director Mike Prysner risk arrest in the April 20 action. “Most people in the military aren’t familiar with their right to seek discharge as a conscientious objector,” Dougherty said. “We wanted to let service members know that if they are experiencing a moral crisis because they cannot, in good conscience, participate in war, that they can file for conscientious objector status and there is an organization that will support them every step of the way.” 

GI resistance has power because war requires obedient soldiers. But active duty service members’ opportunities to make direct impacts are shrinking as war becomes increasingly outsourced and automated. Remote-controlled weaponry is taking over from real humans (often referred to as “boots on the ground,” underlining the nature of using youngsters as cannon fodder). Perhaps the most concerning trajectory is the trend of replacing decision makers with AI that can deploy and direct weaponry, as seen with Israel pioneering a shocking rate of mass death in Gaza with their Lavender and Where’s Daddy programs. These trends make the launch of this war on Iran a critically important window for supporting GI resistance before complete control over mass killing is in the hands of the ruling class and their machines. 

Work stoppage or interference by active duty military can slow or impair the war machine, but this alone may not end the war on Iran. There are more ways in which antiwar service members and veterans can leverage their social position not only as workers, but as symbols. Their voices on military matters have weight both with elected officials and the general public. They have the platform to challenge the myths of morality, necessity and infallibility in which the warhawks wrap their armies and wars. As they increase the unreliability of the armed forces, they can also decrease public confidence in how the troops are being used. Both resistance and public opposition are key toward ending not only a specific war, but tearing up the blank checks for endless wars at home and abroad. 

Veterans rising to meet the moment 

Founded as Iraq Veterans Against the War, About Face has expanded from opposing the war on Iraq to a deeper critique of militarism, as new members joined over the years who had participated in many different facets of the so-called Global War on Terror. Its opposition to the war on Iran is part of a broader recent effort to challenge the U.S.-Israeli wars for regional dominance, resource control and global positioning. 

After Oct. 7, 2023, About Face welcomed hundreds of new members who were moved to organize with other veterans in solidarity with Palestine. To harness that energy, they immediately formed Veterans for Ceasefire, whose first of many direct actions was a sit-in on Nov. 9, 2023 in Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s office. Eight members participated in the 2025 Global Sumud Flotilla. 

In addition to challenging U.S. aggression overseas, veterans have also become important voices for demilitarization of the homefront. In the summer of 2020, when troops were turned against U.S. civilians in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police, About Face reached out to National Guard members, encouraging them “Stand Down for Black Lives” by refusing mobilization against racial justice protesters. 

Challenging militarism at home — and connecting it to wars abroad — has become even more crucial in a time of rising authoritarianism. “Right to Refuse was definitely created with Project 2025 in mind and what was promised in that document about domestic use of the military to enforce their authoritarian agenda,” said Matt Howard, interim national organizing director of About Face. 

Sure enough, ICE surges in 2025 saw the use of military forces to quell civil dissent and carry out race-based purges. The National Guard occupied cities, while the Department of Defense offered bases, staging areas and logistical support for mass detentions. Anti-ICE resistance also faced the kind of intensified surveillance and data collection tested in the killing fields of U.S.-Israeli wars abroad.

Tapping into the organic dissent in the ranks is a particular gift of the Right to Refuse campaign. Billboards facing the main gates of North Carolina’s biggest military installations appeared in September 2025 announcing a website titled NotWhatYouSignedUpFor.org (a joint visibility campaign of Win Without War and About Face). When thousands of active duty Airborne troops (a cold-weather division from Alaska) and military police were placed on standby for Department of Homeland Security support, including a 500-person brigade from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a billboard at the main gate greeted them with, “Did you go Airborne just to pull security for ICE?” Marines entering Camp Lejeune saw “Not what you signed up for? You have options.” 

In U.S. cities experiencing paramilitary occupation from DHS forces, U.S. military veterans found opportunities to demilitarize the skills they brought home and apply them to justice, protection and liberation. A delegation of  About Face members traveled to Minneapolis in February to join local members and other community organizations in building a grassroots response to the escalation of ICE violence. 

Additionally, About Face’s Monitoring and Analysis of Military and Border Operations, or MAMBO, project uses open source intelligence gathering to analyze and map domestic deployments of military and DHS forces, offering usable reports to community groups. Some members of About Face and its close partner Veterans For Peace provide security for local actions and community events, and train and mentor emerging movement security practitioners, both civilian and veteran. This is a radical revisioning of what security can be when seen through a lens of demilitarization — neighbors keeping each other safe. 

Alongside the DHS and National Guard occupation of U.S. cities, the impacts of the war economy and continued cuts to social spending have provided many opportunities for action. Last Veterans’ Day, About Face organized a Vets Say No War on Our Cities march in major cities including those dealing with ICE occupation like Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Washington, D.C. and Memphis. The message they shared was: “We will not allow attacks on our neighbors, or military occupation of our cities and deadly cuts on vital services to be normalized.”

On March 19, the 23rd anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, About Face coordinated national visits to senators to push for a repeal of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force that opened the door to the “forever wars,” and for a vote against further supplemental military spending. A couple days later, members joined the Nuestra América relief convoy to Cuba, bringing supplies and challenging Trump’s saber-rattling. 

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About Face has also been incubating Veterans Against Fascism, a politically diverse coalition of vets united behind the call for No ICE, No War, No Cuts. “Fascism is everywhere, spread throughout the entire government. We have a responsibility to make it grind to a halt,” explained Joseph Funk, a member of About Face and leader in Veterans Against Fascism. “That means we have to defeat it anywhere it wants to exercise its power. That might look like opposing war and international violence, and that might look like standing against federal goons hunting children. It will probably look like a lot of things in the future.”

Winning public opinion

The Trump regime is not attempting to manufacture approval or even consent for its wars, but they are fighting on the narrative and cultural fronts. Nonpartisan organizations like About Face, which has challenged U.S.-led wars under every administration for the last 20 years and is not scared of calling out Democratic leaders, are laying a critical foundation. Those of us who remember Obama’s presidential victory on a platform of ending Bush’s wars, and the subsequent abdication of the forces who might have pushed him to follow through, know we need an antimilitarist movement bigger than opposition to Trump’s caricatured shock and awe. 

“Despite the fact that both parties have had a shitty track record on war and militarism, in the last 10 years MAGA has claimed to be the true antiwar standard-bearer,” Howard said. “We are in a moment where the betrayal of Trump’s base is really clear. They thought they voted in a peace time president and are finding out it was another empty talking point. For movements who have been committed to an antiwar politic, no matter who was in office, there is an opportunity to use our credibility to undermine authoritarianism and contest for people who are waking up.”

The good news: There is leadership and vision. Antiwar veterans are increasing their ranks, building collective power in campaigns and coalitions, and taking strategic aim at multiple pillars of the war machine. 

“Veterans can help focus public energy into concrete demands,” said Katie Chorbak, from 50501 Veterans. “If opposition is going to be effective, it has to be organized, informed and sustained. Veterans can help anchor that effort. What is needed right now is seriousness, discipline and sustained engagement. Change rarely happens because people are upset for a week. It happens when people stay organized long enough to matter.”

This article From ICE to Iran, veterans are challenging US militarism  was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The largest flotilla to Gaza departed on April 12, including vessels in the Global Sumud Flotilla and Freedom Flotilla Coalition, or FFC. This particular flotilla sails amid a regional war in the Middle East, instigated by the United States and compounded by the ongoing Israeli bombardment of Gaza and Lebanon. 

Since their departure, 22 of more than 50 boats in the Global Sumud Flotilla were “disabled and destroyed” and nearly all 180 individuals were abducted during an Israeli Navy raid on April 30, according to a GSF press release. The IDF attack occurred in international waters — hundreds of miles away from Gaza and within 80 nautical miles of Crete — which violates international law, specifically the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. 

“My stomach dropped,” said Zuleyma Guevara, whose daughter Fredi Guevara-Prip, was aboard one of the intercepted ships. 

Rosa Martinez and Noa Avishag Schnall, both aboard the Adalah in the FFC, are still hundreds of nautical miles from Gaza, but continuing east. For them the flotilla, and particularly the FFC, is a human rights mission. 

“Though we do have some medicine on the boat, it’s not like we’re going to be solving any mass medication crisis in Gaza,” Avishag Schnall said. “We are sailing because governments are not upholding their duties.”

Both volunteers on the flotilla and their loved ones assert that the flotilla is just one part of the larger pro-Palestinian movement. As Mika Lungulov-Klotz, Martinez’s emergency contact, put it, “everyone is able to pull a different lever.”

This article A call for bold action from the Gaza flotilla was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When Trump won the first time in 2016, I drank shots of tequila in front of my computer and then passed out in anguish. When Trump won in 2024, I couldn’t do that. This time around, I was a mom. 

By afternoon on election day, the red shifts on the map became overpowering — and yet I still had to pick up my son from childcare. I had to get him dinner, sing songs in the bathtub and make up stories for his stuffed animals. I still had to create a world that was joyous, delicious and full of love even though I was horrified by the political present.  

This is a very particular muscle I have had to build since becoming a mother. It’s different than building a practice of hope. It’s beyond feelings and all about the tangible needs of life. It’s being able to turn hope into something physical even when deeply worn down. Moms, aunties, grandmothers and other caretakers — we have to pull ourselves off the couch and make the sandwiches and brush the hair. 

Every day, in the face of whatever the greater world holds, we build our own pockets where injustices are righted, love is given and joy is present. We calm down tantrums with love and humor. We teach lessons on sharing and taking turns. This complicated dynamic mothers must hold, of nurturing children while social injustice rages, is something I’ve seen resonate across social media recently, with many women commenting on the realities of keeping children loved and happy while the world burns. 

Mothers are the everyday weavers of utopia. Philosophers, journalists, tech experts, Hollywood writers and pundits may throw up their hands and proclaim that our species is doomed, and yet in millions of homes around the world, mothers and caregivers are ensuring that on the contrary, we do live in a world of joy where resources are shared. The past few years of being a new mom have taught me we need to do more than survive; the real magic comes with what we co-create with our children — the evidence that a better world is possible. 

One of the unique aspects of motherhood is that, even while you’re dealing with the immediacy of food, shelter, joy, love, raising a human also means having one foot in the future. The writer and healer Prentis Hemphill said in a recent podcast episode, “Children as Sacred,” that “our culture actually seems to be anti-children and to me therefore anti the future. … What a child compels you to do is create, what a child compels you to do is nurture, to plant a seed, to think about what will grow beyond your life.”

This is no small feat, and might be one of the most underexamined sources of social change out there. Mothers are inherent futurists, just as gardeners are. Even when our children are in the womb, we have to be mindful of every chemical we come in contact with and what it could do to their development down the line. When our kids are growing up, we are constantly aware of how much of their future self is molded from the compendium of all the lessons we teach them. 

“Almost all of parenting is digging really deep for reserves when you are out of it,” said Jenny Zimmer, the co-executive director of the group Mothers Out Front. “Like you’re out of energy, you’re out of time, you’re out of patience, you’re exhausted, and you’re still finding the reserves to set [your kids] up for success.” 

It is this deep commitment to not just hoping for a better future, but knowing that it is formed through the actions we choose today, that directly links what we do now to what will become.

A better future is being built by the everyday work of caretakers to instruct the next generation that love and goodness can exist.

There’s nothing quite like the early years of motherhood for forcing people to realize they can’t do it all on their own. If you try to do all the things yourself, you will quickly break. It is with the village, the community that life gets a bit easier. “Mothers can do more because we know how to work together,” Zimmer noted. 

My formative activist years were working with the Burmese pro-democracy movement, and I remember witnessing women’s meetings where heavy discussions were held on moving aid to refugee camps, or monitoring elections — all while someone’s baby was being passed around from woman to woman. A group of women would chop up fruit to share, and others would help clean up. Communal care was the fundamental driver that allowed more women to step into leadership and peace-building. 

In Minneapolis and other cities besieged by ICE recently, it’s regularly mothers who are organizing food to deliver to those in need, raising money for affected families, forming safety patrols at kids’ schools and participating in ICE watches. Ashley Fairbanks helped start the group Stand with Minnesota, which is a center point of a lot of the mutual aid. In a recent interview with The Guardian, she said “We’re building a helper reflex where, instead of encountering a problem and saying that we can’t do anything, we’re just trying to do it.” 

There is so much to learn from mothers in Minnesota who are showing that the future can be better — by moving their anguished bodies to attend protests, deliver diapers and pick up their neighbors, and showing our children and our communities that we can operate with more humane ways of being. 

America does not have the best track record with positive visions of the future. The vast majority of films set in the future are dystopian, with a stalwart hero making their way through techno-fascism. In fact, when I tried to find films with a positive vision of the future, where humanity was able to come together and create something better — it’s pretty much just the “Star Trek” movies and “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” and even in those the vision of the future Earth is limited (“Star Trek” mostly takes place off Earth, and “Bill & Ted” gives us just a  few minutes’ glimpse of the peaceful future). 

What we need are the mother-filled stories of creation. How from small seeds, wondrous things can be born. Constructing a better future won’t come from some miracle technology that propels us forward. It comes from the everyday work of caretakers to instruct the next generation that love and goodness can exist.

Two directly opposed worldviews vying with each other in America right now are the much-publicized, hyper-individualized ideology of pseudo-macho tech oligarchs, and the quieter reality of mothers leaning into collective movements for a better world. A patriarchal worldview tells us that social change comes through highly publicized “wins” or technological silver bullets. 

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In my conversation with Zimmer, she spoke about how working with mothers has shifted her understanding of what social progress looks like. “I had to reframe victory in my mind from a big win to basically like a journey. There’s always going to be opposition,” she said. “And so when I think about bringing my kids into organizing spaces with me, it’s less that I want them to see my team win something. And it’s more that I want them to see that a good life is spent in a collective project of trying to make things good for everybody.”

A mother’s commitment is incalculable. Rebecca Solnit wrote to me that the concept of motherhood comes down to the idea that “there is a superpower in being absolutely unshakably committed to something/someone morally and in every other way, to your last breath, and because that commitment wants to see goodness all around, doesn’t it manifest goodness?” The future of this planet is being deeply shaped every day by caretakers moving forward with love and an unfeigned commitment to a better future. Once we recognize this for the superpower it is, we can build more systems that embrace its potential. 

If we start accepting that mothers are a powerful force for good, then we need to support systems that can scale their engagement. Mexico City has built 15 “Utopias,” large community centers aimed to take some of the burden off of low-income caregivers. Bogota, Colombia is experimenting with manzana del cuidado, or care blocks, which support caregivers by clustering services together. Many other countries are enacting policies like extended maternity and paternity leave, subsidized child care and health care benefits that help mothers be more able to engage with public life. 

It would be hugely beneficial to society if instead of isolating and limiting people who have a “helper reflex” superpower, we instead built more ways to expand the utilization of this skillset. Mothers are a crucial force for change, not only in our homes and communities, but on a much wider scale — if they have the support they need to unleash their superpowers.

This article Mothers are the most underestimated force for change was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

After a symbolic launch in Barcelona on April 12, the Global Sumud Flotilla set out across the Mediterranean Sea to bring aid to Gaza in what proved to be the largest civilian maritime convoy of its kind: 58 vessels, more than a thousand participants from over a hundred countries. Amnesty called on governments to guarantee safe passage. Greenpeace sent the Arctic Sunrise. And in the early hours of April 30, off the coast of Greece, Israeli naval forces moved in. 

There is something deeply affecting in the sight of everyday people rising to perform the simplest offices of mercy while states and institutions, created for hours of peril such as this, withdraw behind procedure and delay. Across the Mediterranean, men and women gathered what aid they could carry, along with the inward resolve such a voyage demands, and turned themselves toward Gaza. Great structures, swollen with authority and self-protection, were suddenly made to look small beside a few fragile boats moved by fellow feeling.

That, for me, is the true subject here. The values-led flotilla and the light of humiliation it casts upon the official power structures. When private citizens must hazard sea and reprisal in order to bring food and medicine to the trapped, the failure has entered the marrow of public life. Whole systems, immense in apparatus and loud in self regard, stand exposed by a handful of human beings willing to cross water for strangers. The Greeks gave us words for it: demos, the common people, and kratos, their strength. A flotilla is democracy at its source.

In a relentless news cycle of death and destruction, there is something almost scriptural in the image of small craft setting out to relieve the besieged. A boat is a modest thing, rising and falling with the sea, vulnerable to delay, interception and fear. Perhaps that is why it can bear mercy so well. Mercy is among the most beloved names by which God is remembered in Islam, and these volunteers carried aid in their hold along with a quality of heart that official life has steadily thinned out.

The word sumud deepens the meaning further. For Palestinians, it has long meant steadfastness, a staying put in the face of erasure, a fidelity to land, memory and the human shape of one’s life. Here, steadfastness took to the sea. It left the olive grove and entered the waves. One remains steadfast by moving toward the wounded. One keeps faith by refusing distance.

By getting on those boats, the volunteers insisted that strangers are still our concern. A flotilla closes distance in the oldest human way, by drawing near, by consenting to inconvenience and risk because another people’s hunger has become unbearable to the soul.

To set out under such conditions is already a kind of testimony. One imagines the small practical gestures that attend such a voyage: the checking of ropes and provisions, subdued talk, private negotiations of fear, inward glances toward loved ones who would be left behind for a time. Heroism appears in a humble guise, the simple refusal to let danger relieve one of this duty. Those who boarded these vessels consented to exposure, and that consent lent the voyage its moral splendor.

There is something else that stirs the heart in such gatherings. The people who come together for a mission of mercy bring different languages, prayers and burdens of memory. Yet, for a brief and difficult passage they agreed to become answerable to one another and to those waiting beyond the horizon. This, too, is part of the beauty. A world daily instructed in difference and division still contains people capable of forming, under pressure, a fellowship. The boats carried supplies, certainly, though they also carried a living refutation of the lie that people are finally ruled by self-interest or tribe or fear.

Perhaps that is why maritime images can carry such spiritual force. The sea strips away illusion. No one sets out upon open water and remains wholly enclosed within self-regard. One enters a domain older than empires, where frailty and dependence are undeniable. To cross such waters in order to relieve the afflicted is to recover something ancient in the story, something older than diplomacy. It recalls the old belief that mercy is a labor asking something of the body. It must travel and bear fatigue and uncertainty. It must keep watch.

The greatness of the souls on this journey lies precisely in the fact that they remain recognizably human. They will be tired and perhaps seasick, maybe even afraid. They will carry their private griefs with them, along with the larger grief that summoned them to sea. Yet hope does not wait until the heart is free of trembling. It makes use of trembling and gathers what courage it can from love and shame, from prayer and the stubborn unwillingness to let the brutal terms of politics become the final measure of what is possible between us. Amid the daily grief, this is a welcome ray of light.  Hope as an act of resistance, with wet sleeves and a steady hand on the rope. Hope that has looked at the world and, despite every inducement to resignation, continues to choose the human bond.

Those who sailed in April had already paid for this cause. In October 2025, Israeli forces arrested over 450 participants from the last flotilla attempt, among them the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and Mandla Mandela, grandson of Nelson Mandela. Those survivors set out again, undeceived about what might await. Their willingness to return lent the voyage a grave authority. Events confirmed its cost.

The answer came in the early hours of April 30, in international waters west of Crete, 600 miles from Gaza. Israeli naval vessels surrounded the fleet, ordering activists to their knees at gunpoint. Twenty-two of the 58 boats were seized. One hundred and seventy-five people were held aboard an Israeli frigate for up to 40 hours, denied adequate food and water, the floor beneath them repeatedly and deliberately flooded. They were punched, kicked and dragged across the deck with hands bound. Shots were fired, live and rubber both. Thirty-four people were hospitalized in Crete with broken ribs, broken noses and serious neck injuries. Sixty went on hunger strike, before being released.

Two steering committee members were then taken separately to Israel: Saif Abu Keshek, a Spanish-Swedish Palestinian who had been on an observer boat that never planned to sail to Gaza, and Brazilian activist Thiago Ávila. Abu Keshek was forced to lie face-down from the moment of his seizure, kept hand-tied and blindfolded, his face and hands bruised. Ávila was dragged face-down across the floor and beaten so severely he lost consciousness twice. The Brazilian embassy, visiting under glass, observed visible marks on Ávila’s face and noted his significant pain. Both are in Shikma Prison in Ashkelon and still on a hunger strike. A court has now extended their detention until May 10.

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Spain called the detention illegal; Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez addressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly, saying his country would always protect its citizens and defend international law. Brazil stood with Spain. Turkey’s Foreign Ministry called the interceptions an act of piracy. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani called them a brazen violation of international law. The Trump administration called the flotilla pro-Hamas and threatened consequences for any who had offered support.

Power has answered mercy with boots and bound hands. One wants to call this a surprise, but it is more precisely a revelation: something that was always there, now brought into the open. What the interception has laid bare, beyond the suffering of those detained, is the shape of the blockade itself. What kind of order must travel 600 miles from shore to intercept civilian vessels that are carrying bandages? What does a law protect when it meets unarmed people at sea with firearms and drags them face-down across wet decks?

Thirty-two boats remain anchored in Crete, where the organizers are regrouping and considering their next steps. The flotilla was seized in part. It was not silenced. And that refusal has done what no press release could: made the condition of Gaza impossible to look away from, at a cost borne by those who were willing to bear it.

The boats are small enough to be dismissed by cynics, and large enough to shame the world. They carry the old lesson that power does not hold a monopoly on reality. Power cannot produce the moral beauty that appears when human beings gather themselves for the sake of others. That beauty remains one of the last unpurchased things.

I think, in these dark years, about the difference between authority and worth. The first may be conferred by the world; the second is earned in the secret place where the heart decides whether it will remain human. Those who set out from Barcelona hold no office at all. Even so, they carry more of the world’s honor than many governments assembled beneath their flags. They carry it at sea, in the dark, with their hands bound, still keeping watch.

The lantern is still on the water. Mercy has been met with force, and answered the force with the deeper testimony of the body’s willingness to remain. Thirty-two boats sail on. The heart still knows the way.

This article The Global Sumud Flotilla is a mission of mercy, met with cruelty was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On May 1, organizers reported over 5,000 May Day Strong actions across the country — the most widespread distribution of U.S. May Day actions ever. Numbers are interesting — but they’re not nearly the whole story here. Because this May Day was even more important than you think.

With No Kings, millions were activated into the streets. May Day had another goal in mind — to stretch our mass mobilization skills to include more, to quote Martin Luther King Jr., “creative tension.” 

The need for escalation became all the more urgent in light of the MAGA Supreme Court’s ruling eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, the legal crown jewel of the civil rights movement. This heavy blow is aimed at the most reliable voting bloc for a just democracy in America — Black voters. So, in response, we have to return to risky tactics that wage struggle for our democracy.

So in New York, protesters with the Sunrise Movement shut down entrances to the New York Stock Exchange — a daring tactical escalation. In Raleigh, North Carolina, 20 school districts closed for the largest statewide teacher rally since 2019. In each of the thousands of May Day protests, people spoke to specific local conditions — North Carolina ranks 43rd in average teacher pay — but tied to the overall frame of workers over billionaires.

At Kent State University in Ohio, students honored previous generations who braved bullets, standing in the rain and wind to protest the closing of DEI offices and scholarships. They were part of the fast-moving and underreported growth of students organizing against this regime: Sunrise estimates 100,000 students participated in this weekend’s May Day strikes.

It’s important to note what we saw. Escalated tactics were trialed — this wasn’t just sign-waving. The May Day Strong coalition was also consciously moving in a unique formation with National Nurses United, AAUP, NDWA and dozens of local unions, including SEIU, AFSCME and UNITE HERE locals, joining with the likes of Indivisible and 50501. 

But perhaps most importantly and consequentially, it was a structure test for future economic disruptions. In a structure test you’re testing to see who is with you — who is ready to move and who just says they’re ready to move. So in real time we get to assess which groups are ready for further boycotts, strikes and other kinds of economic disruption. These tactics are important to build up for because they are not symbolic, but have a material impact on the authoritarian regime.

As a wise group, this coalition was testing what capacity we have for this kind of collective power. And that capacity was significant (with room to grow!). All consciously organized by a group that has a vision for building to rolling, wildcat and general strikes.

Finding the right yardstick

One of the hazards of living under an authoritarian attempting to consolidate power is that most of our victories will not come from government interventions. As civil resistance scholar Hardy Merriman has observed, we are facing a leader who can wake up each morning and do something terrible — kidnap Nicolás Maduro, fire competent federal workers, bomb Iran, cancel contracts, tear down part of the White House — and in the immediate term, we are not able to stop it.

Therefore “Did we stop him today?” cannot be our yardstick for growth — though obviously, it is an ultimate aim.

So May Day did not stop the Iran war, despite May Day Strong’s strong antiwar demand. It did not fulfill its goal of taxing the rich or guarantee that Trump will honor the “hands off our vote” demand. That’s not the right yardstick.

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What’s next after the historic No Kings protest?

A different yardstick could be numbers. But of course No Kings blows that out of the water with an impressive 8 million people taking action this March.

But No Work, No School, No Shopping is not sign-waving — it’s economic pressure. In preliminary data from the event, 89 percent of participants refused to shop that day, 14 percent didn’t go to school and 32 percent participated in “No work.” We’re now expanding our ability to materially disrupt the regime.

Yes, we need to go further. Yes, we need more than one-day actions. Yes, we need many more groups to participate, but critics don’t make movements — doers do. And the doers were off doing a lot of things.

They were turning out for public demonstration in small towns where showing up at all takes courage. Towns like Idaho Falls, Idaho, Lewisburg, West Virginia and the ranching town of Dillon, Montana.  

In San Francisco, as elsewhere, protesters were arrested doing direct action, among them  elected officials (and several vying for office). In their case, they blocked the airport — the site of a recent high-profile confrontation with ICE forcibly detaining a woman and her child. While being arrested, Sanjay Garla, first vice president at SEIU United Service Workers West, said, “It’s a good day for the movement. ICE out of SFO!”

Memphis showed up boldly. They now face the triple threat of an ongoing National Guard deployment, new redistricting due to the Supreme Court ruling and an enormous Elon Musk xAI data center. Protesters blocked the entrance to Musk’s Colossus I supercomputer, with its massive turbines polluting air and water. 

“We want xAI to turn the turbines off,” protester Jasmine Bernard told Channel 3 news in Memphis. “We know the consequences of xAI being here far outweigh any benefits that somebody may be able to conjure up.” In city after city, protesters were making visible the story of how billionaires are wrecking our lives — and making clear that we’re not going to put up with it.

In Washington, D.C., people blocked numerous intersections, demanding core values of democracy: no more attacks on workers, peace and the long-delayed D.C. home rule. Keya Chatterjee of Free DC explained where the escalation is headed in an AFSCME press release: “Millions of people across the country rose in solidarity today and that’s what it’s going to take to end this regime and their attacks for good. The next step is to flex our economic muscle.”

And if you hadn’t heard much about May Day in your community, obviously that means there’s more to do. But also it’s a good sign, as it means people outside your immediate circle were organizing and moving things. If you’re reading this and realize you’re not yet in the boat, join May Day Strong’s list so they can reach you as they plan what comes next.

May Day Strong proved the organizing phenomenon that getting people in motion is difficult, but once people stay in motion, getting them into greater motion becomes easier. And that is a different kind of victory, measured by different instruments.

The research on what actually determines success in civil resistance makes a stark point: 83 percent of successful anti-authoritarian campaigns win when they have strong participation of labor — without labor, the percentage that wins plummets to 29 percent. 

May Day Strong put together one of the widest coalitions yet: a mix of national and locals of National Nurses United, AAUP, NDWA, NEA, AFT, SEIU, Chicago Teachers Union, Starbucks Workers United, the United Electrical Workers, and APWU, alongside Indivisible, 50501, DSA chapters, immigrant rights organizations, and hundreds of local groups. All under a broad set of sensible demands: 

• Tax the Rich: Our families, not their fortunes, come first.
• No ICE. No war. No private army serving authoritarian power.
• Expand democracy, not corporate power. Hands off our vote.

Movement research is also very clear on another point: Movements that wage economic disruption succeed at dramatically higher rates than those that stay in the realm of courts, elections, rallies and petitions alone.

That’s why testing out the operational capability of days of “No Work, No School, No Shopping” is critical. It may be needed in the future if there are attempts to steal elections or other inflection moments — so it’s important for us to get in shape now. 

It’s worth recalling this particular tactic’s history and what happened in Minneapolis.

Minneapolis gave us the blueprint

Operation Metro Surge placed 3,000 armed, masked federal agents throughout Minnesota, leading to ICE agents killing Renée Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. Families hid. Children were afraid to go to school. ICE agents unleashed chemical sprays on students and staff.

Out of that terror, something else was born. Unions, faith leaders and community organizations made a call: Jan. 23 would be a day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping.” We, as workers and students and consumers, would use our power to stop business as usual. 

The day started at a negative 40 degree wind chill. Despite that, over 100,000 people showed up in the streets. Notably, the action was backed by the executive board of the Minnesota AFL-CIO. Subsequent polling found that nearly one in four Minnesota voters either participated or had a loved one who did.

At the AT&T call center in the Twin Cities, “they only have about 20-30 people, out of over 100, who are still working,” Lori Wolf, a CWA Local 7250 member, told Labor Notes. Across many sectors — SEIU 26, UNITE HERE Local 17, ATU bus drivers, IATSE stagehands, AFSCME municipal workers and OPEIU office workers — people made the choice to stay home.

I have written extensively about the “pillars of support” as a way to understand authoritarian power — the institutions whose cooperation an authoritarian needs to govern, and whose withdrawal of cooperation can crack that power open. On Jan. 23 in Minneapolis, we saw pillars from media to small businesses crack — not break, but crack — across almost every dimension at once. 

Over 1,000 businesses closed. The faith pillar moved, activating new national networks, with over 700 faith leaders participating and roughly 100 arrested in an action at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, blockading the departure lanes used for deportation flights. Across the country, police — long a backbone of state enforcement — began to break ranks, with chiefs publicly condemning ICE tactics and others moving beyond words to support legal distance from rogue, unaccountable and untrained agents. 

Minneapolis Federation of Educators showed up in force with their sea of blue hats — while the following week, University of Minnesota students called for a nationwide walkout. Tens of thousands of students were activated, and they helped spark thousands of largely unreported protests by students nationwide.

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This was not a spontaneous eruption. It drew on networks built after the murder of George Floyd, labor councils shaped by years of relationship, and immigrant rights organizations that had been organizing long before most people noticed. What Minneapolis gave us was not just inspiration. It was a blueprint — and a question. Could it spread?

A structure test

Much of the country does not have the resources, history of organizing and relatively healthy movement ecosystem that Minnesota has. We need more practice moving in more unity with each other. 

In that sense, this May Day was what unions call a structure test. A structure test is not an action you take because you’re ready. It is an action you take to find out whether you’re ready — and where you’re not.

In labor organizing, a structure test is any ask you make of people that is deliberately lower-stakes than the final big ask. It’s designed to reveal the real shape of your organization: who will put their name on a petition, who will wear a sticker to work, or who will attend a public meeting, before you ever ask anyone to walk a picket line. “In the lead up to today’s most successful strikes,” wrote the great Jane McAlevey, referring to historic 2018 teachers’ walkouts, “countless structure tests are conducted in advance of knowing a workplace or workplaces are actually ready to strike to win.” 

Her model of building to win requires doing small tests to both exert power and to identify organizing weaknesses. Each May Day locale hopefully is doing a debrief to assess what networks were activated. Nationally we can see groups who came on board and did turn out, and others who did not.

“We are asking people to take a step into further exerting their power in all aspects of their lives — as workers, as students, as members of local organizing hubs,” Leah Greenberg of Indivisible told The Guardian. “It’s important as it builds muscles towards greater non-cooperation.”

A structure test is very different than wishful thinking (“why can’t everyone just do a general strike?”) — it is testing the capability of institutions and their resolve. It is the practice of honesty about where you are. It is the act of asking, in public and under conditions of real pressure: Who is actually with us?

That question, asked in thousands of cities on May 1, is the most important thing that happened that day. Not because we have the final answer. But because now we know more about the shape of the answer than we did on April 30.

Power, unity, leadership: an honest accounting

Researchers often converge on some key measures to assess movements resisting authoritarianism: unity, planning and nonviolent discipline.

The scale of coordination — thousands of events, major national unions, official city holidays in Chicago, teacher actions statewide in North Carolina, airport actions in the Bay Area, nurses on strike in New Orleans — represented unity and planning, in a real and measurable expansion of what this movement can do. 

“The way we build power is by flexing power,” said Martha Grant, one of the May Day Strong organizers.

In Chicago, the birthplace of May Day, the Chicago Teachers Union recently won the concession that all public school children learn about May Day, creating what CTU president Stacy Davis Gates called “academic freedom for all of us to understand where our empowerment comes from.” Thousands rallied at Union Park alongside a day of economic blackout with SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana, Indivisible Chicago and the Chicago Federation of Labor. 

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What’s it going to take to get to mass strikes?

There are real tensions in any broad front. There are more groups that need to be brought in. And because institutions like unions have been so gutted, there are many more individuals that need to be connected, too — hence one reason organizers created “Strike Ready” to capture individuals wanting to participate who weren’t connected to some of the big organizations.

In Minneapolis this January, what was most striking was not the headline number but the distributed leadership underneath it: union shop stewards who had built trust over years, faith leaders who had organized their congregations, neighborhood organizers who knew every door on their block. 

May Day 2026 built some of that model into its design, encouraging people to register their own events and lead their own actions. But we also know that thousands of communities had nothing on the map: places where the networks are thin, where people are activated and angry but not organized. That gap is the next frontier. The work of the next months is not another rally. It is building into those communities — finding the people who will knock on the next door.

We are training for something larger

May Day 2026 was, in the language of Freedom Trainer’s Community Strike Readiness workshops, not just a day of action. It was one structure test — because we have some big inflection moments coming up. Perhaps the biggest test of this year may be preparing for enforcement of election results — something that the tactic of the strike is well suited for.

A general strike is not a valve we can just turn on and off. It requires groups ready to move in formation with each other — and May Day Strong is positioning itself to be the entity that tells us it’s time to strike if the election is stolen. This is critical.

Cliff Smith, a Roofers Local 36 official and May Day Strong organizer in Los Angeles, said plainly what many are saying privately: “We should not depend on the November midterm elections to provide us with any solutions to this problem. We should have contingency plans in the event that there are not free and fair elections.”

Of course, between now and the election we need a lot more public action and pressure. And the civil disobedience that May Day Strong incorporated is crucial. 

This is just a beginning. The May Day Strong campaign is hosting dozens of planning and debrief sessions and turning its attention towards defending the right to protest, right to vote and the right to have a free and fair election.

May Day 2026 wasn’t perfect — but it was a real exercise of power. We learned where we stand, not in theory but in motion. The muscles are there — maybe stiff, maybe uneven — but real, alive and ready to grow for more escalation, more economic disruption, more clarification of the billionaire opponents who are threatening the existence of all of us. That matters. Now we just have to keep building on it.

This article May Day was even more important than you think was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The ICE campaign to round up millions of immigrants is grounded in tactics designed to inspire public fear and passivity. Dressed in tactical gear and wielding deadly weapons, masked agents strive to project an image of invincible power as they rampage through communities, smashing into cars, breaking down doors and wrestling people into unmarked vehicles.

Nevertheless, many activists have refused to be intimidated, successfully confronting agents on the street to prevent harassment and arrests. Such ad hoc resistance has its limitations, however, since ICE activities often occur out of public view.

In response, activists are using a more systemic approach by targeting businesses that underpin the agency’s ability to function. Because ICE cannot carry out its operations alone, it relies on a network of companies to provide equipment, intelligence, communications, travel, accommodations and everything else huge bureaucracies require.

For example, Palantir has been the target of a campaign because, among other things, it provides surveillance software and database management services to ICE. The Coalition to Stop Avelo targeted Avelo Airlines, forcing it to end its deportation contract with ICE. And boycotts have been launched against Home Depot for allowing immigration raids on its property and Hilton Hotels for accommodating ICE agents.

While a simple internet search can turn up dozens of companies that have been awarded ICE contracts, sometimes finding your opponent’s most vulnerable pillars of support requires doing extensive research. 

Identify targets that are vulnerable to pressure 

In the early 2000s the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, or CIW, did a detailed evaluation of their industry and discovered new targets that drastically changed the direction and effectiveness of their campaign for farmworkers’ rights.

Tomato pickers in the small South Florida town had been struggling since the group was founded in 1993 to increase wages and improve working conditions in the fields. Using short work stoppages, marches and hunger strikes aimed at influencing the growers, they had been able to raise their wages marginally, but the growers remained intransigent. By every measure, the workers were still impoverished.

Discouraged by slow progress, the workers undertook a deep analysis of the food industry. As described by Susan Marquis in her book “I Am Not a Tractor!,” their research revealed a couple of key insights. First, the tomato growers they had been targeting with their protests could not afford to raise the farmworkers’ wages even if they wanted to, because tomato prices were set by the buyers.

The second revelation was that the buyers, unlike the growers, had public-facing brands. The fast food restaurants and grocery stores that were buying tomatoes from the Immokalee growers had brands to protect, and the last thing they wanted was to have their public images tarnished.

Consequently, after targeting the growers for seven years, CIW pivoted, launching a national boycott of Taco Bell. The demand was that the company simply pay an extra penny per pound for their tomatoes, with the extra revenue passed on to the workers. What made Taco Bell especially vulnerable was its ubiquity on college campuses, where student activists could apply additional pressure. 

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Lessons from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for low-wage workers

After about four years of organizing and agitating, the fast food giant’s parent company, Yum! Brands signed an agreement with CIW. Next, the workers targeted McDonald’s, a campaign that succeeded after only two years. After that, the dominoes tumbled quickly as Burger King, Whole Foods, Subway and many more companies were forced to the negotiating table. Using extensive research to expose the industry’s power relationships and find the right targets was the key to their success.

As the CIW’s campaign illustrates, when designing a campaign strategy, your immediate opponent and your best target may not always be the same. Even when your opponent has the capacity to acquiesce to your demand, they may be relatively immune from any pressure you can bring to bear. Fortunately, power is more like a web than a monolith, and while your opponent may seem powerful, their power is not intrinsic, but rather derives from other people and institutions they cannot fully control. Targeting one or more of these pillars of support may prove more fruitful than attacking your opponent head on. 

Don’t stop at the obvious

Finding those pillars requires doing a power analysis. Power analysis is all about uncovering connections and asking how various entities interact to create a web of dependencies that can reveal your opponent’s vulnerabilities and sources of power.

Most professional campaigning organizations understand the importance of doing in-depth research on their opponent, but if you’re a member of an ad-hoc group of volunteers fighting, for example, a data center or a detention center in your community, the idea might not occur. You may try to coerce local politicians or regulatory boards to take your side because they seem to have the power to stop the project. But targeting the most obvious entity may not give you the best chance at success.

“Sometimes we’ll just get stuck at the city council or the mayor … because the immediate decisions stop there,” said Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action. “But what I think is critical is that we are completely mapping the whole terrain.”

“I think that there is utility that can come from going after your immediate opponent, but … your most obvious opponent might not always be who actually has the power to give you what you want,” said Molly Gott, a senior research analyst at LittleSis, a nonprofit research organization focused on corporate and government accountability. “And there can oftentimes be utility to mapping out a little bit more the other powerful players that are involved and the ways that you can pressure them.”

In 2021 the Defend Black Voters Coalition launched a campaign against Michigan state lawmakers who were pushing to overturn the 2020 election results and suppress Black voting. Although the campaign was eventually suspended after Michiganders passed a ballot initiative that essentially accomplished the campaign’s objectives, the coalition’s process was a great illustration of how a thorough power analysis can uncover layers of indirect connections between people and corporations that may not be obvious at first.

As described by Andrew Willis Garcés in a Training for Change podcast, the coalition realized it would be futile to target the entrenched Republican legislators who were attempting to interfere with Michigan elections. But research revealed several big donors who supported the Republican legislators, and one of those companies — insurance giant Blue Cross Blue Shield — had contracts worth billions of dollars with Michigan cities and counties.

So the campaign targeted Democrat-controlled municipalities across the state, urging them to pass resolutions threatening those business ties if the insurance company didn’t end its support for election-denying legislators. The campaign began to gain momentum as five cities and counties, including Detroit and Wayne County, approved contractor accountability measures before the voter ballot initiative was approved and the campaign ended.

But targeting tertiary targets — Michigan municipalities — to indirectly influence legislators shows how deep research on an opponent can reveal potentially vulnerable connections up and down the power chain.

The nuts and bolts of power analysis

“I know this can be a challenge for groups that don’t have people on staff who are researchers,” Jacobs said. “There’s a lot that we can do via simple Google searches and not stopping on the first page of results. We can dig and find out a lot of stuff that’s in the public domain.”

In addition to deep internet searches, another way to gather information about your opponent is doing what James Mumm calls a “research action.”

“You could be talking to workers, you could be talking to ex-employees of a company,” said Mumm, who is chief of institutional advancement at the People’s Action Institute, a national federation of local groups dedicated to building the power of poor and working people. “If you get a meeting, you could sit down with the target of your campaign and ask them questions.”

Specialized databases can also be useful, Mumm said. For example, Pitchbook provides detailed financial data on corporations, and LexisNexis contains news articles and court cases. But these databases are expensive and may be beyond the reach of all-volunteer groups unless they can find a professional advocacy group that has a subscription and is willing to share.

The questions to explore when doing a power analysis vary based on the type of campaign, but Gott, the LittleSis research analyst, offers some examples: “If we’re thinking about doing a power analysis of a corporation, we look at who are the executives, who’s on the board, how do they get financing, what banks do they work with, who are their investors, who are their customers, who are their shareholders, do they get subsidies, all that kind of stuff.”

When researching powerful people, Gott says the investigation should be similarly wide ranging: “For example, research might include questions such as what boards are they on, what kinds of business and social networks are they a part of, do they have investments, do they belong to a particular country club, what are their political relationships, do they give money to particular elected officials,” she explained.

Mumm suggests a slightly different approach to power research by trying to answer four basic questions about your opponent: what do they want, who do they fear, who has power over them and who do they have power over. The first two questions can help form the campaign’s strategy and test its effectiveness.

“So we’re trying to take what they want away from them and bring what they fear closer,” Mumm said. “And the only way we know if we’re doing either one of those correctly throughout the course of a campaign is we get a reaction from the target. If we get no reaction from a target, then we have made bad guesses and have to do more research.” 

Tracing connections helps answer Mumm’s third research question — who has power over your opponent? You might discover your opponent has financial ties, supply chain dependencies, political affiliations, personal relationships and more — any of which could present promising campaign targets. This is how you can generate secondary and tertiary targets.

Researching the fourth question — who does your main target have power over — can be a great source of intel, according to Mumm, especially in corporate campaigns. That’s because not everyone likes their boss. Employees who are disgruntled or sympathetic to the campaign’s objectives may provide inside information that can shed light on corporate decision making and internal power dynamics. All this information can be compiled to inform a campaign’s targeting strategy.

The information gathering process shouldn’t end after the initial strategy is settled on. Continuing research during a campaign is crucial because power relationships are constantly shifting, especially during long campaigns. Also, as more information about the opponent surfaces, a change in target might be necessary, especially when a campaign gets bogged down.

When a strategy isn’t working, Gott said, “then you go back to the drawing board, maybe do more research, maybe revisit research that you already had.”

Reevaluate your target as needed

A good example of a campaign finding success by shifting to a secondary target occurred during the Riders Against Gender Exclusion, or RAGE, campaign in Philadelphia. In 2010, bus drivers were harassing trans people whose appearance did not match the gender on their passes, and accusing them of using someone else’s pass. RAGE formed to fight the policy.

After some research, the group determined that SEPTA, the Philadelphia transit authority, was the entity that had the power to eliminate the gender markers, so that agency became their target.

“Ultimately we were pretty clear that SEPTA were the ones that could say yes or no to our demands,” said Nico Amador, who was one of the RAGE organizers. “Sometimes as campaigners, we are dealing with a target that really has no direct accountability to us. Voters don’t choose the head of the public transportation system.”

Consequently, after two years of unsuccessfully pressuring SEPTA, the campaign was losing steam. The group took stock and decided to pivot to a less confrontational objective. A new “Ride with Respect” campaign engaged allies to sign cards pledging to intervene if they saw someone being harassed by bus drivers because of a perceived gender mismatch on their bus pass.

Meanwhile, a woman who had attended RAGE meetings decided on her own to initiate conversations with a few Philadelphia City Council members to discuss the gender marker issue. The lobbying resulted in the City Council unanimously passing a non-binding resolution in support of changing the bus pass gender policy. Shortly afterwards, SEPTA discontinued the use of the gender markers on commuter passes.

While it’s likely the RAGE campaign against SEPTA had softened their resistance and set the stage for the policy reversal, it was the City Council that ultimately proved to be the decisive target.

“I think there was maybe an oversight on our part once we had actually built that power and that influence to not notice that the City Council as a secondary target would have been a smart move,” Amador said.

But Amador doesn’t think it was a mistake to initially target SEPTA.

“I think in our case it would have been hard to build legitimacy around the campaign if we had not put pressure on SEPTA directly first,” he said.

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Nevertheless, this example demonstrates the importance of constantly reevaluating targeting decisions as power relationships fluctuate during the course of a campaign.

While doing extensive opposition research may seem like a daunting task, especially for poorly resourced groups, there is help. LittleSis provides research assistance and free training programs for activists. It was LittleSis research that aided the successful StopAvelo campaign by identifying some of the airline’s pillars of support, like airports that leased them gates, local governments that provided them subsidies and universities that signed promotional deals with them.

Besides providing toolkits, research guides and their own database of powerful people and institutions, the nonprofit offers an annual four-part webinar called Research Tools for Organizers that covers the basics of power analysis. 

“We talk about intro to power research … understanding the history of it in social movements in the U.S., and then how to research a corporation, how to research nonprofits and how to research billionaires,” Gott explained.

No matter how formidable an opponent appears on the surface, chances are they have social, political or economic connections that render them vulnerable. Power research can help campaigns identify pillars of support, and finding the right target can be the difference between success and failure.

This article Why power analysis is key to fighting ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The president who promised to end forever wars and spoke of reducing nuclear weapons has succumbed to what David Wallace-Wells calls “impulsive warmongering.” 

After bombing Iran for 12 days last June, the U.S. and Israel launched a massive military assault that has caused widespread damage in the region and major disruption in global energy markets. In January, Donald Trump sent military forces to capture and arrest the leader of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. The White House has proposed the largest military spending increase since World War II and plans to pay for it with draconian cuts in health care and other domestic social programs. Trump has refused offers by Moscow to preserve limits on U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and wants to resume nuclear testing.

Opposing these policies and advocating for peaceful alternatives is essential to create a safer world. A more engaged global peace movement is needed to counter these threats and advocate for a more secure future. 

Below is a four-point agenda for political action: End the war against Iran; prevent nuclear proliferation in the Gulf; halt and reverse the global nuclear arms race; and slash military spending levels. 

Ending the war in Iran

Stopping Trump’s continued military aggression against Iran is an urgent priority. The war is increasingly unpopular. Recent polls show 58 percent of Americans opposed to the war, with disapproval of Trump’s presidency at a record high. 

Although Republicans in the Senate have repeatedly rejected Democratic attempts to invoke the War Powers Act limiting U.S. involvement, some in the GOP have signaled that the statute’s 60-day deadline on May 1 could be a turning point. Some Republicans have indicated they will not support the war beyond that date if the president does not seek Senate approval or find a way to end the conflict. These rumblings of discontent, although faint, are an indication of mounting political trouble for the White House.

The president desperately needs a way out of the quagmire he has created for himself. He claims that Iran has been defeated and the war is over, but Tehran refuses to yield. The U.S. allowed the initial deadline for the end of the ceasefire to pass last week without taking further military action, but Trump repeated his odious threat to cause the “major destruction” of Iran’s civilian infrastructure. 

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The American peace movement we need today

As Trump flails about for a solution, opponents of the war must continue to demand an end to all further bombing and all U.S. military operations in the region, urging a withdrawal of American forces and negotiations for a solution to regional security issues and agreed limits on Iran’s nuclear program. 

Protests against the war are increasing. On April 20, dozens of veterans and military family members demonstrated at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Members of About Face, Veterans For Peace, Common Defense, Military Families Speak Out and other groups unveiled antiwar banners in the Cannon House Office Building rotunda. They held red tulips out of respect for the thousands of Iranians killed by U.S. strikes. They conducted a flag-folding ceremony to honor the 13 U.S. troops killed so far in the war. Chanting antiwar slogans, more than 60 of the veterans and their supporters were arrested by U.S. Capitol Police. 

That same day protesters gathered at the New York office of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand urging support for legislation introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders that would block U.S. funding for additional weaponry and bulldozers to Israel. The Sanders resolution is gaining increased support among Democrats in Congress. The actions in Washington, D.C. and New York in recent days were among many protests against the war across the U.S., around the world and in Israel. 

Opposition to the war has become a theme of the No Kings movement, which initially concentrated on saving democracy and opposing executive overreach. With Trump’s attack against Iran, the focus of the movement has broadened. Messages opposing the war and its costs were prevalent in the massive March 28 mobilizations. Posters for “healthcare not warfare” appeared frequently. 

Antiwar themes need to be front and center as activists engage in the midterm elections. MoveOn, the Movement Voter Project and other organizations are already hard at work mobilizing support for progressive candidates. By participating actively in political meetings and campaign debates, opponents of the war can deliver a powerful message: If candidates want our vote, they must take a firm stand against Trump’s disastrous war.  

Preventing proliferation in the Gulf

The stated purposes of the war have shifted constantly, but the most consistently emphasized goal is to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. Trump has also mentioned other objectives, such as regime change and gaining control of Iran’s oil. If nonproliferation is the goal, the use of military force is the wrong approach. Most successes in nonproliferation policy have been the result of diplomatic bargaining, often utilizing targeted sanctions and incentives. 

Iran’s nuclear program was effectively contained through the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, which blocked Tehran’s pathway to developing nuclear weapons. (Details on how the JCPOA curtailed Iran’s nuclear program and the evidence of Iranian compliance with the agreement are available here.)

Although the U.S. State Department reported Iranian compliance with the JCPOA, Trump claimed falsely that Tehran was cheating and reneged on the deal in May 2018. The U.S. then imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions, leading to renewed enmity, prompting Tehran to enrich uranium to higher levels and laying the foundation for the current armed hostilities. 

Iran made major compromises in the JCPOA, and it offered similar concessions in negotiations in June 2025 and February 2026. On the last two occasions, the U.S. and Israel began bombing just as conciliatory Iranian proposals were presented. Given Trump’s disdain for diplomacy, Iranians are understandably skeptical of the prospects for a negotiated agreement. 

U.S. and Israeli assaults may have stirred an impulse among Iranian hardliners to play the nuclear card they have previously held in reserve but have not used. The tragic irony is that a war supposedly to prevent Iran from building a bomb may increase the propensity to do just that. 

Worsening the danger is Trump’s commitment to help Saudi Arabia acquire uranium enrichment and plutonium separation facilities. As Washington wages war to prevent Iran from enriching uranium, it is proposing to help Tehran’s rival develop a similar and more expansive nuclear capability. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman stated in a 2018 interview that if Iran develops a bomb, “we will follow suit as soon as possible.”  

A nuclear arms race in the Gulf would be a nightmare for everyone, including Israel, which adds a compelling argument for ending the war and engaging in effective diplomacy to settle the dispute with Iran and contain nuclear programs in the region. Members of Congress have introduced legislation to prevent Saudi enrichment and impose strict nonproliferation guardrails on the proposed deal. These efforts deserve public support.

Halting the arms race

Nuclear proliferation is not just a concern in the Middle East. Dozens of disarmament groups in the U.S. and other countries recently joined together to issue a global “Call to Halt and Reverse the Nuclear Arms Race.” The groups are urging a complete stop to the development and deployment of nuclear bombs and weapons systems on all sides, including the U.S., Russia and China. The organizations have unified around the message that “more nuclear weapons will not make the world safer.”

Disseminating the call and seeking additional endorsements from religious, scientific and social organizations are achievable action steps that can increase awareness of the nuclear danger. Building support for the call can prepare groups to oppose specific acts of nuclear development by the United States, such as the deployment of additional nuclear warheads on existing weapons platforms, and resuming nuclear explosions at the Nevada test site. 

Activists are also demanding that Washington and Moscow formalize an agreement on maintaining current strategic weapons limits and begin negotiations for a new arms reduction treaty. They advocate for the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, as specified in the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Slashing war budgets 

The president and his Republican supporters in Congress are drastically militarizing the U.S. federal budget. Adjusting for inflation, Trump’s 2027 budget will increase military spending by more than 40 percent. Among the many alarming items in the new budget is a 65 percent spending increase on plutonium production to create 100 new plutonium pits for nuclear warheads per year. 

Even before the proposed increase, military spending is higher now than it was at the peak of the Vietnam War. It is nearly twice what it was in 1961, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the “unwarranted influence” wielded by the military-industrial complex. 

The new budget can be regarded as a vast corporate welfare system to further enrich arms contractors. The unparalleled increase in their financial power will enable arms builders to lobby the government for even more unnecessary weapons. It will also benefit members of Congress who receive contributions from weapons contractors to create jobs in their district. It’s a legalized form of corruption masquerading as national defense. 

Decades ago, those who profited from war were branded merchants of death. Peace activists in the 1930s helped Sen. Gerald Nye of North Dakota convene widely publicized hearings on the munitions industry. The proceedings exposed the role of industrial and financial magnates in promoting the pre-World War I arms race, and fueled public disgust with capitalist greed. Perhaps an equivalent public disclosure of arms contractor corruption could be organized today.

Military spending expert Stephen Semler’s analysis of Trump’s 2027 budget illuminates America’s warped national priorities. Setting aside entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, which are funded by fixed formulas written into law and can only be adjusted through extraordinary Congressional action, Trump’s budget allocates 80 percent of discretionary spending either directly or indirectly to war: preparation for war, the consequences of past wars or militarized policing. If enacted, the new proposal would cut spending on domestic priorities and social programs by $300 billion.

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On top of all of this, the White House has announced it will submit a $98 billion supplemental appropriation to continue the war on Iran and stock up weapons to fight similar wars in the future. The war supplemental will face stiff opposition in Congress, deservedly so. The budget debate provides an opportunity for activists to mobilize against further spending for war, and also to challenge the entire warmaking budget. Small cuts here or there will not suffice against the monstrously distorted budget now before Congress. 

If we add to the direct and indirect costs of war, the military’s share of the interest on the national debt, along with growing expenditures on prisons and immigrant detention centers, the amount of tax dollars devoted to the wars at home and abroad in Trump’s proposed budget would exceed $2 trillion per year, according to Semler’s analysis. Programs for public health, the environment, housing, scientific research, day care, nutrition and education are slashed to the bone. The Trump administration has built a garrison state that feeds weapons contractors and starves the rest of us. This is a tragedy of historic proportions, and it means there is nowhere to hide from the war machine and the surveillance state. 

More and more people and organizations now have no choice but to pay attention to overspending on the Pentagon, and to fight back as if their lives and livelihoods depend on it. Because, increasingly, they do. Among the organizations working directly against the war machine’s spending splurge are People Over Pentagon, a coalition that includes Public Citizen, Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Project on Government Oversight, the American Friends Service Committee, Peace Action, and the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and the Poor People’s Campaign, a joint project of the Kairos Center and Repairers of the Breach.

Pressure is needed to demand a fundamental restructuring of federal spending priorities. Without a wholesale shift towards more balanced budgeting, millions of Americans will suffer from untreated medical conditions, inadequate nutrition and lack of access to economic opportunity.

The peace agenda is demanding and will require an enormous mobilization of political action from millions of Americans. The challenge is daunting, but the prospects for progress are real. Trump’s warmongering is increasingly unpopular. The prospects for political realignment in November are increasing. Millions of people have participated in No Kings protests. If the political energy against Trumpism can be harnessed for a concentrated campaign to stop war and militarism, a more peaceful future will be possible.

This article A peace agenda to end military madness was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Across villages in India, protests erupted in December 2025 after the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, government scrapped one of the largest social safety nets in the world and replaced it with a watered-down version. 

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, or MGNREGA, guaranteed paid work to rural households. The new Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act not only drops Gandhi’s name but also steers away from the original rights-based framework that served as an economic lifeline for the roughly 30 percent of households in rural India who live in poverty. 

After Modi signed the new act into law on Dec. 20, unions and other workers’ organizations started mobilizing the rural population, running campaigns and demonstrations explaining the fine print and how it strips away the right to guaranteed employment. While the new law raises the number of days that the government will pay people to work from 100 to 125, it adds restrictions. Before, people who held job cards could apply for work whenever they needed it. Now, there is a 60-day pause period during the sowing and harvesting period. And, most concerning to advocates, work availability is now subject to a capped federal budget. 

Economist Jean Drèze said that this all amounts to a fundamental change: “The federal government now holds the discretion to give work. This dependence is a serious dilution of the principle of [guaranteed] employment, and it is bound to reduce the bargaining power of workers in private employment as well.”  

Protesters across rural India held funeral processions to lament the death of the old program. In the northwestern state of Rajasthan, women wailed, wept and thumped their chests at administrative block offices and headquarters, echoing the local custom of professional mourners, known as rudaalis.

In other states, women composed and sang songs condemning the rebranded law. Workers also held rallies and submitted memoranda of demands at the government offices, where workers apply for job cards under MGNREGA and demand work. 

Meanwhile, a coalition of center-left political parties, including the Indian National Congress Party, launched their own nationwide agitation, which ran from Jan. 10 to Feb. 25 and included marches, sit-ins and a one-day fast. Their demands are to roll back the new law and strengthen MGNREGA, with timely work assignments and a nationwide minimum wage of $4.30 per day (currently, daily wages range from $2.50 to $4).

Coordinating the bottom-up protests is the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha, or NSM, founded in 2017 — a decentralized national coalition of workers’ unions, mass organizations, NGOs, activists and public intellectuals that brought together over 30 groups across 15 states. The coalition’s demands go further than the political parties’ and include 200 days of work per adult rural worker during natural disasters and a minimum wage of roughly $9 per day, adjusted annually for inflation. 

Since December 2025, thousands of people have participated in the nationwide mobilization coordinated by NSM, consisting of creative actions from the local to the state level, including the protests at the administrative offices in January, mass demonstrations at state capitols in February, and women-led protests on International Women’s Day in March. The ongoing protests aim to apply electoral pressure to the ruling party and force the government to repeal the new act and strengthen the old one. 

At ground zero, exasperation and relentless protest

Feb. 2, which marked 20 years of the rural livelihood program, saw mass demonstrations at state capitals, district headquarters and administrative offices.

In Kumrapara Village in the eastern state of West Bengal, which lies in the Sundarbans region — one of the most vulnerable climate hotspots in the world — a group of families gathered around midday to protest the new act and discuss their exasperation over the lack of rural work for many years now. 

In March 2022 the Modi government stopped issuing MGNREGA funds to West Bengal, an opposition-led state, over financial irregularities. Last year, a parliamentary committee report observed that the suspension of funds had led to sharp increase in “distress migration and disruptions in rural development initiatives. … exacerbating economic hardships in the state.”

Life was marginally easier with work available at the villages. Now, the young men have largely left to find seasonal work in southern and western India, over 1,000 miles away from the eastern state of West Bengal where they live. 

Farmer, activist and lawyer Avik Saha said that the BJP government has been trying to throttle the MGNREGA since coming to power a decade ago. “Finally, they have been successful in dismantling the program,” he said. Their goal, he believes, is “to convert rural labor into cheap unorganized labor.” 

The original act, passed in 2005 by the Congress party, was designed to address rural poverty and unemployment. It served as a fallback option for workers in times of agrarian crisis. Numerous studies found that the act was successful in bringing money to rural households and reducing debt and hunger. The work itself built rural infrastructure and adaptation to drought and floods.  

The act was especially crucial for groups who face job discrimination, such as Dalits, Adivasis, migrant workers and women. With a quota that women make up one-third of beneficiaries and an equal-pay mandate, the act encouraged women’s participation in work outside their homes. Over the years, research has shown that MGNREGA has gone a long way in providing women with paid work and autonomy over household decisions, including children’s well-being. According to the central government’s data, women made up over 58 percent of participants in the employment program in 2025.

The protests over the act’s demise build on the years of decentralized rural protests against its erosion. Since the right-wing Modi government came into power in 2014, the act has been under threat, with funds curtailed, wage payments delayed and a hard-to-access digital attendance system leaving the poor scrambling to get work.

Slogans like “Har haat ko kaam do, kaam ka pura daam do” (Give work to every hand, pay fairly for that work) have defined the protests from the early years.

“These show a movement of ordinary people doing extraordinary things,” said Nikhil Dey, founding member of the people’s organization Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, part of the NSM. “The biggest legacy is the coming together of people’s thoughts and actions, and the beautiful articulation of their demands. The slogans are an assertion of their citizenship.”

The women in the village have been protesting since funds were cut off from West Bengal in 2022 — taking to the streets, blocking roads, clanging pots and pans at local administrative offices and traveling to the state capital of Kolkata, 50 miles away. 

“The clanging of plates signaled that we need work to eat — the plate being a symbol of us securing our rice for the day,” said Nirubala Halder, a worker in her 60s who said she has gone to every protest since 2022.

Halder’s neighbor Namita Pramanick, 60, said she is still owed pay for work she did in 2021. “I cleaned ponds painstakingly for 22 days. There is no hope now to get paid or work,” Pramanick said.    

People from the village gather around Kanai Halder, an activist with the West Bengal-based agricultural workers’ organization Paschim Banga Khet Mazdoor Samiti, another member of the NSM. “You cannot afford to lose hope now,” he tells them. “This is going to be a long battle, and we have to prepare for it. Would you rather that your young boys and husbands leave for distant lands?”

Work opportunities are drying up in Sundarbans, which has been called the cyclone capital of India, as climate change intensifies the cyclones. Seawater flooding from the storms is raising soil salinity. Guaranteed work would be a social security buffer in the village and also help climate resilience efforts like restoring mangroves and building earthen embankments to keep out tidal surges. 

“The truth is we have not protested enough,” Saha said. “In a way, we have allowed this to happen. But eventually farmers, farm workers, MGNREGA workers will be forced to come together due to economic compulsion.”

The support of political parties is key

On May Day, the NSM will protest the new act, and on May 15, the platform has planned decentralized demonstrations at work sites and administrative offices across the country. 

The workers’ organizations are learning to tap into the power of social media to spread word about the protests. 

They were inspired by another protest movement brewing in the states of north India in December — in opposition to a ruling by India’s Supreme Court that made the Aravalli hills vulnerable to mining and construction. Instagram was flooded with content. When the workers’ organizations asked the women in the villages how they knew about the protests around Aravalli, they responded by showing them Instagram reels. 

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“We realized we had never explored the potential to connect through social media. It is a smart way to form an organic decentralized movement which the government cannot clamp down on, and to get the mainstream media to pick up on it,” said Nikhil Shenoy, member of Rajasthan Asangathit Mazdoor Union, a part of NSM. 

Workers with the NSM have been recording catchy songs accompanied by puppetry to help push out word about the protests on Instagram.

Ultimately, Shenoy believes that pressure from political parties will be key to making change. With West Bengal headed for elections on April 23 and April 29, the ruling All India Trinamool Congress party has made the first plank of its reelection platform a guarantee of 100 days of work to all job card holders in the state. The party accused the ruling BJP of “betraying the people of Bengal” by withholding funds for MGNREGA.

While there has been some cooperation between the political parties and the NSM, Shenoy stressed the need for more. “The political parties have a reach which we cannot achieve,” he said. “When they are able to pick up on the pulse of the people, then the movement gets bigger. The government will only listen when it is politically hurt.”

This article Rural India is not giving up a work guarantee without a fight was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.