The affordability crisis is hitting people hard across the country, but it’s especially acute in North Carolina. For the sixth year in a row, North Carolina holds the distinction of being the worst state in the nation for workers based on its wage policies, worker protections, and rights to organize, according to Oxfam. Nearly half of renters in the state are struggling to afford their homes, while nearly a third of households are cost-burdened (spending over 30 percent of their income on housing).

North Carolina voters’ eyes may light up when they see two proposed constitutional amendments on their November ballots: one to cap the state personal and corporate income tax rates at 3.5 percent, down from a cap of seven percent, and another to limit how much local governments can levy in property taxes. On their face, they appear as if they might bring much-needed tax relief to North Carolina’s working class. 

The amendments are deceptively framed as being beneficial to working people and homeowners, reading as if they would lower individual taxes when there’s no indication that they will, according to Todd Warren, statewide campaign strategist at Down Home North Carolina, a member-led organization that endorsed a “no” vote. Instead, Warren said, the measures would be a giveaway to corporations and wealthy individuals by limiting how much they pay toward the public good — and a “scam” for voters.

Since the passage of the two Republican-sponsored bills that placed the amendments on the ballot this past May, Down Home NC and over 20 other groups have come together as the NC Vote Against coalition to defeat them, as well as to oppose a third amendment that would enshrine voter identification requirements in the state constitution.

Each organization has its own expertise and its own tactics, but a common message: The amendments will not benefit working-class people, but rather corporations and the ultra-wealthy. Each group is playing its part in collecting a total of 100,000 pledges from North Carolinians who commit to voting against the amendments.

The fight to fund the future

Down Home NC joined together with another coalition member, the Carolina Federation, to launch the Fund the Future campaign, deploying nearly 200 paid canvassers.  

Jenn Frye, co–director of the Carolina Federation, spent part of this weekend canvassing at the poll at a Durham, North Carolina library, where she convinced an older couple to vote “no” on the amendments. After a member-led endorsement process that included political education on the amendments, a leadership summit and a vote at a statewide membership meeting, the Carolina Federation decided they wanted to deeply engage in the amendment fight. “We see more and more people in North Carolina who agree that corporations and the wealthiest individuals aren’t contributing what they owe when day in and day out, North Carolinians are working really hard,” Frye said. “We pay our taxes, and we contribute what we owe.”

Down Home NC and the Carolina Federation were founded in 2017 and 2018, respectively, in the wake of President Trump first taking office and Republicans winning control of both North Carolina’s state legislature and governorship in 2013 (for the first time since Reconstruction). The groups share a long-term goal of loosening corporate power’s grip on the state legislature and supplanting it with people power.

The Fund the Future campaign campaign is knocking doors, talking to voters at the polls, getting resolutions against the amendments passed by local governments and school boards, and placing signs in small businesses and in yards, among other tactics. So far, the Carolina Federation’s canvassers have knocked on over 600,000 doors across six counties, collecting over 33,000 pledges, while Down Home NC’s canvassers had knocked 500,000 doors across 20 counties and collected about 8,000 pledges.

“Whatever the outcome of this amendment fight, Federation’s members plan to launch a statewide campaign next year with other organizations like Down Home and Siembra to demand that the legislature pass fair tax policies that make corporations and the wealthiest individuals pay what they owe our communities in taxes,” Frye said. “That may be a multi-year fight. It is one our members feel is worth waging.”

North Carolinians deserve funding for real solutions, Frye said, such as property tax assistance programs, childcare tax credits, an increased minimum wage (it’s currently the federal minimum, $7.25 per hour), and protections against corporate landlords.

Todd Warren of Down Home NC said he has never seen such a robust response to a single issue in over 20 years of working and organizing in North Carolina.

Because Down Home NC’s chapters run organizing campaigns to make sure that local budgets go toward working people’s needs, members recognized immediately how the amendments would exacerbate the underfunding of local services. Like the Carolina Federation, its members endorsed a “no” vote in addition to endorsing political candidates who are supportive of its platforms.

Many voters don’t know about the amendments, Frye said, and if they do, they’re often not sure what to make of them or inclined to support them because they’re exhausted and stressed out due to the affordability crisis. But when they are engaged in conversation about how the amendments affect services they rely on, “then people are movable,” she said.

Frye gave the example of her own mother, who recently suffered a series of strokes. Fortunately she was living in a North Carolina county with adequately funded Emergency Medical Services, or EMS. But residents of counties with underfunded EMS operations could face a life-or-death situation during medical emergencies.

“Right now, people feel like ‘taxes’ is a dirty word,” said Warren, a former public school teacher. “But if they connect it to something that they care about, like, ‘Oh, in Johnston County, we have explosive population growth. We need to build a new high school. These amendments would limit our ability to [do that].’ Then they’re like, ‘I’m gonna vote “no” on it.’ We can do that in a five-minute organizing conversation. It doesn’t take much for people to see through the scam.” 

North Carolina’s allegiance to corporations

North Carolina has lost out on almost $18 billion in annual tax revenue since Republicans began overhauling the tax system in 2013. Personal income tax reforms are so regressive that the state’s lowest earners pay more than 10 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the highest earners pay only six percent. For corporations, the income tax has dropped from seven percent to two percent, the lowest in the nation, and will be phased out completely by 2030. As tax revenue shrinks, so does local governments’ ability to fully fund vital public services.

“Our public services, the things that are supposed to strengthen our communities and support all families in all counties in North Carolina, are being stretched to the limit by the tax cuts,” Frye said. “These amendments want to take that and enshrine it into the [state] constitution.”

Exploitation has marked North Carolina’s economy since the days of chattel slavery. Post-slavery, Black families like my own (in Bertie County) sharecropped for a living well into the 20th century — jobs now carried out by migrant workers who experience poor labor conditions. The Duke family once had a monopoly on the state’s tobacco industry and founded both Duke Energy and Duke University, two institutions notorious for not paying their fair share.

Now the state and some local governments are subsidizing data centers, of which over 60 have been built and at least 30 more are planned or under construction. Under pressure, the state eliminated some tax breaks for data centers in July, but three remaining sales tax subsidies are projected to rob the state of $250 million in revenue annually. Meanwhile, between 2017 to 2024, the average electricity bill of a North Carolina household rose by nearly 30 percent. The state is subsidizing wealthy corporations as regular folks struggle to keep their lights on.

A history of underfunded public schools

On May Day this year, thousands gathered in the capital city, Raleigh, to rally for fully funded schools. Tax cuts have already contributed to the state being ranked last in the country in public school funding by GDP.

Isabell Moore, a coordinator at North Carolina Families for Public Schools (a project of Down Home NC) and a public school parent, said the amendments could be “catastrophic” for public education. North Carolina Families for Public Schools comprises countywide, districtwide and schoolwide teams of volunteer organizers who are calling for equitable, fully funded public schools. These teams are currently circulating a pledge to fund the future for children that includes voting against the amendments, along with measures like fair funding for special education; higher teacher pay; and safe, inclusive schools for all students, including those from immigrant families. 

North Carolina Families for Public Schools had already voted on its 2026 platform when the amendments dropped in May but decided to incorporate them because they stand directly in the way of their goal to win fully funded schools. Their organizers have been tapping into their personal networks to turn people out to vote against the amendments, holding house parties and school-based parties to educate people on the amendments, and more. 

“Everyday working people and public school parents are creative and tough and scrappy,” Moore said. “If we commit to not just voting ‘no’ but also organizing other people in our networks and in our school communities, that’s when we really start to build the power to defeat the amendments.”

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Even public schools in wealthy counties like Durham, home to Duke University (which has a $14.3 billion endowment) and Duke University Health System (which made nearly $766 million in profits last year), are chronically underfunded. The riches of these two tax-exempt nonprofit institutions haven’t trickled down. Among other demands, the Durham Rising coalition—made up of workers, students, and community members—is calling for Duke University to help fund public schools and educator salaries by making a voluntary payment to the local government called a PILOT, or payment in lieu of taxes.

Since the summer, Christy Patterson, vice president of the Durham chapter of the North Carolina Association of Educators, or NCAE, and a middle school teacher for students with disabilities, has been knocking on doors to tell folks the amendments are for billionaires, not everyday people. The NCAE, which functions as a professional organization because North Carolina bans public-sector collective bargaining, is part of the NC Vote Against coalition and was one of the main architects of the “Kids Over Corporations” rally in May.

“Our voters and our community are engaging us in conversation on the doors,” Patterson said. “We’ve had some conversations that really made us think. Constructive friction on the doors is always good because everybody’s not going to say the same thing or think the same. They’re just so ready to open the door and talk to us, so we are grateful for that.”

Organizing for the long run

In a September poll by Elon University, 67 percent of respondents were in favor of the income tax amendment, and 72 percent supported the property tax amendment. Organizers are working hard to turn that tide.

However, even if they don’t get their desired outcome, there is an entire movement that will continue holding North Carolina corporations and wealthy households accountable until they contribute their fair share to the public good. Organizations like the Carolina Federation, Down Home NC, and the NCAE have been engaging in this work for years and are in it for the long haul.

Warren hopes the Fund the Future campaign can help shift the narrative so that people understand that “taxes” aren’t inherently bad but rather a tool for improving quality of life for themselves, their families, and their communities. 

“Through years of listening and campaigning, we know what working people across North Carolina want,” Warren said: well-funded, well-staffed public schools, healthcare access, transportation options and recreation programs for kids, infrastructure for effective disaster response. “When we talk to people about those things, even when they understand that it may involve an increase in taxes for them personally, they support funding those types of programs.”

This article A North Carolina movement asks voters to reject corporate tax breaks was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Garnet DeGrave and other organizers with Citizen Action Wisconsin watched in shock as news broke this June that FBI agents had raided the office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a nonprofit that hosts voter registration drives and does political organizing. The incident was largely understood to be an attempt to intimidate progressive organizers in the state and foster uncertainty in the state’s elections. DeGrave realized if a similar situation happened in Wisconsin — if a government agency interfered with community organizers or, in the worst case scenario, the election — they were woefully unprepared. 

“There weren’t enough people that were organized in the western half of the state to be able to handle that,” DeGrave, Citizen Action Wisconsin’s northeast organizer, said. 

This spurred the organization to try to fill the gap. At the end of September, Citizen Action Wisconsin — which does grassroots organizing around electoral and issue-based campaigns for social and racial justice — partnered with local organizations to pivot to election protection  ahead of a crucial midterm. 

It’s one of many community organizations and advocacy groups across the United States that have built out their election protection and defense work this year in an effort to combat misinformation and protect election integrity — a basic tenet of democracy that has come under attack from a president who is an election denier. Alongside national groups like the ACLU, which has had 68,000 sign-ups for its Democracy Defenders Task Force program, these state and local organizations have undertaken an unprecedented coordinated effort to bolster voting rights amid efforts by the federal government to undermine election results. 

According to DeGrave, the work falls into two categories. “Election protection” is pre-election work to help people overcome any barriers to voting — a process that differs in every state. This can include challenging laws that might restrict voter access, running voter assistance hotlines or holding voter education campaigns.

“Election defense,” on the other hand, is work during voting and after polls close to ensure every vote is counted and to defend election results. This can include nonpartisan poll watcher programs and community-led trainings that prepare people to mobilize in the event of a contested count due to political interference. 

For Citizen Action, the pivot was a natural one, as the group had done small-scale election protection work and occasional direct action, DeGrave said. Citizen Action partnered with GROWW, a grassroots group that organizes behind progressive candidates in western Wisconsin, to host training sessions on how to mobilize in the event of election interference. In Michigan, Voters Not Politicians is running a similar election defense program, taking inspiration from protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. In Maine, organizations like the League of Women Voters have worked to grow a statewide poll watching program — a tactic also being used by groups in Florida and California.

Though election protection and defense efforts have been an integral part of American politics for decades, part of the reason this year’s efforts have grown in size is because the stakes feel so high.

“This election is such an important moment for us to be prepared for, in order to vote out authoritarians,” DeGrave said.

A surge of volunteers

In the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, the Trump administration has intensified tactics that advocates say are meant to intimidate or disenfranchise voters. 

On the pretext of combating voter fraud — which experts say is virtually nonexistent in the U.S. — the administration has demanded sensitive voter information to identify alleged noncitizen voters from every state. Its attempts have been consistently denied by judges, though that hasn’t stopped the administration from trying to remove 20,000 people from voter rolls in California or from creating a federal voter database that’s incorrectly flagged some voters as noncitizens. The administration also tried to make voting more difficult for Americans with new Postal Service restrictions on mail-in voting, which a district court put on hold until after the election. 

State Republicans have followed President Donald Trump’s lead. Since Trump entered office in January 2025, at least 19 states have passed laws that will make it harder to cast ballots in the midterms. 

Government officials have also repeatedly implied they will deploy armed federal agents to poll sites, an action illegal under national law since it could constitute voter intimidation. The administration has also indicated its intention to send around 1,000 Department of Justice federal monitors to all 50 states to observe voting procedures, which advocates say is another intimidation tactic. And privately, Trump opponents worry he could claim that foreign governments interfered in the election as a way to discredit results. 

“It’s highly, highly unlikely. But if ICE were to be around the polling places, we want our observers to report it.”

Jen Lancaster, League of Women Voters of Maine

Mel Neal, legal counsel on voting rights issues for democracy defense organization the Campaign Legal Center, characterized the Trump administration’s actions as undermining trust in the election system. “They are attacks on democracy and are an attempt to sow distrust in our election system so that election results can’t be trusted,” she said. 

In response to these threats, organizers have built statewide coalitions of nonpartisan poll watchers: people who travel to poll sites during early voting and on Election Day to ensure that people are able to vote without difficulty. 

Such poll watching programs have been around for decades, explained Amy Keith, executive director of Florida’s chapter of Common Cause, a national voting rights group founded in opposition to the Vietnam War in 1970 whose initial campaign successfully reduced the voting age from 21 to 18.

Poll watching emerged first and foremost to document any and all issues that could discourage voters trying to cast their ballots: police presence, overlong lines, lack of disability access, language barriers, etc. Jen Lancaster, the deputy director of the League of Women Voters of Maine, said the league’s poll watching program emerged during COVID-19 to ensure all polling places followed public health standards, such as by implementing plexiglass or acrylic barriers. 

“We are always watching for anything that could intimidate or deter or make it harder for voters,” Keith said. The goal, she added, was “to make sure that polling places are calm and welcoming, so that everybody can have that experience to cast their ballot and to participate in the process.”

But this year, organizations have also begun advising volunteers about what to do if agents from federal agencies like the FBI or ICE show up. 

“It’s highly, highly unlikely,” Lancaster emphasized. “But if ICE were to be around the polling places, we want our observers to report it.” The presence of any officer, including ICE agents, near a polling location can discourage voters, which is why organizers look out for it. “It can be scary to walk by an armed officer in order to cast their ballot,” Keith said. Poll observers don’t typically engage in direct action themselves when these situations arise; instead, they alert their teams, who often have experienced advocates or lawyers on standby to provide advice or assistance.

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Maine’s nonpartisan poll watching program has grown to around 400 registered volunteers. “For Maine, this is a pretty big number,” Lancaster said. In Florida and California, poll watching programs co-run by Common Cause chapters reported over 1,000 recruits. They are part of a nationwide boom in poll watching volunteers, which state-level chapters of Common Cause and the League of Women Voters have worked quickly to accommodate. 

Eileen Ma, director of democracy and national initiatives at the Asian Law Caucus, which has co-led an election protection program in California since 2012 with Common Cause, said the program could only channel the surge of volunteers into trained roles because of years of  infrastructure development.

“We have the capacity to bring on and train 1,000 volunteers because we built up over time the materials and the expertise and the practical knowledge of how to do that,” Ma said. “The work over the last decade [has] been critical to our being able to respond in this moment.”

Combating misinformation and building trust

Advocacy organizations have also, for years, operated national and state-level voter hotlines where prospective voters can call to clarify any questions they have about voting and make plans to cast their ballots. All day, including on weekends, Keith and her team at Florida Common Cause field calls about early voting, ID laws and polling locations. 

Lately, the Florida Common Cause team and other organizations with voter hotlines have fielded questions related to new voter ID laws, which have gone into place in several states. These laws have caused confusion about what identification can be used to vote, organizers said. 

Keith sees clarity on voter laws as crucial to combatting voter misinformation, which she and other advocates characterize as an unfortunate side effect of the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine election results. 

Misinformation has included false rumors about the number of noncitizen voters in elections, how ballots marked by poll workers could be disqualified, incorrect guidance about how to register to vote, and more. 

“We want people to have the correct information, not misinformation — whether it’s disinformation being spread by bots or [others] intentionally trying to confuse people, or it’s misinformation because they don’t understand the process,” Keith said.

By combatting these rumors through voter education and voter hotlines, which are increasingly available in more languages, Keith believes trust in the electoral system — the number one defense against attempts to overturn election results — could be restored. 

Groups around the country are using various channels to get correct information to voters. In Wisconsin, the legal advocacy group Law Forward has invested in its social media strategy, and used social media and op-eds as avenues to combat voter misinformation. 

Democracy Defense Foundation adviser Brian Jones said the organization, which was founded in 2024 in part to reverse the erosion of trust in the U.S. electoral system and operates in eight states, has heavily invested in partnering with community organizations like churches and local nonprofit groups to get information about elections out.

In Maine, where internet access in rural areas remains an issue, Lancaster said the League of Women Voters prints a newspaper with information about candidates across the state. This year, they distributed 50,000 copies in 16 counties. In rural counties, they left the newspapers in town hubs — community centers and libraries — for people to see. 

“There’s a transparent system here and play,” Jones said. “People need to understand that and ensure that faith and trust in their elections, and it’s not driven by just a partisan point of view.”

Ready to deploy

Unlike Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, organizations that have worked in voting rights spaces for years, like Citizen Action Wisconsin and GROWW, don’t have a volunteer base dedicated to this type of work. In the past month, Citizen Action Wisconsin and GROWW have trained about 70 volunteers across Wisconsin in voting rights and post-election mobilization, and then trained those volunteers to conduct outreach to get others involved in election defense. 

“If they talk to five people and those five people talk to five people, then we can actually end up at over 700 people that are motivated and organized and ready to be deployed in a rapid response situation if something does go wrong with the election,” DeGrave said.

Volunteers will be posted outside of key polling sites across Wisconsin when ballot counts begin, and will remain at the ready to host vigils and press conferences outside polling sites if any issues arise.

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In Michigan, Voters Not Politicians, which primarily focused on distributing information about early voting and ballot drop-off locations to voters across the state, has worked on recruiting dozens of volunteers to mobilize in anticipation of election interference. 

Communications director Melinda Billingsley said the organization plans to have volunteers watch polls and, if needed, advocate for voters experiencing issues at the ballot box as part of a statewide nonpartisan poll watching program. 

In the event of a contested election, “we’re recruiting folks to be willing and able to go to any place they’re needed and to throw a party and create a joyful, safe atmosphere,” Billingsley said. This strategy is partially inspired by anti-ICE protests across the United States, which has involved organizers utilizing creative approaches to defend community members from federal agents.

Staying on watch

Though organizers have welcomed the increased interest in poll watching and voter education programs this year, many are wondering how to sustain that energy in future election cycles, where the stakes will arguably be just as high. 

“It’s even more important because in 2028, we have a presidential election year and in 2030, we have a census year,” Darius Kemp, California Common Cause’s executive director, said. Census counts help determine congressional districts, and voting rights organizations are advocating and educating against legislation that would skew a census count, such as a proposed rule to not count noncitizens.

But beyond ensuring fair and accurate elections safe from federal interference, organizers see the expansion of their work as critical to restoring Americans’ faith in the electoral system, which has dropped in the past decade. 

“It is not just a one-day struggle,” said Ma, from the Asian Law Caucus. “It’s not just a one kind of activity kind of struggle. It has to be a full-frontal assault or full-frontal defense, however you choose to look at it, in order to preserve people’s voting rights.”

This article Tens of thousands get ready to defend the vote was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Oct. 25, Serbia voted and the Student List won. Late that evening, President Aleksandar Vučić — the man who has dominated the country’s politics since 2012, steadily hollowing out its courts, media and elections along the way — went on television and admitted that his Serbian Progressive Party and its allies had lost. The final count isn’t in yet, but the result is not in doubt. Candidates selected by the Students List protest movement have more than half the vote and a majority in the 250-seat parliament.

For more than 20 years, our team at the Belgrade-based Center for Applied NonViolent Actions and Strategies, or CANVAS, has worked with activists from dozens of countries on one question: How do ordinary people defeat a government that looks unbeatable? This time the answer came from our own streets, again. We want to explain what happened, because movements elsewhere will try to learn from it, and we’d like them to learn the right lessons.

You can’t understand Sunday without understanding the 14 years before it, since Vučić first came to power.

Most people in Serbia learned to live with a low, constant fear. You assumed your phone wasn’t really yours. Amnesty International later confirmed what many suspected: Spyware was being installed on the phones of activists and journalists, sometimes while they sat in a police station. If you spoke up, a tabloid might put your face on the front page the next morning with a story about who was supposedly bankrolling you. People lost jobs and contracts for being on the wrong side. Plenty stopped saying what they thought, even at the kitchen table.

We see this pattern in almost every country we work in. That kind of power doesn’t have to arrest everyone. It only needs everyone to believe they could be next.

How it started

On Nov. 1, 2024, the concrete canopy at the Novi Sad railway station fell and killed 16 people. The station had just been renovated. Everyone understood immediately what that meant: The money meant to keep people safe had gone into someone’s pocket. Within days, “Corruption kills” was written on walls across the country.

Students shut down their colleges and refused to go back to class. Many observers abroad missed how important this was. A march lasts an afternoon. The blockade of the universities lasted for months and took a whole part of society out of normal life. In our field we call that noncooperation, and it is far more powerful than protest alone. Every regime depends on people showing up and doing what is expected of them. The students stopped.

For two years the students were arrested, followed, slandered and called foreign agents. Cars drove into crowds. People were beaten. The government gave them every excuse to respond with violence, and they didn’t.

At the largest protest in Serbia’s history, in Belgrade on March 15, 2025 — with between 275,000 and 325,000 people, according to the independent Archive of Public Gatherings — student marshals in yellow vests kept the crowd calm and blue flares showed people the way out if things went wrong. None of that was improvised. The students organized themselves. The assembly of each fakultet (a specialized college within a university) chose its marshals. Before every big action they went over the same things again and again: how to spot provocateurs, how to calm a tense moment, how to move a crowd out safely. At CANVAS, we teach this in every training we run: Nonviolent discipline doesn’t happen by itself. It is planned, practiced and repeated until it’s second nature. The students did exactly that.

Here is why it mattered so much. Violence was the one thing the regime wanted from them. A single burning car would have given the government its “terrorists” and sent the cautious middle class back indoors. 

Because the students stayed nonviolent, everyone could join. Grandmothers did. Farmers did. People who had never been to a protest in their lives did.

What it cost

People sometimes talk about nonviolent action as if it were the soft option. Anyone who watched these students over the past two years knows better.

They walked across Serbia. They arrived with bloody socks and taped-up blisters, slept wherever someone offered a floor, and set off again in the morning. In village after village people stood by the road with bread, hot tea and blankets, and a lot of them were crying. Those marches reached places that no rally in Belgrade ever could, places the government thought it owned.

Wherever they stopped, they talked with people. In town squares, school yards and village halls, they explained why they were marching and listened to what local people were angry about. They also urged residents to set up their own citizens’ assemblies, and in many towns people did, often for the first time in their lives.

Their professors paid a price, too. When fakultets sided with their students, the government cut university salaries to a small fraction of what they had been. Some professors received nothing at all for months. The president went on television and said that instead of salaries, they would get potatoes. Schoolteachers who backed the protests were punished the same way. These are people with children, mortgages and parents to look after, and they stayed with their students anyway.

A list with no politicians on it

Then the students did something we had not seen done quite like this anywhere.

They didn’t hand their momentum over to the opposition parties, and they didn’t run for office themselves. They wrote their own rules for the slate of candidates that they would support. No students could be on the list. Nobody from the ruling coalition. No officials from the opposition parties. No extremists.

For more than a year, over 80 student assemblies in six university cities proposed names, argued about them, interviewed people and vetoed the ones they didn’t trust. It was slow, messy and deeply democratic. We think that is exactly why it worked. Nobody could say it was cooked up in a back room.

What came out was a list of 250 people, one name for every seat in parliament, who were respected long before politics: professors, teachers, doctors, actors, artists and athletes. 

Serbia doesn’t have local districts. The whole country votes as one constituency for party lists, seats are shared out by each list’s share of the vote, and they are filled in the order the names appear. So the order matters, and the first name on the list was a cardiologist from Novi Sad. A former governor of the National Bank shared the list with one of the best basketball players this country has ever produced. Several opposition parties pulled their own lists and backed the students instead, which could not have been easy for them.

The people on that list don’t agree about much. Some are on the left, some on the right, and some have never thought of themselves as political at all. State-owned media called that chaos.

We see it the other way around. Movements win by bringing huge numbers of people on board, and huge numbers of people never share one ideology. If the list had looked like one camp, it would have attracted one camp. Because it looked like Serbia, almost anyone could find someone on it they trusted.

What held it together was simple. Nobody wants another leader the whole country has to obey and adore. Nobody wants to live again in a place where a handful of people get rich off everyone else. The students put it on their posters in three words: “Serbia or Mafia.”

Healing from a cancer

The best way we can describe where Serbia is today is this: we’ve had the diagnosis, and treatment has just started.

For years the country lived with a cancer — with captured courts, captured media, public money flowing into private pockets, and fear as the normal background of life. It spread slowly into nearly every institution.

Sunday’s defeat of Vučić didn’t cure it. Sunday made treatment possible.

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Anyone who has sat next to someone they love during chemotherapy knows what comes next. It takes a long time. It hurts. Some weeks the treatment feels worse than the illness. There will be setbacks and bad results, and people saying things were better before. The old networks won’t leave quietly, and some reforms will fail the first time they are tried.

But this cancer can be beaten. And the whole body has to heal, including the neighbors, relatives and colleagues who voted for the other side on Sunday. They aren’t the disease. They’re part of the country that has to get well.

What we ask of each of us

No government can do this healing by itself. Here is what we think it will take, and from whom.

1. The new governing majority: Start with institutions, not with settling scores. Establish courts that are actually independent, a public broadcaster that tells the truth, and clean elections — all of which will outlast any government. And open a full, public investigation into the surveillance of citizens, so no one is tempted to do it again.

2. The movement: Don’t let the assemblies fade away. They built this list, and they are the best protection Serbia has against the next strongman, including one who might come from inside the movement itself.

3. Friends abroad: Support Serbian institutions and citizens rather than personalities. In practice, that means long-term funding for independent media, watchdog groups and local citizens’ assemblies; sending judges, auditors and prosecutors from your own countries who can work alongside Serbian colleagues rebuilding theirs; and support tied to concrete rule-of-law results rather than to warm words for whoever is in office. And please stay for the whole treatment, not only the first week.

4. Activists in other countries: Don’t copy the slogan. Copy the method. Go beyond marching to real noncooperation, train for discipline instead of hoping for it, and build unity out of your differences.

Serbia has just shown that nonviolent action still works when it’s planned, patient and carried by many hands. Now it has to show that a country can heal. We intend to be part of that work: training the next generation of organizers, writing down honestly what worked and what didn’t, and holding the new government to the same standard the students held the old one.

A version of this article first appeared on CANVAS’ newsletter.

This article How Serbian students toppled an authoritarian was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On July 30, images streamed across TVs, social media feeds and newspapers of thousands of people approaching a fence along the beach, in boats and by foot. Migrants, including children and families, were attempting to cross into Ceuta, a Spanish enclave bordered by Morocco. Facing violent border guards and the threat of drowning, over 70,000 people made it to Ceuta, with hopes of eventually reaching the Spanish mainland. Officials in Ceuta said that 100 people died in the crossing — either by drowning or being crushed — and sources on the ground believe the number was higher. 

“I lost my phone, my money, my ID card, everything I had,” one Moroccan teenager recalled. “At one point I got pulled to the bottom, so far down that my feet touched the sand. When I looked around me, I saw women and babies who had drowned.”

“There was no proper humanitarian response from the local authorities — whether it is basic hygiene, food or shelter,” said Ric Fernández, coordinator and spokesperson for humanitarian and migrant advocacy group No Name Kitchen, or NNK, about the first days after the mass crossing. “Instead, there was an institutional response of pressuring people to ‘voluntarily’ return to Morocco. … There was repression, violence against people on the move in every form — legal, administrative and physical, and the forced expulsion of people.”   

Facing intense pressure and violence from both the Spanish police and military, within 96 hours most people returned to Morocco. Estimates about how many migrants remain are in flux, but the Spanish government said in late September that up to 10,000 people are still in Ceuta.

While the global mainstream media quickly moved on from this story, the situation in Ceuta has remained tense over the last three months, with increased violent harassment by the police, evictions and collective expulsions. In recent weeks, “voluntary returns” and evictions from makeshift camps on the beach have ramped up.

Irene Estébanez Gutiérrez, a family and community doctor in Madrid, spent two weeks in Ceuta as a volunteer. “An information campaign has been waged that portrays people on the move as invaders, violent and dangerous,” she said. The media coverage, she believes, has failed to adequately address “the resulting humanitarian crisis, the systematic violation of rights, the lack of protection for minors, and the systematic violence and discrimination to which people are being subjected to, particularly by the military.”

Those who remain include Moroccan men and women, alongside Sudanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Malians and Nigerians. According to NNK, a significant number are minors. They are still stranded; the majority of them have slept in the street or in makeshift tents since they crossed into Ceuta over two months ago. 

Kora, who uses a pseudonym as an activist to protect her identity, arrived in Ceuta to volunteer in early August and found the violence and the lack of access to basic necessities particularly angering. The authorities were “not letting them access the supermarkets to get food or water,” she said. “They turned off the publicly and freely accessible water [to shower or drink] on the beaches and beat them or scare them in the middle of the night … to purposefully making their lives more miserable.” 

Organizing solidarity, facing criminalization

This violence, however, did not prevent activists and migrants from developing forms of organizing and resistance. Hundreds of migrants staged a protest on a popular beach in Ceuta in August to demand asylum. On Sept. 21, Migreurop, a Euro-African network of organizations, activists and researchers that monitors European migration policies, noted in a joint statement with over 100 organizations: “We have witnessed forms of resistance in everyday survival practices.” They mentioned the sharing of information, food and medicine, as well as safety and protection practices. 

Besides migrants’ self-led efforts, civil society has stepped up to help, with the Spanish Red Cross distributing food at Trampolín Beach, the site of one makeshift camp. Other local charities like Luna Blanca, have been providing between 2,700 and 3,500 meals a day in five locations with initial funding from the Spanish government. NNK, a group started by Serbian activists in 2017 that supports migrants along the Balkan and Mediterranean routes to the EU, has been working in Ceuta since 2021. It has grown from a fixed team of four to more than 21 volunteers, after a call for help in early August through social media and Signal groups with other grassroots organizations providing aid to migrants in EU borders. Operations have shifted in the three months since the migrants arrived, and NNK is now cooking and serving over 1,200 meals a day in a new industrial-size kitchen. 

Fernández shared how the group has adapted its work on the ground to keep up with a crisis situation. “For more than a month [after July 30], we were not able to do proper legal accompaniment, because the system was broken and we were just trying to register people,” he said. “We tried to divide our work into four different teams: legal, health, cooking, awareness.” To keep things coordinated, aid groups in Ceuta hold a weekly meeting to share information and needs. The most pressing needs are for immediate humanitarian assistance, including clothes distribution, housing for vulnerable groups and phone charging. 

Volunteers arrive from Spain and mostly other European countries, contributing what they can based on their experience. “I provided direct basic health care because of the barriers to accessing medical care and the huge health needs due to violence and living conditions,” said Irene, the doctor who volunteered with NNK. She said she assessed dozens of cases involving wounds or injuries resulting from assaults, mostly perpetrated by the Spanish military. 

The hostility of authorities toward migrants has also extended to volunteers, who carry out their daily work under intense police monitoring. Police constantly ask for identification documents and conduct searches, including of food containers meant for distribution. Reprisals against volunteers and grassroots groups have taken multiple forms, from administrative fines to criminal charges of “trafficking.” A volunteer who had previously spent time in Ukraine and Syria reported that the seven-square mile enclave of Ceuta felt considerably more militarized than either of those countries.

Lessons learned and the way ahead 

Spain’s response to the people who crossed into Ceuta has been shocking to many observers, especially for a country that has been considered among the more progressive in the European Union on migration. This comes at a time when states are slowly beginning to implement the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, a new and comprehensive reform to migration management which includes a focus on external borders. Legal advocates argue that this pact, coupled with the use of emergency laws, could suspend migration and human rights law in the EU during mass border crossings like the one in Ceuta. 

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Solidarity groups have also come under attack and are looking for ways to move forward in this new atmosphere. Greece is among the first countries to implement the pact and one that has led the way in criminalizing humanitarian efforts to support migrants. This increasing criminalization is happening “through the misuse of the criminal justice system to target and persecute activists and people in solidarity for their work, as well as through administrative law, such as harsher requirements for the registration of civil society organizations,” said Eleni Sirri from the Border Violence Monitoring Network, a network of NGOs, associations and collectives that monitors human rights violations at and within European borders. 

Anna Gruber is the advocacy manager from Collective Aid, an NGO working with migrants in the borderlands of Serbia, Bosnia and Greece. She shared how Collective Aid also had to reorganize and strategize about the way ahead, given the increase in crackdowns on humanitarian work, as well as the anticipated changes because of the EU pact. “We are now focusing more on capturing conditions in detention, [and] mapping deaths and disappearances on the borders,” she said. “While these are hard to trace, bringing all the scattered evidence we can find together helps showcase the EU’s focus on detention camps and the containment of migration that is at heart of the new pact.” 

Like other groups navigating the criminalization of migration and anticipated changes under the new pact, NNK feels it is important for grassroots groups across the EU and beyond to come together around migrant rights. Fernández believes putting energy into growing networks and collectives of grassroots groups is the way forward. “The far-right in Europe and instrumentalization of migration will continue to grow,” he said. “We need to prepare for that and learn from each other to be stronger.” 

Kirsten Dimovitz, the advocacy coordinator for the Border Violence Monitoring Network and a volunteer in Ceuta, contributed additional reporting to the story.

This article Inside the resistance to Spain’s crackdown on migrants in Ceuta was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

I recently showed up to a protest for the first time in months, looked around, and thought: “Who the hell are all these people?” 

Friends I could once rely on running into at protests when I was younger were missing. 

The fact that I hadn’t been to a protest in months was unusual. I’d had a hard season of exhaustion and cynicism, and I felt I was falling out of the loop. In the last few years, I turned 30 and moved back to my hometown, and the once-intense focus on social movements that I had in my 20s was now jostling for attention with work and family. 

The absence of my comrades at that protest seemed to signal that others, too, had burned or faded out of organizing.

It’s a trend that Chris Dixon describes in his new book, which is about sticking around for the long haul in the fight for a better world: “In radical activist scenes especially,” he writes, “people tend to age out by their 30s, if not before.” 

When the manuscript of Dixon’s book came my way, it spoke to my fear of burning or fading out of the movements that have given my life meaning and momentum. (I sit on the editorial collective of Between The Lines Books, and helped select the book for publication; it was released in September 2026.) 

After a few recent boom-and-bust cycles of uprisings — 2020’s Black liberation uprising, the Palestine solidarity protests that kicked off in 2023 — it’s a timely and thoughtful book about building movements with care and commitment.

Dixon (who unfortunately shares a name with a far more famous American crypto bro) is an anti-authoritarian activist and a scholar of social movements. “For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World” is the latest effort in his lifelong project to understand how social movements are built and sustained.

Dixon grew up in Alaska, and the book opens by describing his decades-long friendship with Ruth Sheridan, an anarchist who was in her 70s when she first came to talk to his eighth grade labor history class. That early curiosity — about how left-wing social movements are built and sustained and the unsung activists who make it happen — showed up in his 2014 book “Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements,” in which he shared lessons from almost a decade spent interviewing organizers across the U.S. and Canada. 

Now, Dixon has reached back into this same conversational archive to write “For the Long Haul.” 

We meet Bill Stivers, an elder communist Dixon befriended as a teen; Rachel Herzing, the co-founder of prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance; the political prisoner David Gilbert with whom he exchanged letters from jail, and many more. 

These lifelong leftists share their observations about what leads to burnout, the many-headed monster that has long stalked social movements. During this time of totalizing neoliberalism and weakened movement infrastructure, it’s grown especially powerful. These movement veterans counsel us to be patient, open-minded and to “practice being nobody special.” 

Dixon tells the story of Stivers who, at the age of 76, travelled from Anchorage, Alaska to the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico to attend the Zapatistas’ Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. It was just a couple years after the militant group’s armed uprising and a young Dixon, more swayed by a European left tradition at that time, looked on with skepticism. But Stivers ended up having the more clear-eyed assessment of this new approach to anti-capitalist struggle. Stivers had cultivated the long view, which helped him avoid cynicism and dogmatism, and encouraged him to keep learning and stay open to new developments.  

What I found most helpful about the book was Dixon’s formulation of burnout: he sees it not just as a type of overwork or exhaustion, but as a feeling of defeat that becomes more common because of a lack of strategy. Dixon introduces this idea by sharing a conversation he had with Kim Marks, a direct-action environmentalist and Indigenous solidarity organizer in Oregon: “So much of burnout is about not being effective,” she said, “and so much ineffectiveness comes from not having a plan.” 

Dixon traces the ways that people often burn out of activist groups back to this underlying lack of strategy. When a group promises sweeping change but never decides how to take the first step; when a group gets mired in discussions about internal structure or politics and stops taking outward action; when a few veteran members shoulder a huge amount of work while new ones struggle to find meaningful ways to pitch in; when a group is hastily cobbled together to address a crisis then falls apart just as quickly after an unsuccessful campaign — all of these are instances in which a lack of strategy leaves people feeling defeated, ineffective and worn-out. 

A good plan can pull groups out of these exhausting spirals. This involves mapping the current political landscape, articulating our goals, making agreements about what to do and how to support each other in doing it, and then evaluating our success and learning from our mistakes.  

Dixon writes about the importance of imbuing this strategy-setting with care and intentionality, to “help people to talk frankly about workload, make reasonable estimates of what they can do, and look out for one another’s well-being.”

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You can find many of these same encouragements — for rest, care and intentionality — in the pages of any self-help book. But the goal of capitalist self-help literature is to create an individual who is independent, sane and productive enough to keep cranking the handle of profit-making machines. 

Dixon’s help is different: it’s not for the individual, but for the collective. At the end of the day, “sustained involvement in movements is fundamentally a collective activity, not an individual one,” he writes. No amount of advice given to or followed by the individual can stop the pattern of burnout and disengagement that’s become endemic in leftist spaces. 

As a result, Dixon focuses on collective care rather than self-care. This can look like preparing food for the picket line, planning for childcare and legal support at the direct action, or tending to hurt feelings after the meeting. He calls care work “a crucial — and too often overlooked — foundation for the long haul.”

For Dixon, care is not just a way to make organizing more pleasant for the people doing it, or a moral imperative if the left wants to keep claiming the high ground. Instead, he sees care as a strategic imperative. When we make our political commitments with care in mind, Dixon writes, it forces us to ask ourselves and each other if what we’re committing to is reasonable and tactical. And when it is, we become more likely to stick around for the long run, and also more likely to win.

Not one of Dixon’s ideas stands without a quote from an organizer, an example from a movement or a reference to a movement scholar’s work. One of the book’s main contributions is its vast bibliography — a full third of the pages are suggested reading and endnotes. 

Dixon’s form of activist research is highly attentive to insights that are gleaned from a person’s own experiences. Like this observation by anti-authoritarian activist Helen Hudson, who draws on decades of organizing with prisoners to form her analysis of how the state uses prison to weaken movements: “Prison isolates the prisoners from support,” she told Dixon, “but also deprives younger generations of radicals from the experience of revolutionaries who have much to teach us.”  

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Dixon encourages younger readers like me to find these people in our own lives — older activists like Stivers and Sheridan who show us that it is possible and lovely to live an ordinary life of unflagging commitment to the left. 

This is not an organizing manual (though Dixon does recommend a few of those in his suggested readings). Instead, what he gives us is a deep study of left-wing dynamics and some broad strokes toward sustainability. The people likely to get the most from this book are those of us who have already gone through many cycles of boom-and-bust social movement activity, and who are looking for fuel that burns longer and cleaner. 

And it’s by paying attention to Dixon’s rigorous practices of listening and sharing that readers will get the most out of this book — leaving not just with a handful of advice, but with an initiation into a practice. 

This article Beating burnout in social movements requires strategy was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

After Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration moved to rein in the Bovino-style spectacle with its made-for-TV arrests. In an attempt to avoid another public outcry, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has quietly settled into a new rhythm.

Arrests have still increased month after month, reaching a record high of roughly 51,000 people taken into ICE custody in August. This is part of a new surge — carried out in hospitals, courthouses and airports — with an intent to stay off the nightly news. As The New York Times reported, this phase is “captured mostly by grainy security camera footage, through cracked blinds and from behind closed doors.” 

This phase is also backed by a dragnet of data. At airports, ICE has been running name matches with TSA to detain people at check-in counters and gates. It has found a backdoor into the country’s license-plate cameras: Records show local and state police ran more than 4,000 immigration-related searches on Flock’s camera network in a single year. (Yet another reason Flock cameras should not exist.)

Perhaps surprisingly, much of the tech infrastructure driving ICE’s new surge is headquartered in … Vermont. The town of Williston, outside Burlington, is home to both ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center, which houses the agency’s national tip line, and ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, or NCATC, its social-media surveillance hub. 

As ICE tries a new approach, this new phase of resisting ICE requires moving to more offense — and the people of Vermont are offering us some clear lessons. 

Vermont resistance

Resistance started with the fight over flights. Early in Trump’s second term, activists documented ICE moving detainees onto commercial flights out of Burlington’s airport — more than 450 people as of mid-July 2025, by their count. They showed up in airports as witnesses and disruptors, sometimes aided by empowered flight attendants. They forced an ICE retreat: organizers say ICE hasn’t moved detainees through the airport in more than a year.

More recently they’ve gone after the hard infrastructure. Sit-ins at the White Cap Business Park in Williston, where the NCATC facility is located, have led to arrests for allegedly blocking the entrance to the ICE offices, including 11 people in February and 13 in July.

After those arrests came some unusual twists, which speak volumes about the courage it takes to refuse unjust orders and to continue protesting in the face of repression.

Complicity and noncooperation

Responses to authoritarianism are as old as a time — many of the same dynamics from Vermont show up in the ancient story of Pharaoh and Moses.

Undeniably the most powerful person in his land, Pharaoh was the ultimate authoritarian. His big trick was taking beautiful work and turning it evil. Take the work of midwives, whose job is to usher life into the world — he turned that work into ugliness by ordering the Hebrew midwives to kill every newborn boy. 

But we all have a choice. And famously, several of the midwives refused. Their act of noncooperation with an unjust order is the reason Moses lived.

We are living through a moment when institution after institution is being turned toward evil. Some, like the Department of Justice, were already a mixed bag. But now it is being turned against the very logic of due process it claims to serve, as we’ve seen recently with the criminal indictment of whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson. Other institutions, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are being perverted, with great resistance from insiders who cling to the key values that these agencies were founded on.

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In Vermont, the local prosecutor, Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, faced her own choice. When asked to bring charges against the protesters who held the sit-ins, she repeatedly declined, citing limited resources. That makes sense: No one was harmed, and the protesters have a strong necessity defense — the argument that they were preventing an even greater harm. Every minute that ICE isn’t taking part in abducting people is good for the country.

Then came a bizarre turn of events. The state’s public safety commissioner directed state police to send the cases to Vermont’s Attorney General Charity Clark, bypassing normal procedure and upending the traditional role of the attorney general. Clark, a Democrat, decided to charge the protesters with trespassing.

In an op-ed, she said her hands were tied: “Justice must be blind or our system will fail.” Back to Pharaoh: This is a bit like a midwife in the next town over raising her hand to say, “I’d like to kill Moses, because that’s what the law dictates.”

Protesters recently unearthed relevant Vermont history — a model of state-level noncooperation. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which ordered cooperation with slave catchers, Vermont passed a state statute known as the Habeas Corpus Law. It effectively nullified the federal law, and went so far as to require state attorneys to defend anyone accused of being a slave, with full representation before a judge and a jury. The entire practice of nullification was deemed highly escalatory — so much so the federal government threatened military invasion — but due to the state’s resistance, throughout Vermont there was effectively no participation in the Fugitive Slave Act.

As in that case, the pressure from the federal government has continued. One week before a planned week of direct action, the federal government suddenly charged five people from the earlier protests with obstructing access to a federal facility (punishable by up to 30 days in prison or a $5,000 fine), likely hoping to deter further escalation.

We all have a choice: complicity with Pharoah or noncooperation. Despite the threats and new legal challenges, the protesters in Vermont chose the riskier, more liberatory path.

A funeral, a guerrilla garden and a sit-in

The week of direct action went on as planned, beginning with a funeral. On Oct. 5, more than 30 clergy led a procession of a hundred or so mourners who walked behind a hearse to the White Cap Business Park, singing “Amazing Grace.” They carried 95 paver stones, each representing a life taken by ICE — directly or from complications while detained — and placed them one by one in a handmade coffin of Vermont pine. The action echoed the Stolen Neighbors Quilt created in Minnesota, which remembers people who were deported. Here, names of those killed by ICE were read out. Then, in front of the doors of the spy center, the coffin was nailed shut. 

Rev. Marybeth Redmond said at the vigil, “I have walked alongside Vermonters struggling to survive, and I have never seen our immigrant neighbors so hunted, so afraid and so alone.”

In the end, it was a symbolic act. Security scattered the stones, and the property manager and others were seen taking crowbars to the coffin. But it was only the beginning of the week.

The next action was a garden. Because what would you expect from Vermont? Rather than using just their bodies to get in the way, about 40 protesters arrived at sunrise with pots, planters and bags of soil. 

They affixed the boxes to the pavement with construction adhesive, painted and chalked them with flowers, insects and slogans, flew a rainbow kite, and by mid-morning, had gotten a full dance party going. The action blocked the road to 188 Harvest Lane, which houses ICE’s national tip line.

They were also highlighting the environmental violence of ICE’s data intensive operation. Gardener Isaac Petersen said, “ICE’s surveillance technology is extremely energy-intensive, much of it powered by AI and data centers. It harms our communities directly by targeting our neighbors.”

State and local police moved some barriers, but largely left the garden alone, which blocked the road for most of the day. ICE’s parking lots were nearly empty all day, and the rumor was that ICE was told to avoid coming into the office.

Each day escalated from the day before. By Thursday, protesters went right up to the front entrance of the Harvest Lane facility. Dozens had arrived before 8 a.m. to deliver handwritten note cards with “tips” encouraging ICE employees to find other jobs. The protesters started by taping those messages to the windows and doors. Then they hauled out a rug, a couch, a coffee table and a fold-up mattress — a makeshift living room — and sat down, singing and playing music, effectively shutting the place down. 

Much of this has been intergenerational. Vermont protesters have ranged from people in their early 20s to an 83-year-old from Bethel and 85-year-old from Sharon.

Some of those sitting at the entrance this week had taken part in earlier acts of civil disobedience, and several now face charges brought by Clark. 

Organizers say the ICE facility was effectively shut for much of that week, its parking lots empty. Police interference was minimal: At one point, officers came over only to remove the items protesters had used to block a surveillance camera, then returned to their cars. As the organizers said in their press release, “ICE employees went home rather than face Vermont’s week of bold, decisive action.”

What you can do 

The week of action was only one moment, and organizers hope others will organize their own — aimed at different pieces of ICE infrastructure. There are other flash points around the country this month, too, in Austin, Minneapolis and Arizona.

As for Shut Down ICE VT, the group behind the week of action, they plan to keep going. One simple way to support them: Call the tip line that ICE runs out of Williston to encourage neighbors to turn each other in. To disrupt its activity, the group is encouraging people to call 866-347-2423 and tell whoever picks up all the different ways ICE could be making a better world. According to organizers, this tactic has been so successful the lines are clogged — one person was on hold for 2 hours and 18 minutes until her phone died. (This tactic was used in the early DOGE days.) Instead of doing Pharaoh’s bidding: What are the beautiful things you could be doing with your life? It can be a bit of a daily ritual.

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Because here, in the end, is Pharaoh’s trick: He changed the meaning of what was legal. He didn’t simply say, “You must obey me.” He said that if you refused, you were the one breaking the law.

But we should remember whose side the law has so often taken. The law stood against enslaved people seeking freedom. It stood against women having control of their own bodies. It stood against trans people claiming full autonomy. The law, by itself, is no defense against injustice — and must not be turned into an instrument of oppression.

Sarah George declined to prosecute protesters for a reason. By stepping in to take up the case, Charity Clark has signaled a willingness to participate in the repression. The people shutting down ICE in Vermont are on the right side of history. Let’s find ways to join them.

This article How Vermont shut down ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This election is not like any other. You’ve heard that before, and so have I. But after decades of “this presidential election is the most important election in your lifetime,” I have finally conceded that this midterm election may be the most important election in my lifetime — because it will be the ultimate test of whether Trump and MAGA have succeeded in their authoritarian consolidation of power. 

And so it’s appropriate that many groups are trying new things ahead of this election — because the old playbook alone won’t get us there.

No Kings. On Oct. 17, No Kings is going to try something it hasn’t tried before. Instead of another mass march, the coalition is holding No Kings: Vote Early, a nonpartisan day of action in which communities will host block parties, BBQs and local protests to make a voting plan together and vote early where local rules allow. Organizers say it’s “not purely a protest,” but rather a nonpartisan action to encourage voter participation. The idea is to treat voting not as something we do alone, but as something we do together. I’m not old enough to remember it, but people used to go to the polls with their neighbors and make an event of it. This is bringing back that collective spirit.

(It’s easy to host. Go here for all the info you need by Thursday Oct. 15.)

Election Holiday. Another experiment is popping up for the Nov. 3 election — Election Day: Our Civic Holiday. This group (which I’m a part of) rests on a simple idea: treating Election Day as a day for showing love for democracy by doing our civic duty. Vote, help someone else vote, become a poll worker or observer, or find another way to participate in civic life. The idea is to translate that into a cultural vibe, like Valentine’s Day, but for a different form of love — love for democracy and our neighbors.

These are two experiments among many in how we protect elections in new ways under new circumstances. (I’ll be writing more about possible post-election actions later.) Neither solves the problem on its own, but both actions build on the understanding that stealing an election gets much harder when there’s a large blowout. Hungary is the reminder. As I wrote in April, Orbán’s defeat was so decisive that he conceded before all the votes were counted, with turnout near 80 percent, the highest since their transition to democracy. As Micah Sifry put it, it was “too big to rig.”

New tactics aren’t easy — and it’s worth reminding ourselves of that.

The trap of the winning tactic

Until now, No Kings has been known for one thing: enormous marches, each bigger than the last. Organizers put the first at five million, the second at seven million, and the third, in March, at more than eight million. When a tactic works like that, the pressure to keep repeating it is immense.

I’ve seen this up close. After Greta Thunberg began her Friday walkouts, Fridays for Future grew and grew. I was working with 350.org — a global environmental organization — at the time and we provided a lot of the backend technical support to help it grow. That growth created tremendous pressure and helped drive movement at the United Nations and in many countries. (You can certainly argue it contributed to the Inflation Reduction Act, which — despite significant cuts — has some parts that are still very active.)

But every tactic eventually peaks. As Saul Alinsky put it, “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Suddenly an organization named for leaving school on Fridays needs to improvise — and that’s hard.

Student protesters asked me to write the Climate Resistance Handbook to try to assist Fridays for Future (and others) to break out of their tactical doldrums.

Occupy Wall Street hit the same wall. In Philadelphia, where we had an encampment outside of City Hall, my ears still ring with painful, shouted debates over whether we could do anything other than occupy. The argument largely won out that occupying is the thing that held us together — and like most occupations around the country (but not all!), we never tactically transitioned.

That’s the pull: The familiar tactic feels like the glue. The drive to stay the course is strong. And it takes a strong decision-making process to break out.

Many of us know this tactical challenge: endless weekly vigils and letter-writing with no changes. Worried about this dynamic in my anti-casino organizing group, I once made us promise we would only use the same tactic once — resulting in new tactics like citizen’s search warrants, Philly’s Ballot Box or the public filibuster. 

So No Kings deserves congratulations for breaking the mold. Yes, many would love to see something more escalated that increases the level of risk-taking — but it’s worth just underlining how difficult it is to change course at all. So greeting this pivot with encouragement makes all pivots more possible.

The strategic logic

Why put so much energy into the election? 

I’ve regularly argued there is so much more than elections. And Trump’s attempt at consolidation is happening in places where elections alone won’t save us. Take the military, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to purge 20 percent of the military’s top leaders. He’s already blocked and purged many women and Black leaders. Many view his attempts as a long-term purge to keep control of the military. (The military is hardly defensive and has its own ways of pushing back — including the extensive leaking about the eight sailors in the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group who attempted suicide.)

But the elections remain critical both as a narrative (exposing Trump’s unpopularity!) and also because Congress (for all its faults) remains a key pillar in allowing the theft of congressional money, putting in radical judges, co-signing his corruption and so much more.

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Trump knows this, which is why it is such important contested territory for him. In September, Trump led the crowd at the Republican National Convention in a pledge to “cheat like hell” (Newsweek claimed he was joking — but I’d say the intent is hard to dismiss). The Callais decision echoes widely as the single largest loss of Black political power in recent memory. 

Trump hopes terror can keep us from voting. In March he signed an executive order restricting mail-in voting, and while courts have kept the restrictions from taking effect this year, the fear it stoked is already having an impact. Trump is adding more fuel by making up stories of noncitizen voting. Why? So he can actually steal the election. I lay out 18 ways the regime might take our votes away in this scenario guide.

If nothing else, remember that a 2028 election becomes far easier to steal with a willing Congress. You don’t need a strong imagination to picture a Trump-led Jan. 6 insurrection under current Republican leadership ending in a fully effective coup backed by Congress and the Supreme Court. That becomes much harder with a hostile Congress.

All of this brings us back to why the midterms matter and the context of why collectively voting early and supporting each other on Election Day matters.

Why turnout is protection

Mass participation can overwhelm a system and make the likely accomplices of would-be election thieves less willing to go along. Trump can try to control the narrative, but the mechanics of theft require a chain of accomplices: election deniers in the certification process, state actors, and behind them businesses and supporters who quietly approve. That’s why folks at May Day Strong launched the Business for Democracy Pledge. By signing on, businesses commit to oppose obstacles to voting and, if results aren’t honored, to close ranks in defense of the election. It pulls potential accomplices back before they cross the line.

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Then there are the efforts to recruit more voters, like the Oct. 17 Vote Early Day coming up soon — a chance to mix large-scale decentralized actions for an electoral good. Or the Election Day: Our Civic Holiday effort where we’re not asking for a federal policy change. We’re asking people to treat the day differently. Vote if you haven’t. Help someone else vote. Make it visible.

We’re trying to feed into the energy by reminding everyone to stay active on Election Day, Nov. 3, by:

• making sure you’ve voted, and that the people around you have too
• becoming a poll worker or nonpartisan observer
• joining Singing Resistance, Souls to the Polls, or Joy to the Polls, and meeting any interference with positivity
• connecting with rapid-deployment teams or people already at polling sites, not to confront ICE, but to redirect and escort voters so everyone eligible gets to vote.

You can share the word at election.holiday. Businesses can support the campaign by pledging to give their employees time off to do their civic duty through Time to Vote, the coalition founded by Patagonia. And if you’re still looking for roles to support the election, find them at We are Ground Control.

All of this is part of the pre-election plan: Get large numbers of people voting against an awful regime. There’s an abundant range of opportunities to help protect our election. I hope you find your role.

This article Why we need to think outside the box this election was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When the shrill of heavy earthmoving machinery crept towards Elias Mlambo’s riverside banana plantations in February, the sudden brownish color of the river alarmed him. 

The water was laced with used machinery oil, disfiguring the once crystal-clear, wild water of the Haroni River. The river not only sustains the Ndau tribal people of the Chimanimani district in southeast Zimbabwe but also acts as Zimbabwe’s eastern border with Mozambique. By December of last year, excavators operated by a Chinese mining syndicate were at work along a stretch of the riverbeds — tearing up centuries of riparian ecology in a hunt for alluvial gold deposits.

“They appeared without notice, without our permission, claiming to have a government license to dig for gold on our land, but never showing the actual permit,” said Mlambo, a banana farmer and local tribal elder in Rusitu, one of the largest villages in the district. 

He said he confronted a man who claimed to be the manager of the Chinese miners — but the man gave his name only as “Xai Samson” and flatly refused to give out the company’s name. He acted as though he did not understand English — a deliberate tactic some dubious Chinese mining syndicates adopt in Zimbabwe when confronted by aggrieved locals, Mlambo said. 

“He just waffled a few sentences in Chinese — gestured to the excavators and piles of fresh soil,” he explained. “We figured out that our river, fruit plantations and ancestral graves were collateral to the invaders.” 

Ignored at first

For the next three months, Mlambo made complaints to the Chimanimani municipal authorities, a lawmaker and Zimbabwe’s mines ministry — and was ignored. Just one ministry bureaucrat responded to Mlambo and other tribal elders by telephone, only to say that his hands were tied, citing how high-level state partnerships and national economic priorities trump tribal land rights. It’s a familiar cold response from Zimbabwe’s government that human rights leaders say has given dozens of Chinese prospectors carte blanche to excavate hills and river streams, and encroach onto tribal farming and grazing lands in pursuit of precious metals like platinum, lithium or gold.

“There’s a cozy, transactional relationship between state decision-makers and Chinese minerals prospectors,” said Nsama Musonda, the executive director of Care for Nature Zambia, a regional ecology monitoring nonprofit. “This gifts Chinese businesspeople a carefree right to dig for precious minerals — without consent — on tribal people’s lands in Zimbabwe and nearby countries like Zambia.” 

Knowing the script that has played out elsewhere across Zimbabwe, Mlambo and fellow villagers refused to retreat. Instead, they looked across the international boundary to Mozambique — a stone’s throw across the Haroni River. On the other side, in Mozambique’s Sussundenga district, villager Manuel Pinto was watching his community’s primary fish stocks float belly-up to the surface.

Fish in the community ponds that line the Mozambique side of the Haroni riverbed were suffocating from the sludge coming from the spoiled headwaters on the Zimbabwe side, he said. But Pinto feared something worse: Mozambique’s community health nurses warned that children could develop chemical rashes if they encountered contaminated waters. 

“The river doesn’t need a passport to flow and nourish both countries, Zimbabwe and Mozambique,” he said, speaking the same Ndau vernacular language that hundreds of thousands of tribal people on the Zimbabwe side of the river border speak, too. “We realized that if authorities in Zimbabwe would not enforce environmental law, the Ndau people on both sides of the border would act to protect their right to safe livelihoods.”

The border alliance 

Pinto says he knew routine complaints would be easily ignored by state decision-makers. So Mlambo and Pinto conjured up a community alliance rooted in their shared Ndau lineage. Tribal identity, older than colonial state borders, drove their determination to defend their environment against the encroachment of heavily polluting Chinese miners. 

In daylight, the Ndau communities on the Zimbabwe side confronted the Chinese miners: spraying graffiti on the worksite and the machinery, and singing, chanting and banging pots, drowning them in noise. Since the area is remote geographically, located far from city markets, they also successfully convinced local food shops to refuse to sell soap, beverages, bread, meat, tea, essential groceries and cellphone top-up cards to the Chinese miners and their local mining employers. Taxis and buses refused them service. These actions constantly reminded the miners and their workers that they were trespassing on tribal lands. 

“We made life uncomfortable for them,” Mlambo said. “Their workers were often hungry because we instructed local shops not to sell food or beer to the invaders, which they liked a lot. They would drive 50 kilometers just to replenish the food pantry with essentials like salt and cigarettes. Their workers began to quarrel with their bosses.”

Locals also shared their displeasure to social media networks followed by thousands of Zimbabweans. 

At the same time, the Ndau communities on the Mozambique side of the river filled out urgent cross-border environmental petitions with provincial authorities in Mozambique’s Manica province. They walked into the offices of the governor and lawmakers and demanded urgent meetings, asking them to directly press the Zimbabwean government to take action under specified timelines. If the decision-makers didn’t follow through, the Ndau activists threatened not to pay taxes because the sludge from Zimbabwe’s polluted river was beginning to spoil their corn and fruit farming plots. 

The Zimbabwe government is known for being “tone deaf” to citizens’ grassroots petitions against irregular mining, said Pedrito Martinho Campira, chief of the Sussunhega district. But he added that the deliberate aggressive petitioning of the regional government in Manica, which borders Chimanimani, has created a diplomatic headache for Zimbabwe’s stubborn authorities, whom locals suspect were shielding the Chinese syndicate.

“At night our people would cross the river, cover the Chinese mining site with paper petitions and spray graffiti, warning the Chinese miners that they are messing with the waters flowing into Mozambique,” Campira recalled of the intense cross-border pushback that overwhelmed the Chinese prospectors. 

“Illegal riverbed mining is an affront to our two shared lands and cultures,” he said. “We are one Ndau people separated by a colonial fence; we have blood family ties across the river.”

Faced with nightly protests, daily confrontation with locals on the Zimbabwe side of operations, cross-border diplomatic pressure and vocal warnings from Mozambique border guards, who were dismayed by the contaminated water flowing from the Zimbabwe side, the unidentified Chinese miners finally retreated in June. They abandoned heavy machinery and fled the mining site — leaving locals to rehabilitate spoiled riverbeds, banana plantations and damaged forest cover. 

“We won,” Mlambo said. The Chinese mining syndicates operating without consent across rural Zimbabwe are used to facing only local complaints and enjoying the shield of compromised government bureaucrats, he added. “This time they faced something unfamiliar — a cross-border, bi-national grassroots pushback, and they were clueless on how to respond.” 

Xiao Samson, the manager of the Chinese syndicate that attempted to excavate for gold in Haroni River, refused to give a full interview. He only said in a short phone call, in broken English, that, “we are no lawless people. We have a permit. We will [be] back in Haroni River to do our gold with law.” 

Mutoko pushback

The victory in Chimanimani is not an isolated event; it marks an uptick of grassroots defiance forming in rural Zimbabwe in areas where precious minerals are being discovered. In the granite-rich hills of Mutoko, 250 miles north of Chimanimani, a similar crisis boiled over in June. Mutoko has long been the center of friction over complaints that Chinese miner-exporters are blasting and digging up lucrative black granite and gold without consent — leaving in their wake damaged homes, polluted riverways, desecrated grazing and farming lands, and deformed hills. For example, Shanghai Haoying Mining Investments has been frequently cited by locals for continuing mining activities without obtaining community consultation or environmental approvals, and for threatening to evict locals. 

In June, the community finally drew a line in the sand with a different band of Chinese miners, who, like the miners in Chimanimani, refused to give out their identity. 

“My house has been shaken to the core — its roof and walls cracking from relentless blasting by nearby Chinese miners who are going for gold,” said Urai Godo, a mother of three whose home stands at the slopes of a contested hill. One day in early August, the building frustration finally boiled over when locals saw a crew at a Chinese gold prospecting site setting up wires and detonators. Locals feared that the hill was going to be destroyed by dynamite while kids were doing homework in houses nearby. Word filtered around the village in minutes and residents carrying pots and wooden sticks stormed the blasting site without warning, Godo said. A Chinese mining boss who called himself “Hei Chu” felt the pressure and gave orders for his workers to stop blasting preparations. 

“We encircled the miners — chanting, singing, blocking their work progress. The rattled miners dropped their detonators, unwound the blasting wires, hopped into their cars, abandoned the site and never returned,” Godo recalled. 

“Hei Chu” was not reachable for comment on why the miners had attempted to work on communal land in Mutoko because the number he gave the village head repeatedly went to voicemail and no longer seemed to be working. 

Compromised governance and impunity

Though still small, this growing pushback by rural residents against mining impunity is a damning example of how the state in Zimbabwe is now captive to foreign extractive corporations, said Ancelimo Magaya, an outspoken cleric based in Harare, Zimbabwe. 

“Rural Zimbabweans are seeing this shady encroachment onto tribal lands without consent,” he said. “Rather than simply relying on hiring expensive lawyers to litigate or lodge complaints with the same tone-deaf government agencies, they are taking the miners head-on through peaceful grassroots protests.”  

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The Environmental Management Agency of Zimbabwe doesn’t do much against these foreign mining syndicates, Magaya says. They often issue small, token fines. Some officials could themselves be compromised by the same mining syndicates. This has not escaped the attention of rural residents in Zimbabwe, and they are determined to mount active, peaceful grassroots resistance rather than wait for regulatory protection, which is often absent. 

The spokesperson for the Environmental Management Agency did not respond to emailed questions about why mining in Chimanimani began without first obtaining community consent, an environmental impact assessment certificate, and all the necessary paperwork. However, speaking on anonymity, a senior bureaucrat denied such characterization.

“We are in a tricky situation,” he said. “We would like to do our jobs properly defending communities against ecological destruction. But we can’t match the money, tools and vehicles that these mining syndicates have — and the political influence they carry.” 

Back in Chimanimani, Mlambo surveyed the banks of the Haroni River. The water is beginning to run cleaner, but the marks of devastation on the land remain. Some youths are replanting fruit and Indigenous trees to rehabilitate disturbed riverbanks. The scars on the land will take years to heal.

“We reasoned that the government in Zimbabwe won’t tackle these Chinese miners,” Mlambo said. “As Ndau people on both sides of the border, we resolve to be united and proactive in defending our ecosystems. It worked, and this is a model of how grassroots communities can defend their lands against corporate extractivism.” 

The Chinese in Zimbabwe had never met this kind of bi-national grassroots community resistance to unaccountable mining, he says proudly. “We shocked them – they froze and we learnt lessons to refine our resistance next time should they try to mine on our lands again.”  

This article Inside the successful campaign against illegal Chinese mining in Africa was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Since the massacres on Oct. 7, now three years ago, the news has brought a steady stream of horror and broken promises. The ceasefire in Gaza has been broken thousands of times; the ceasefire with Iran only holds until the next strike. Many of us have responded by going numb or turning away. Over these three years, I’ve come to believe that collective mourning can help movements build sturdier organizing infrastructure, move through paralysis and numbness, and get back to the long-term work of creating systemic change.

I’ve spent nearly two decades living and working as a human rights defender, mostly in Palestine and Israel. For years, I responded to atrocities the way much of the dominant organizing culture did at the time: strategically. I prepared statements, launched campaigns and mobilized our base. I worked through several wars and the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide. Even though my colleagues and I were often physically together, we rarely had the opportunity to collectively mourn. In fact, mourning was often seen as something only the privileged could afford. As organizers and solidarity activists, we were the ones who needed to push past the pain and keep mobilizing.

And then, after each war, large swaths of colleagues and organizers would burn out, and our movement would suffer a setback. Movement researchers Paul Gorski and Cher Chen, studying U.S. human rights and social justice activists, found that an estimated 50 to 60 percent of organizers eventually walk away from movement work and never return, burned out by a culture that treats overwork and self-sacrifice as necessary. That culture also leaves no room to mourn and process the secondary trauma that accumulates, hastening burnout. These kinds of cycles make it especially hard for movements seeking systemic change to sustain themselves.

When Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023 and I was waiting in anticipation of the retaliation against Gaza, I knew I couldn’t respond with the same kind of organizing strategy that we usually use: preparation of advocacy statements, social media campaigns and fundraising appeals. I knew that while some people should and would continue that work, there also needed to be spaces for organizers and our base to mourn. And so, on Oct. 8, I opened a space for collective mourning online, sharing it in the many community, political and religious groups I was a part of, for anyone who needed somewhere to process what they were witnessing and feeling. Dozens of people joined: primarily my Jewish community at first, and then people from many faiths and chapters of my life, from Palestine to Palo Alto. 

As the assault on Gaza and the genocide continued, the room stayed open. More colleagues, including community organizers, artists, chaplains and psychologists, joined me in facilitating, and we held space for hundreds of people from across our communities to mourn together. We formed a collective called the Social Change Sanctuary and developed a format that included facilitation and participation from attendees. Over time, we were invited to hold spaces for other communities in mourning. We’ve held spaces to grieve the ongoing genocide; climate catastrophes like the fires in Los Angeles; ICE raids, arrests and murders; and the war on Iran.

Participants repeatedly shared the difference it made in their lives to know they had a consistent space to mourn.

“In daily life, when something hurts, I turn away, I distract myself,” one participant told us. “But the collective mourning practice helped me move through the frozenness that constant news induced — helped me stop doomscrolling — and I’m able to return to my work.”

That participant went on to organize her community and raised $20,000 for refugees in Gaza. 

Another participant returned to their role as a chaplain, and extended her work to include “movement chaplaincy” holding one-on-one spaces for people doing solidarity work. 

Many participants also shared how witnessing the news with others enabled them to feel the emotions provoked by the headlines, leaving them feeling less isolated and more connected. That is co-regulation happening at the communal level, increasing people’s capacity. People who could barely stay in the room during the earliest, rawest sessions after Oct. 7 can now sit with the news longer, witness without shutting down and understand what is theirs to carry and what is not.

A historical movement of mourners

While many of the collective mourning groups that have come together in recent years are new, they’re built on generations of organizing that already knew how to fold community care and grief into the work itself.

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Preserving a people’s history through quilts

During the civil rights movement, Southern organizers mourned the murdered publicly and loudly, treating funerals as organizing events rather than sites of private grief to be managed quietly. Decades later, AIDS activists advocating for government support built the NAMES Project Quilt, which memorialized the dead one quilt square at a time. And ACT UP’s “political funerals,” where activists carried the actual ashes of the dead to the White House lawn, were a vigil and a protest at the same time.

For years, Black Lives Matter’s Los Angeles chapter has opened its meetings and protests with a mourning ritual in which members stand in a circle and speak aloud the names of people killed by police, while one person at the center pours out water for each name and the group answers “ashe” after every pour. 

Over the past three years, IfNotNow, a Jewish organization that mobilized thousands to oppose the genocide in Gaza, has built something they call ceasefire circles: small, ongoing groups organized around what researchers studying the practice term “solidaristic grief,” designed less as a single vigil than as a longer-term way of holding people inside the movement over time.

In February, as ICE violence escalated, a coalition that included the NDN Collective, the Brave Heart Society, the Indigenous Protector Movement, the American Indian Movement, Sunrise Movement and Project South circulated a public toolkit for grieving those killed by federal agents, built explicitly so that any group, anywhere, could hold its own public mourning.

How mourning helps us keep going 

In an environment dominated by negative news, many of us are starting to turn away, rather than experiencing a kind of secondary, media-induced trauma that can leave us anxious, depressed or numb.

Both avoidance and numbness are the nervous system’s way of protecting us — an involuntary, evolutionarily produced reaction. They are also what makes the news cycle so useful to the people who want to immobilize us and our movements. Steve Bannon named the strategy “flood the zone.” Scholars of authoritarianism describe this as a deliberate exploitation of the public’s limited attention, engineered to produce fatigue and an inadequate or absent response. The aim is to overwhelm and exhaust the opposition. 

We do not need to feel guilty for having this response, but we do need a way through it. So we ran an experiment: Could listening to the news become an opportunity for co-regulation instead of dysregulation?

We called the practice Good Mourning. We held the 30-minute practice once a week for 40 weeks with six to 10 people. For 15 minutes, we listened to the day’s news together, usually “Democracy Now!,” mixed with music. People wrote, drew, danced or sat still while they listened. Then, for the other half of the session, we turned to each other and shared what moved through us, without offering to fix or resolve anything.

Why listen to the news at all? It may seem like a counterintuitive ask of people who are already overwhelmed by news. But tuning out isn’t a neutral act for organizers. If we numb ourselves to avoid the pain, we also lose contact with the reality we’re trying to change. We lose sight of the people being harmed, the urgency and the stakes. Scrolling by yourself doesn’t help either; it keeps the nervous system braced without ever letting it process. 

But practices like Good Mourning offer a third option: Take in the news deliberately, in a bounded container, alongside others, with room for the body to respond. This helps us stay informed and connected to what’s happening without being flooded by it, and that connection is what fuels action.

“I started Good Mourning because I wanted to hold myself accountable to listening to the news, instead of giving in to the temptation to block it out completely,” Eva Orbuch, a community organizer and one of the founders of Good Mourning, told me recently. “It became so much more — a community, a creative practice, a way to take in the news mindfully, a place to recommit to what supports my own resilience and makes things a little better in the world.”

Talking about the news activates the same analytical mind that has been narrating the news to us all week. But moving the body or creating something, even just doodling, helps us use another part of the brain to process it. That’s the basic premise of expressive arts therapy: Grief and trauma often live below language, stored in the body as tension or bracing, and adding expressive arts to the practice of listening to the news helps us move through it.

Listening together also creates an opportunity to co-regulate communally. Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory describes how nervous systems calibrate against each other: Being near someone else in a state of relative safety can shift your own breathing and stress response toward theirs. A structured, repeated practice gives that calibration somewhere to happen, week after week.

“The practice helps me to compost whatever I’m holding, and to move through all the grief,” one participant said.

Making your own Good Mourning practice

This year, several of my friends contacted me before Oct. 7. “What could we possibly do this year? I’m tired of organizing events,” an organizer who has held dozens of peace vigils in the past year told me. 

“Why don’t we create our own space for collective mourning?” I offered. We can look at some of the stories, news and art from the day together. Make something of our own? 

She agreed. 

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Perhaps this is also a practice that can accompany you. Creating your own space for collective mourning doesn’t require much. Ideally, form a small group and commit to 30 minutes. Read the news to each other, or play it aloud, mixed with music, or anything that isn’t just more thinking. Invite people to pair the listening with something for the body, like movement, drawing or dancing. Then turn to each other and share your grief, without trying to resolve it, fix it or offer advice. At the end, share one way you will nourish yourself and others in this hard time, and wish each other well.

This simple act of witnessing your community in grief has been powerful for so many. Perhaps it can be a way for you and your community to move through mourning and keep on mobilizing.

This article To build stronger movements we need to grieve together was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Sunlight filtered through the trees separating the headquarters of the Plan and Budget Organization in Tehran as 300 teachers gathered outside to protest on Sept. 6. Their demands were simple: salaries that keep pace with inflation, fair pay scales and improved health and welfare services.

They knew they were taking an enormous risk. 

For years, educators across Iran have taken to the streets to demand fair wages, better working conditions, the release of detained teachers, the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free education for all children and to peaceful assembly and association. For years, they have faced arrests, enforced disappearances, prosecutions on national security charges, dismissals, imprisonment and solitary confinement. 

Teachers and teachers’ union activists played a prominent role in the January 2026 uprising, when people across the country called for freedom and an end to the Islamic Republic system of government. In response, they were heavily targeted. By July, at least 60 had been arrested, prosecuted or imprisoned. At least 14 have been killed. Still, against all odds, Iranian teachers have kept their movement alive.

The Iranian teachers’ movement is not organized through a single union. Local and provincial teachers’ associations operate across the country, while an umbrella network called the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations, or CCITTA, links many of them. The structure allows teachers to organize locally while coordinating actions across the country.

Some of these actions, like protests and public statements, are impossible to miss. Others are less confrontational and more relational: debating movement priorities, supporting imprisoned colleagues and their families, building solidarity with other social movements, or simply getting together to hike or read or watch a film. Together, they knit together a movement that has proven resilient against virtually every form of repression, from internet shutdowns to detentions and killings, while continuing to press its demands.

‘A continuation of my responsibility as a teacher’

Mohammad Habibi became a teacher in 2003. For him, it was never just a job; it felt like a social responsibility. But he soon realized that quality education for students could not be fully achieved without protecting teachers’ rights. So he joined the Iranian Teachers’ Trade Association and later took on several roles within the CCITTA. He is currently its spokesperson. 

“My trade union activism wasn’t separate from teaching,” he said. “I saw it as a continuation of my responsibility as a teacher. Teachers have a duty that goes beyond teaching textbooks. They must defend the right to education, student dignity, educational justice and freedom of thought.”

Like Habibi, the nine teachers interviewed for this story described demands that encompass both their own rights and those of their students. They want salaries and pensions that reflect the real cost of living, job security, meaningful participation in education policy, freedom of expression and association, and the release of their imprisoned colleagues.

But they’re also calling for free, high-quality and equitable public education for all children, regardless of ethnicity or gender, while opposing the privatization and commercialization of education.

For Esmaeil Abdi, the former general secretary of the Tehran Teachers’ Trade Association, who spent nearly nine years in prison for his activism, the fight against privatization is inseparable from the fight for equality. “If education becomes a commodity whose quality depends on a family’s economic ability, social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next,” he said.

Teachers also advocate for every child’s right to receive education in their mother tongue alongside Persian, arguing that Iran’s linguistic and cultural diversity should be reflected in its schools.

Over the years, the movement has won concessions on some of these demands, like pension increases, the implementation of the Teacher Ranking Law (specifying pay tiers) and corresponding salary increases, and a voice in the management of their retirement fund. However, even when policies change, implementation may be incomplete. 

“But the significance of this experience lies not only in the material results of these demands,” said Eskandar “Soran” Lotfi, a Kurdish teachers’ union activist and former CCITTA spokesperson. “It also shows that sustained and organized protests by teachers have succeeded in bringing issues that the government initially refused to accept into the sphere of public policymaking and decision-making.” 

Abdi shared a similar view: “Despite repression, the teachers’ movement has succeeded in keeping issues such as free public education, teachers’ rights and educational inequality at the center of public debate.”

While maintaining its organizational independence, the movement has built solidarity with workers, students and women’s rights activists. This has happened despite what Laeya Mohammadi, a teacher activist using a pseudonym for fear of reprisal, describes as the “government’s attempts to divide teachers from other movements, including by claiming teachers hold a higher social status than [other groups], like workers.” 

Much as they would later take part in the January 2026 protests, teachers participated in the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, in which hundreds of thousands protested the repressive government after the morality police killed 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. Four years later, that struggle still shapes the aspirations of teachers like Habibi, who hopes for a future in which female teachers and students are no longer compelled to obey the country’s veiling law and instead have full autonomy over choices as personal as what they wear.

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Teachers’ broader social commitments have also surfaced when their students are at risk. Beginning in late 2022, girls across Iran began reporting illnesses after suspected poisonings at schools, with cases eventually spreading across many cities and provinces. As the incidents continued amid conflicting official explanations and growing concern over students’ safety, the CCITTA called nationwide protests in March 2023. Teachers and parents demonstrated across the country. In some locations, security forces teargassed and arrested protesters.

Shadi Taban, a teacher who spoke under a pseudonym, was among those who participated. For her, the issue reflected a principle reaching well beyond teachers’ own working conditions.

“Our red line is the students,” she said.

That red line was crossed during the January 2026 uprisings when the government killed more than 200 schoolchildren. Teachers took it upon themselves to protest their students’ deaths and honor their memories through the “Empty Desks” campaign. Despite widespread internet shutdowns and the difficulty of accessing information, Iranian teachers were able to collect and share the names, photographs and stories of around 240 children who had lost their lives. 

Abdi believes that this record-building could one day help establish truth, accountability and redress for the state-committed abuses. “We see this as an important part of a future process of transitional justice,” he said. 

After the U.S. military struck a school in Minab in February 2026, killing 150 people, including 120 children, teachers launched another documentation campaign. Titled “Abandoned Backpacks,” it symbolized the children who never returned to school. 

But the significance of the campaigns transcends symbolism. “For us, these were also efforts aimed at seeking justice, preserving collective memory and defending children’s right to life and education,” Lotfi said. 

Social organizing and consensus-building 

One of the movement’s most fundamental structural challenges is that independent trade unions lack legal recognition in Iran. According to Lotfi, this creates obstacles before organizing even begins. Teachers cannot openly and formally recruit members or build a stable financial structure through membership dues to support research, education and organizing. Meetings and assemblies often occur only in private spaces.

The movement is therefore forced into a permanent contradiction: Much of its organizational work must happen informally, even as its demands are voiced publicly.

When those demands do become public, their spread encounters another barrier.

Pirouz Nami, who established the Teachers’ Trade Association of Khuzestan in 2012, said state-affiliated media often suppress teachers’ actual demands while portraying their activism as the product of foreign manipulation or hostile forces. “Within Iran, if any newspaper attempts to report the truth, it faces closure or prosecution,” Mohammadi explained. International coverage, Nami added, can create a different problem: sporadic attention that captures individual protests or arrests but misses the movement’s longer-term structures, relationships and organizing work.

In the face of such expansive challenges, teachers have developed an equally expansive repertoire of strategies. But those strategies remain peaceful, despite the repression and violence they are met with.  

“One cannot seek freedom, justice and human dignity through methods that violate those very values,” said Habibi, who has himself been arrested and beaten for protesting.

Teachers organize strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins and letter-writing campaigns; issue joint statements; document rights violations; and use social media to raise public awareness. One teacher, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, recalled more theatrical actions he had participated in. In one, teachers collectively burned payslips; in another, they built a coffin for the education system and carried it through the streets in a mock funeral procession.

The decision to take action at all is one that’s shaped collectively before anyone takes to the streets.

Several teachers described decision-making within the CCITTA as a democratic process built around discussion, consensus and majority voting. Lotfi said consensus is woven into organizing from the earliest stage. Before a demand becomes a slogan, teachers discuss, analyze and write about it. Workshops and longer discussion sessions may follow, with supporters and opponents debating the idea.

“This transforms a demand from a simple slogan into an issue that teachers … can collectively defend,” Lotfi said.

Opposition to the privatization and commodification of education, for example, was not always universally shared. But as Iran’s once all-public education system gradually shifted toward greater private-sector involvement, a small group of teacher activists began arguing that privatization was undermining the constitutional guarantee of free public education. They discussed the consequences of this trend through written materials, meetings and debate. Over time, the idea gained broader support. Today, opposition to privatization, as well as advocacy for free, public and equitable education, have become some of the movement’s central priorities. In fact, according to Habibi, “It is because of teachers’ protests that the privatization of public education has proceeded much more slowly than successive governments would have liked.” 

Alongside the demonstrations and strikes visible to the public and the state, teachers continually work to strengthen relationships within the movement. “Even activities that don’t seem directly related to our demands form a part of social organizing,” Lotfi said. Teachers meet online and in person. They organize hiking groups, walking groups, cultural programs and social gatherings. That work, Abdi said, helps build a movement that “doesn’t depend on one individual and preserves and reproduces its capacity to act, even under pressure.”

The trust created through those relationships can become crucial when repression strikes.

Solidarity with detained teachers

In May 2022, Lotfi was arrested when returning to his hometown, Marivan, ahead of a planned Teachers’ Day protest there.

“My tenant had informed my family beforehand about what was happening,” he recalled. “The security forces had surrounded my home. But I went back anyway because I had spent years working to create joint action, and didn’t want to miss that moment. I was arrested almost immediately after entering the city.”

State television later portrayed him negatively, including allegations that he had ties to “hostile countries,” which he says are unfounded. Authorities pointed to a friendly meeting between Lotfi and two French teacher trade unionists as evidence of those supposed connections.

His detention activated the networks he had spent years building.

Dozens of teachers demonstrated outside education offices and other government institutions. Teachers circulated statements and written appeals demanding his release. When Lotfi began a hunger strike to protest his detention and pressure to confess to ties with the French citizens, dozens of teachers began solidarity hunger strikes of their own. He was finally released on bail in August 2022, but was rearrested in October, during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. 

The wave of support he received was not unique to him.

Several teachers described a similar response whenever a colleague is detained or imprisoned: Associations issue public statements, raise awareness through social media and news outlets, and organize gatherings outside education offices and courthouses to pressure authorities for their colleagues’ release. Teachers also provide financial and emotional assistance to detainees’ families and try to secure legal support. The movement does not act alone. Habibi said volunteer lawyers, journalists and civil society activists have repeatedly stood alongside teachers, despite the consequences that solidarity can carry.

At the same time, teachers aligned with state authorities participate in what Lotfi described as mechanisms of control and repression. “They might spread rumors about activists, like portraying them as affiliated with foreign governments,” he said. The result can be fear and mistrust, discouraging even sympathetic teachers from publicly supporting detained colleagues.

For detained teachers, repression spills into the lives of their loved ones, who are left to absorb its emotional and material costs.

A teacher who requested anonymity because he is out on bail pending trial, described his wife being arrested alongside him this past spring, amid a broader crackdown on teachers’ union activists.

“Both my wife and I were beaten,” he said. “They blindfolded and handcuffed me and put me in a vehicle.”

During the two months he spent in detention, he said, a judicial officer threatened to reopen what he called “Glass Room No. 100.” The teacher described it as a place where protesters were raped with glass bottles — a form of sexual torture Amnesty International has independently documented against other detainees in Iran.

Like the other teachers interviewed, Nami endured years of threatening phone calls, surveillance at work and in the classroom, pay cuts, arrests, torture, solitary confinement and ultimately job dismissal. Watching his family endure the consequences alongside him, he said, doubled the weight. During Nami’s detentions, his wife had to manage the household and care for their eldest son, who has a severe physical disability, entirely on her own, while also living with rheumatism and diabetes.

Mohammadi testified about her detention experience to the women’s committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. She told them that when the Ministry of Intelligence summoned her, she went without informing her family. Security agents nevertheless tracked her children through her phone, causing them severe distress. After her arrest, authorities threatened her family against reporting her imprisonment to the media. 

“But on a social level, going to prison under this regime no longer carries a social stigma,” she said. “On the contrary, people wear it as a badge of honor, proud to have stood up against the state.”

Building strength under wartime conditions

Challenges intensify during internet shutdowns and periods of war, like Iran is experiencing now. Habibi said teachers struggle to communicate, share information and coordinate activities; even maintaining contact with the families of imprisoned colleagues becomes difficult.

The danger extends to communication devices themselves. Lotfi said authorities sometimes seize activists’ phones and computers during arrests and searches and later use information stored on them in judicial proceedings, making secure communication a constant concern.

Even under these conditions, public action has not disappeared entirely. 

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The Sept. 6 protest was one of the movement’s most recent public demonstrations, unfolding amid a broader wave of protests across the country that included actions by railway workers, nurses, unemployed youth and retirees over grievances like unpaid wages and the mishandling of pension funds.

But wartime conditions, intense repression and the imprisonment of many active organizers have forced teachers to retreat from frequent street demonstrations.

“We are trying to preserve our relationships and collective spirit through lower-risk activities happening across the country, such as group walks, hiking trips, film screenings, book discussions, and educational and cultural gatherings,” Habibi said. 

One such lower-risk activity is a screening of “When We Fight” (a documentary about the 2019 Los Angeles teachers’ strike), planned for World Teachers’ Day on Oct. 5, possibly followed by a virtual conversation between Iranian teachers and American educators featured in the film about organizing strategies and shared experiences.

The CCITTA continues to provide financial support to imprisoned teachers, who currently number 15 by Habibi’s count, although resources have been strained by the uptick in arrests since January 2026 and payments have become smaller. The fund cannot take international donations, due to the government’s sensitivity to connections outside the country, so it is financed by voluntary donations from teachers, who risk having their bank accounts frozen in retaliation. “Still, each time this happens, a new account is created, and teachers begin making donations again,” Habibi said.

The CCITTA is also continuing its Empty Desks project. And as schools reopen, teachers, including Taban, are campaigning for the reinstatement of colleagues who were dismissed for their protest activity. In late September, teachers, parents and civil society activists launched a petition demanding the reinstatement of all dismissed teachers, rallying in particular around Kurdish teacher-activists Majid Karimi and Ghias Nemati. The two had briefly returned to their classrooms after a higher administrative body overturned earlier decisions barring them from service, only for education authorities to impose new penalties that again removed them from teaching. 

“Although our methods might change because of the circumstances, our commitment to defending teachers’ rights, public education and civil society remains unchanged,” Habibi said.

This article Iran’s teachers movement perseveres against all odds was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

What if one of the most consequential political effects of Sudan’s war is not simply that the state collapsed, but that millions of people were forced to discover what society could organize without it?

In Sudan, that discovery did not begin with a political declaration. In many places, it began with food.

Khalid, a young man who had been involved in Sudan’s resistance committees during the revolution, was among those who remained in his city after many residents fled. Some of those who left already knew him and the other young people who stayed. They had organized things together before the war. Years of working together had created a kind of trust that would become critical once the institutions around them disappeared.

The displaced suggested that they start a community kitchen, or takiyya (a Sudanese community kitchen where volunteers prepare and distribute free meals), to feed those who remained.

The first donations came through WhatsApp groups. Sudanese living outside the city transferred money through Bankak (a mobile banking service that allows users to transfer money and make payments electronically). Khalid bought sacks of broad beans, oil and charcoal. He went to mosques to recruit volunteers, while others used Facebook and WhatsApp to invite young people to join.

They cooked and distributed food every day. Then the work expanded.

Some families could not safely leave their homes. Women and girls faced particular risks moving through the streets, while elderly people often could not walk to the kitchen. Khalid and other volunteers began collecting their requests, buying what they needed and delivering it to their homes.

Relatives abroad would transfer money into the volunteers’ accounts. The volunteers would withdraw it as cash and deliver it to the families.

No institution had appointed Khalid to do any of this. There was no formal organizational chart, no contracts defining responsibilities, no salaries and no legal agreement governing the network.

But that did not mean there was no organization. People knew who could do what.

Responsibilities were distributed according to professional skills, geographic proximity, availability and urgency. Older volunteers carried particular authority because they had accumulated experience; younger volunteers learned from them.

The arrangement was informal. But it was not unorganized.

Emergency Response Rooms (locally organized civilian networks that coordinate emergency food, health care, evacuation and other essential services) and other civilian networks in Sudan are often described in humanitarian language: communities feeding communities, transporting medicine, evacuating the wounded and filling gaps left by the collapse of public services and the difficulty of international organizations reaching people.

That description is accurate, but it does not tell the whole story.

The more consequential question is: What did people learn while doing all of this?

They learned how to mobilize resources without an institution behind them. How to decide which needs were most urgent. How to match people to tasks. How to negotiate movement through territories controlled by different armed actors. How to manage disagreements without allowing them to destroy the network. How to move money and information across front lines. And how to transfer knowledge to someone else before the person who possessed it was killed, arrested or forced to flee.

Survival became a school of organization. But this school did not begin from nothing.

Before the war

Sudan already had traditions of collective action, including nafeer (a Sudanese tradition of collective voluntary labor in which people mobilize together around a shared need). The resistance committees (decentralized, neighborhood-based civilian groups that became a major force in Sudan’s 2018–19 revolution) that emerged during the revolution also developed forms of neighborhood-level organization based on trust, horizontal coordination and collective action.

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After the revolution, parts of this infrastructure evolved into Change and Services Committees (local community bodies that organized basic services and neighborhood affairs), which in different areas organized aspects of everyday life, from bakeries and cooking gas to other local services. These were organized bodies. In some places, they had defined responsibilities, documents and official stamps. Their members accumulated practical knowledge about managing the affairs of their communities.

So when war came, civilians did not begin from zero.

There was already an infrastructure that had learned how to turn political trust into everyday administration.

The experience of Gezira State reveals something even more striking.

When the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, a powerful paramilitary force that the U.N. and U.S. found has committed acts of genocide, took control of Gezira on Dec. 18, 2023, local government effectively disappeared from areas under their control. Less than a month later, on Jan. 16, 2024, the governor of Gezira issued Decision No. 1 of 2024, dissolving all Change and Services Committees in villages, neighborhoods, rural settlements, markets and industrial areas.

The decision did more than dissolve them. It instructed local executive officials to inventory and take possession of the committees’ fixed and movable assets, documents, property and official stamps, and to freeze their bank accounts until new caretaker committees could be formed.

There was something revealing about that detail: Even the stamps were part of the authority the state wanted to reclaim.

But the committees that the governor had ordered dissolved were still on the ground, while the authority issuing the order was absent.

The committees’ response, in essence, was a simple question: If you have dissolved us, come into the state you left and take the stamps from us.

Six days later, on Jan. 22, the Fifth Infantry Division command of the Rapid Support Forces issued its own decision, stating that it was “renewing confidence” in the Change and Services Committees and instructing them to continue performing their duties toward citizens across the state’s localities, neighborhoods and villages.

The contradiction could hardly have been clearer.

The state, absent from the territory, ordered the civilian bodies operating there to disappear. The armed force that controlled the territory found itself facing an existing civilian infrastructure performing functions that military control alone could not perform.

An armed force can enter a city and declare control within hours. It does not automatically know who needs medicine, who has the key to the bakery, who can operate a water station, which families need assistance, or who can safely move between neighborhoods.

Here it becomes apparent that controlling territory militarily is not the same as possessing the knowledge required to govern life within it.

The Change and Services Committees were not just a humanitarian response that emerged when the war began. Before the war, they had already accumulated experience organizing everyday services. What looked during the war like the sudden emergence of civilian networks was, in many places, a shift from one function to another: from organizing bread, gas and local services during the revolutionary period to organizing food, water, medicine and evacuation during war.

The infrastructure did not disappear when the state did. The mission changed.

The experience of a group of water engineers led by a man named Bakri illustrates the difference.

At the beginning of the war, the group tried to keep existing water stations operating. But as the fighting continued, fuel and spare parts became harder to obtain, while insecurity made maintaining centralized infrastructure increasingly difficult. So they improvised.

They organized ways to bring water directly from the Nile, sometimes using donkey carts carrying large barrels. They located wells that had been abandoned for years and organized their reopening. When some families could not collect water themselves, volunteers delivered it to them.

Teachers did something similar. A group led by Saif began operating schools at limited capacity after the war dragged on and children’s behavior became increasingly aggressive and distressed.

They were not trying to restore a normal academic year or guarantee promotion from one grade to another.

They were creating child-friendly spaces where children could learn, play and recover some sense of routine, while reducing the educational and psychological damage of prolonged war.

The same pattern appeared in medicine, evacuation and information.

Volunteers who had never received formal emergency-response training learned how to respond to airstrikes and artillery fire, how to protect women and children, how to organize safe departures, and how to move patients whose required treatment was unavailable in conflict areas.

Some became known to armed groups because their work required repeated negotiation with them. Sometimes that familiarity helped them pass checkpoints or move patients with fewer risks.

When neutrality becomes suspicion

But that knowledge created another danger. The more successfully civilian networks kept life going, the harder it became for armed actors to regard them as non-political.

In one town in Gezira, a group of young women working in medicine faced precisely this dilemma after the RSF took control and the hospital closed. They managed to enter the hospital and remove laboratory equipment, medicines and other essential supplies. They then began treating patients in secret.

They feared being forced to treat RSF fighters. But they also feared what would happen if the army returned and interpreted that treatment as evidence of collaboration with the RSF.

They continued working secretly for months. Eventually they were discovered and arrested, before being released after it became clear that they did not represent a political or military threat.

Their experience reveals a central contradiction of civilian life during war: You can decide to serve everyone. You cannot decide how an armed actor will interpret that service.

A surgeon I interviewed in Gezira lived through the same contradiction in a more brutal form. She was trying to keep medical care available to civilians. She treated everyone, including wounded RSF fighters.

According to her account to me, RSF members assaulted her inside the hospital after one of the fighters she had operated on died. Her 13-year-old daughter was then sexually assaulted.

She did not tell me what happened simply as a personal story. She was warning me to leave.

I was in Gezira myself during this period. I was among those working to keep hospitals functioning and civilian services going. I saw how quickly humanitarian work could be viewed as politically motivated.

This is where the language of humanitarian neutrality reaches its limits. In a war in which each side seeks not only to control territory but also to define the meaning of every action within it, even neutrality can acquire political meaning.

The problem is deeper than civilians being trapped between two armed forces. The war itself can appropriate the meaning of civilian action.

A doctor treats a wounded person because the person is sick. A fighter sees assistance to the enemy.

A network moves a family because the family is in danger. An armed actor sees suspicious movement.

The space between humanitarian action and political action becomes so narrow that separating the two can become almost impossible.

Knowledge that survives

And yet the networks continued to grow.

New volunteers joined. Donations from Sudanese abroad continued. International organizations provided limited support in some areas. In parts of Gezira, volunteers running medical facilities sometimes coordinated with Médecins Sans Frontières.

But the most important development was less visible. The networks began reproducing knowledge. The older generation knew they might not survive. Volunteers were being killed, arrested and displaced. So those with experience began teaching younger people what they knew.

This was more than training. It was a relationship of respect, mentorship and apprenticeship. And the reason was practical and brutal: If one person died, their knowledge should not die with them.

This changed the nature of the networks. A volunteer who distributes food to a neighborhood is practicing mutual aid.

But a network that can replace that volunteer, transfer the knowledge required to continue the work and survive the disappearance of its original organizers is demonstrating something closer to institutional capacity.

It is not an institution. But it is a capacity.

That distinction matters because we usually recognize institutions through their visible forms: offices, regulations, budgets, job titles, salaries and chains of command.

But perhaps institutions begin before all of those things. They begin when knowledge becomes transferable. When responsibilities can be redistributed. When a collective practice can survive the disappearance of the person who started it. When people know what to do without waiting for someone to tell them.

This is also why it is difficult to describe these networks simply as temporary substitutes filling a vacuum until the state returns.

The vacuum itself changed the society inside it.

People who entered the war knowing how to organize a neighborhood learned how to manage networks stretched across displacement, fear and military control.

The volunteer who began by distributing food learned, over time, how to manage money, information, risk and relationships with armed actors.

The doctor who opened a hospital door had to think about security, neutrality and evacuation, not only medicine.

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Even disagreements within networks became part of the learning: how to disagree without breaking the network, and how to place people’s immediate safety above personal conflict.

The war was not building institutions in the conventional sense. It was building people who knew how to create organization under pressure.

The limits of resilience

But the answer cannot be romantic. These networks cannot replace the state.

They can distribute food and medicine, restore access to water, organize emergency medical care and create educational spaces. They cannot indefinitely operate a national electricity grid, maintain complex pharmaceutical supply chains or guarantee public safety.

Nor are they equal.

Some neighborhoods have doctors, engineers and strong diaspora networks. Others have far fewer resources. Funding can run out. Volunteers can burn out. International support can bring bureaucratic requirements that alter the character of informal work.

These networks are therefore not proof that the state is unnecessary. They are proof that state capacity and social capacity are not the same thing. And that distinction becomes even more important when military control changes.

In areas retaken by the army, some volunteers fled. Others were arrested or killed after being accused of collaborating with the RSF. Sometimes the basis for suspicion was simply that they had continued providing services while the RSF controlled the area.

The same act that had once been an act of survival could acquire an entirely different political meaning when the person at the checkpoint changed.

Yet the practices themselves did not necessarily disappear.

The takiyyas continued, often under different people. The faces changed because the people who had built the networks had been killed, imprisoned or displaced. But the practice survived.

This may be the most politically revealing fact about Sudan’s civilian networks during the war.

The war did not simply create a vacuum where the state had been. It forced people to learn what could be organized inside that vacuum.

They learned from those they trusted. They learned how to distribute scarce resources. They learned how to negotiate with armed actors without becoming armed themselves. They learned how to make collective decisions without formal authority. They learned how to teach someone else before they disappeared.

And perhaps they learned something more important than any service they provided: The capacity to organize collective life does not always come from the center.

For decades, the state was treated as the basic infrastructure that made public life possible.

The war shattered that assumption in places where the state could no longer provide food, water, health care, education or security.

People did not respond because they had decided to build an alternative political system. They responded because someone had to cook. Someone had to find water. Someone had to treat the wounded. Someone had to get children off the streets. Someone had to negotiate passage.

But repeated acts of necessity accumulated into something larger than necessity. They accumulated political knowledge.

And this is why rebuilding Sudan after the war cannot simply mean restoring the institutions that stopped working.

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Sudan will need public institutions capable of functioning. No volunteer network can replace the state indefinitely, and asking it to do so would only turn another form of resilience into another form of abandonment.

But rebuilding the state without recognizing what society learned in its absence would be another kind of failure.

The question is not whether takiyyas should become ministries, or whether Emergency Response Rooms should become permanent government agencies.

The question is whether the people who learned to organize life without formal authority will be treated merely as beneficiaries of reconstruction — or as people who acquired something the postwar state urgently needs.

Because the most important legacy of these networks may not be the meals they served, the wells they reopened or the patients they treated. It may be the knowledge that accumulated among them: That authority can be exercised without office. That responsibility can be distributed without bureaucracy. That trust can function as infrastructure. That institutions can disappear without the capacity of society to act disappearing with them.

The people who built these networks were not trying to design a new political system. They were trying to survive.

But wars can produce political knowledge without anyone intending to produce it.

And perhaps the central question facing Sudan after the war is not simply whether the state can return to the places from which it disappeared.

It is whether it can return without pretending that the society waiting for it is the same society that existed before it left.

Perhaps the task after the war is not to return society to the state that existed before the war, but to rebuild the state around the knowledge that society was forced to produce when the state was gone.

This article How the war in Sudan is teaching society to govern without the state was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Climate activists engaged in nonviolent direct action are used to the rinse and repeat of arrest: handcuffs, short trip to jail, a misdemeanor charge and then release to friends for a post-action pizza dinner. Show up at court a few weeks later for a brief arraignment and wait for the case to be dismissed. Low drama.

That’s changed under Trump. From the Declare Emergency activists charged with felonies (for applying washable paint to the protective case around a Degas sculpture) to the Extinction Rebellion activists under investigation by an FBI terrorism task force (for undisclosed reasons), activists can no longer depend on walking away unscathed from direct actions. Multiple states have passed anti-protest laws since Trump was elected, increasing penalties imposed on activists. Grassroots action has a higher cost now. 

Simultaneously, with the gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act and its attendant tax credits for clean energy investment, the federal path to climate action is blocked. And local wins, while important, cannot surmount the incredible rollbacks happening at the federal level, as Sunrise Movement Executive Director Aru Shiney-Ajay recently pointed out. 

Indeed, the U.S. climate movement is in deep trouble. If all that weren’t enough, the climate crisis is no longer top of mind for many on the left, especially with the rising authoritarian threat and the focus on affordability. With civil disobedience demanding greater risk, traditional policy advocacy for climate action at the federal level closed off and public attention turned elsewhere, what tactics do we in the climate movement have left?

What’s left is deep engagement with the labor movement — its members and its tactics. 

Organized labor has a broad base, a track record of major wins and the power to shut down the economy. And make no mistake: Economic leverage is a necessary ingredient in the struggle to bring down companies as profitable as those in the fossil fuel industry. 

Climate activists have relied heavily on tactics of protest and persuasion (see Gene Sharp’s categories), underinvesting in tactics of economic noncooperation. While the environmental movement has a history of consumer boycotts, there have been fewer instances of work stoppages or rent strikes. The climate groups that do engage in symbolic work and school stoppages (most famously, Fridays for the Future), have mostly been confined to students and are largely to make a political statement rather than a strategic attempt to gain concrete concessions from a specific target. 

Strategically aligning workers with a rapid energy transition not only broadens the coalition needed to win durable policy victories, but builds power with a movement versed in strikes, walkouts, slowdowns and other forms of economic disruption. (Not to mention a bevy of tools like community benefit agreements and co-enforcement to promote follow-through on corporate environmental promises.)

Labor-climate alliances go back decades (see Blue Green Alliance, Climate Jobs National Resource Center and Labor Network for Sustainability), and unions have long advocated for a just transition that supports workers employed in polluting industries. But in the current political environment, we need these relationships to be stronger than ever.  

One major opportunity for the climate movement is the May Day Strong coalition, which brings labor and community groups together to organize mass strikes and make big demands for systemic change. The coalition’s demands don’t yet include climate, but the climate movement can still organize with them to learn nonparticipation tactics and build solidarity toward a broad base that sees climate, anti-authoritarianism and affordability as one united fight. 

Lessons from labor 

Think about the situation at your job. Workplaces are pretty authoritarian: the leader doesn’t care much for the input of the people on the shop floor, and what the leader says goes. If someone gets hurt, let the government step in to help them. As unions teach us, for a group of workers to extract real concessions from a profit-maximizing boss requires building enough power among workers to shut the workplace down (or at least threaten to do so). 

The same dynamic is true of the fossil fuel regime and the general public. The fact is that fossil fuel companies operate with little accountability to the public they endanger through their greed, harming the many for the enrichment of the few. By thinking of them as essentially authoritarian, we can focus on how to weaken their pillars of support so as to bring about their collapse (per Gene Sharp). In the face of fossil fuel oligarchs who operate without checks and balances, a worker-inclusive climate movement capable of strategic noncooperation offers the most viable path to transformative change in the current political landscape. 

Pillars to target might include shareholders, frontline workers, the regulatory landscape, physical infrastructure and institutional investors. Some of this can be done in direct partnership with unions and workers (which I’ll explore more in another piece). Concentrating on a specific choke point like port logistics or oil refining can paralyze supply chains, amplifying our impact. Sectoral strikes within these industries are also powerful, making building common cause with their workers paramount. Strikes by public-sector workers like teachers also carry a heavy punch (though they are only legal in about a dozen states and typically only when a contract has expired). 

Identifying the demand, as well as the target, is key to such acts of noncooperation. Strikes targeting companies can include demands for corporate investment in public infrastructure, on-the-job retraining, environmental audits or electrification of the supply chain. Strikes by municipal workers can include demands to divest pensions from fossil fuel companies, electrify public transit, retrofit publicly owned properties, pass heat safety mandates or clarify protocols for workers responding to climate disasters. Some of this is already happening through existing climate-labor alliances. Winning more campaigns like these would weaken the fossil fuel regime’s pillars of support by targeting the physical infrastructure, financial systems and legal regulations that enable it to continue wrecking the planet.

In addition to weakening the pillars of support, other indicators of a campaign’s success include increasing popular engagement and enhancing the capacity of the movement to escalate further (by bringing in more organizers, developing replicable tactics, etc.). The tactic of economic noncooperation can deliver all three.

But if we are serious about making a real dent in emissions, we need to target the federal government. The fossil fuel industry is so profitable and so powerful that it will likely require a major policy intervention to curb its rapacious behavior. The Inflation Reduction Act was a step in the right direction, but our movement was unprepared to exert the leverage needed to protect it from an unfriendly administration. That kind of leverage comes from bringing the economy to a standstill. 

Almost all of us are workers (and customers, renters, borrowers, etc.), and all of us rely on a functioning planet to live. So what would happen if we simultaneously stopped? Didn’t show up at work for a few days, and didn’t buy anything? This would take massive preparation and coordination of course, but the impact would grind the economy to a halt. No bus drivers, no teachers, no bank tellers, nothing being built or sold. This is what is known as a social strike –— a mass action by an entire population.

Carbon emissions might briefly drop, but the impact of a strike reaches beyond a single day. The United Auto Workers’ use of the “rolling strike” to win big concessions from the nation’s three largest automakers shows the power a movement wields when it can credibly threaten to strike anywhere, at any time, in enormous numbers. Just as runaway capitalism caused the climate crisis, it has also constructed an economy that would be hobbled by mass work stoppages and consumer boycotts. 

This is a tall order, to be sure. Even the labor movement’s use of work stoppages has declined over the past 40 to 50 years due to national policy change, employer opposition campaigns, the collapse of union membership and deindustrialization. But recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in unions, increased organizing and heightened class consciousness — suggesting a renewed opening for organizing workers and showcasing their power. 

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And the climate movement has turned out en masse in the past; by some estimates, the 2014 People’s Climate March turned out 400,000 people. Imagine the number that will turn out after a historic El Niño cycle and four years of federal incompetence. Now imagine if that number of people — rather than flying to New York City and marching — all stayed home for a week. No shopping, no selling, no driving, no working. 

Social strikes are rare and tough to pull off, but we saw a stirring example of their power in Minnesota this year. Roughly 25 percent of voters in the state either participated in the day-long strike or had a loved one who did. 

For community members and workers across industries to participate in a nationwide social strike would take years of organizing. That’s why we need to start planning now. 

The power of relationships

To engage broader swaths of the population, we need to build a bigger tent. Here the labor movement provides valuable wisdom. A helpful distinction that organizers often make is between our base and our allies. Our base shares our values but not necessarily every demand, while our allies share a specific demand but not necessarily all our values. 

The climate movement’s base is made up of environmental activists, while our allies come from a wide variety of backgrounds including faith communities, student groups, human rights activists, lawyers, Indigenous groups, politicians, scientists, renewable energy companies and more. Anyone may have kids in public schools that are struggling with rising utility costs; they may rent an apartment in a complex with crumbling infrastructure; they may be part of a religious community that emphasizes responsibility for creation; they may be active with a political party that values outdoor recreation and fiscal responsibility. 

These identities and memberships are valuable when we recognize that we do not need to agree on every issue in order to share some common self-interest and cooperate on a specific campaign. What enables us to continue to take coordinated action with our allies is a commitment to continued relationship building rather than shutting each other down for divergencies in viewpoints. Here climate can take a page from Saul Alinsky, who advocated for sidestepping ideological landmines and focusing on concrete issues that make a difference to real peoples’ lives. 

In the current political climate, organizing based on shared self-interest is the only way forward. Families are struggling to pay the bills, and calls to deprioritize climate messaging in favor of an affordability frame are mounting. (Even Democrats are engaged in “climate hushing.”) We need a coalition broad enough to fight for both a living wage and a livable planet. Relational organizing based in self-interest is the way to build that. In his book “People, Power, Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal,” Marshall Ganz explains that “relationships grow out of the realization of mutual benefit, the creation of shared value, and the commitment to a shared future.” Organizing to save our planet checks all three boxes. 

In a labor campaign, relational organizing relies on the identification of organic leaders, training the leaders to recruit other workers, the workers agreeing on issues and then engaging in increasingly challenging structure tests — smaller actions that build organization and faith in each other. The bonds built between the workers through these tests are the basis for future organizing. In her book “No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age,” Jane McAlevey spoke to the interaction between risky actions and building strong relationships. “[F]or workers to win substantial gains, the strike weapon is essential. … Transformational experiences come through high-risk collective action,” she wrote. Those transformational experiences tighten the bonds holding the group together and facilitate political education.

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Relationship building is also important for climate groups. Organizations like the Sunrise Movement or Fridays for the Future rely heavily on peer-to-peer organizing and one-on-one conversations. Incoming activists are given real responsibilities and opportunities to guide campaigns. And campaigns against specific pipelines or other pieces of fossil fuel infrastructure tap into preexisting community networks (like neighborhood groups, Indigenous communities and faith congregations), growing stronger by building alignment around a common demand. 

What the climate movement needs now is to expand those networks to include communities that we may not see as natural partners. These diverse coalitions are prominent in local struggles against data centers that engage disparate groups such as farmers, parents, IT professionals, local businesses, sports clubs and more. We need to make sure they include workers across sectors, too. 

The fulcrum

The ramp-up to May Day 2028 offers a prime opportunity for the climate movement to build powerful relationships with labor groups, while at the same time engaging in structure tests toward a social strike making climate demands upon the federal government.

After the United Auto Workers, or UAW, won their successful September 2023 sit-down strike (winning wage increases, job security and the inclusion of electric vehicle plants into existing contracts), they began building for more. The union called for locals across different sectors and unions to strategically align their contracts to expire on April 30, 2028, so workers can strike on May Day, the international worker’s day (rather than run the risk of an unauthorized “wildcat” strike). When different unions align their contracts in this way, they have more leverage than if one union acted alone. The May Day 2028 demands are not yet set, and the UAW’s goal is broad: “to create a crisis for the billionaire class to win more for all of us.”

Given low union density, even 2028 contract alignments by the UAW (and possibly the American Federation of Teachers and other unions) would have limited impact without community support. Even if some workers couldn’t walk off the job in a general strike (such as those covered by a current contract, precariously employed or unable to afford taking time off), they could still participate by not buying anything, calling in sick, engaging in a slowdown, working to rule, showing up to picket lines or rallies while off work, supporting striking workers with donations or sharing strike demands on social media. 

That’s the idea behind May Day Strong — a labor-community coalition that deploys economic noncooperation to demand taxing the rich, protecting the vote, reining in ICE and expanding democracy. May Day Strong explicitly organizes community members who do not belong to unions, thereby building a broader community-labor coalition. On May Day 2026, they coordinated one of the most widespread May 1 actions in U.S. history. Right now, they’re focused on solidarity schools and local actions, like support for an Indiana community that lost power during a series of storms due to the local utility company’s alleged malfeasance. Ultimately, they are ramping up to a nationwide action on May Day 2028. 

The coalition includes many climate groups, like Climate Defenders, Extinction Rebellion, the Climate Museum, the Sunrise Movement, and more. But the coalition’s affordability agenda contains not a single mention of climate change. Given the presence of climate organizations in the coalition, that could change, depending on the power that climate-focused coalition members bring to the table. 

Regardless, May Day Strong represents an opportunity for the climate movement to engage in deep relationship building, both with union and nonunion workers, and to build strike-ready capacity. It offers a chance for the climate movement to stand in solidarity with unions and with working people, in a show of good faith. If the climate movement shows up for organized labor in 2028 — and the year and a half of organizing that precedes it — strong relationships will be built.

That means participating in structure tests so the strike muscle is strong and practiced when the time comes to use it. Climate activists should commit to deeper engagement with May Day Strong, attending trainings, turning out for May Day and Labor Day actions and advocating for the inclusion of climate demands in the platform. Climate activists should also show up for workers anywhere they are on the picket line, finding common cause against the billionaire elite who threaten us all. 

None of this is to suggest that the climate movement should stop organizing for local climate policies. Local decarbonization and climate resiliency remain key battlegrounds. But in the face of overt hostility to national climate policies that encourage job growth while protecting our planet, we must also expand our tactics.  

Noncooperation has been underleveraged in the climate movement, and we now have a chance to learn the tactic from organized labor while expanding our base. The time is ripe for these efforts. Broad coalitions are being built to oppose the authoritarian takeover, but the climate movement has found itself on the periphery. Despite the urgency of threats to our democracy, we cannot overlook the escalating threat to our planet. Engaging more deeply with May Day Strong allows the climate movement to drive home how the pillaging of our planet goes hand in hand with efforts to squash dissent and dismantle democracy. The climate movement cannot afford to wait until other threats are resolved. When the next “natural” disaster inevitably comes, the climate movement needs to be strike ready. 

Where we go from here

By using May Day 2028 as a structure test, the climate movement can build capacity for a later date of climate noncooperation. Possible demands might include asking the president to declare a climate emergency or pass an executive order reinstating certain Inflation Reduction Act provisions. The important thing is to make a clear demand that can feasibly be granted by the specific target; in Minnesota, it was simple: “ICE out.” 

Significantly, this tactic could be effective regardless of the party in power. The concepts of the pillars of support and Erica Chenoweth’s rule of 3.5 percent (the principle that movements have historically succeeded when they engage 3.5 percent of the population in sustained nonviolent action), both come from the literature on civil resistance to authoritarianism, so they do not depend on a functioning democracy. Furthermore, both parties rely on the economy functioning normally and would face significant public pressure if essential workers like teachers and janitors stayed home. Economic noncooperation — including, but not limited to strikes — has the benefit of being legal (for workers not covered by a contract with a no-strike clause). And if the climate movement keeps showing up for our allies in labor, we signal to all presidential candidates in 2028 that we will not be hushed. 

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Even in this time of movement winter, climate activists don’t have the luxury of despair. With heightened danger from climate chaos and increased political hostility towards climate activists, the stakes have never been higher for our movement and our planet. 

But there is opportunity here, too. 

With the upsurge of interest in unions, increased organizing, the narrative focus on affordability, historic polarization and heightened class consciousness, the public is ready to be organized as never before. By organizing workers across sectors and engaging in economic noncooperation, we weaken the political and financial pillars of support for the fossil fuel regime, thereby hastening its eventual collapse. That moment can’t come soon enough.

This article What the climate movement can learn from organized labor was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The ophthalmologist said he was going to touch my eyeball, then tilted my exam chair back in the darkness. I felt my body brace as movie torture scenes flashed through my mind. I noticed that I wasn’t breathing, so I practiced inhaling through my nose, and exhaling as steadily as I could for the rest of the exam.

Noticing our bodies and breathing intentionally may sound simple, but they are two of the practices that can keep us grounded when we are navigating scary or upsetting situations. As we approach a midterm election marred by threats of violence, I am practicing these skills as often as possible, not to suppress my feelings, but to be aware of how they are affecting me, so I can make conscious choices. 

Why staying grounded matters

The forces of authoritarianism want us to feel knocked off center by the many ways they are trying to keep people from voting. Trump administration officials continue to suggest that ICE, FBI or other federal agents could be sent to polling places. It’s important that election volunteers and voters stay grounded to avoid playing into their hands. One danger is that fearful voters will just stay home, whether or not the administration carries out their threats. Another danger is that we resist any government interference in ways that increase the chaos, which Trump would use to bolster his narrative that the left is the real threat.

Many national and local groups are hosting trainings to prepare people to protect our vote calmly and nonviolently. A widely used tool is the “Election Defense Scenarios” guide, which sketches out 18 possible threats and what people can do about them. Author Daniel Hunter writes, “One of the clearest lessons from every scenario in this guide — and from democratic movements around the world — is this: Illegal and unjust orders only work if people comply with them.” He notes that a more subtle theme of the guide is handling fear. For example, those volunteering at the polls should make sure we do not become “vectors of fear” by spreading unfounded rumors.

I learned the danger of rumors in 2020. Weeks before the presidential election, my friend Ingrid Lakey heard that the neo-fascist Proud Boys were coming to a park near her home in Philadelphia. Despite growing up as George Lakey’s daughter, and years of training for nonviolent direct action with Earth Quaker Action Team, or EQAT, Ingrid did not feel prepared to de-escalate armed militants if they wanted to stir up trouble. Neither did I, though given the times, we both wanted to increase our ability to handle scary situations. With two other friends from EQAT, we decided to show up, not to intervene, but to see what we could learn. 

We met early for a few minutes of silent Quaker worship and named our intention to observe what happened, including inside ourselves. We walked to the park early and watched hundreds of people arrive, none wearing MAGA hats. When the crowd’s energy became frenzied, we asked people nearby what was happening and were told there was a Proud Boy with a bat. Later we heard it was a hockey stick, or maybe a gun. 

The four EQAT members helped each other to assess what was actually happening rather than get caught up in the fearful energy. In the end, the Proud Boys never actually showed up, but the rumor of their presence led a small crowd to chase a man into his car. Within a few days, a video of his window being smashed got millions of views on conservative social media.

If a similar video emerges this election season, there is no doubt that Trump and the media that support him would use it to claim that leftists are the true threat to the vote, distracting from his many efforts to stop people from voting. Even if armed agents do show up near polling places, managing our fear will help us choose responses that will aid us both in court and in the court of public opinion. 

If Election Day turns out to be relatively uneventful — if our fear was the point, and the armed men never show — preparing ourselves for the worst-case scenarios will build nonviolence skills and relationships between organizations. Both will be important in the work ahead, no matter who wins the midterms.    

We have more experience than we realize

The good news is that many more Americans have learned the value of nonviolent discipline in recent years. Even before people were moved by the successful nonviolent resistance in Minnesota in January, Trump’s second term motivated newly activated people to undergo training in both resistance strategies and de-escalation tactics to help large marches stay grounded and on message. 

EQAT has played a role in the Philadelphia area serving as peacekeepers (also known as marshals or a safety team, depending on the group) and training more people to take that role. Knowing that “stay calm” is the first step in any situation, our trainings always include grounding practices, such as breathing, humming or singing together. In-person roleplays enable people to practice holding their center in ways that online trainings can’t replicate.

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Timely lessons for keeping people safe in the streets 

I’ve seen this training pay off. At a Philadelphia No Kings march, one of our peacekeepers saw a marcher knock the red hat off of a Trump supporter who was trying to film himself arguing with the crowd. Our peacekeeper stationed himself by the provocateur and told protesters walking by, “Don’t take the bait.” The Trump supporter continued to try to draw a reaction, but other peacekeepers joined the first one, preventing the clickbait confrontation he clearly wanted.

While people this year are most worried about encountering armed agents at the polls, it’s important to remember that it’s not always outsiders who need de-escalation. An argument broke out at the front of a different No Kings march just before it was due to begin. A local march leader was angry at a man with a very large Palestinian flag that was flapping in the wind and hitting some participants in the face. A nearby marshal physically separated the two men, then spoke to each individually, calming them down so a solution could be found. The Palestinian flag remained visible near the front, but positioned so it wasn’t in anyone’s face. Incidentally, the marshal was the mother of two teenagers, and her day job is teaching neurodivergent children.

I find it helpful to remind people that they probably have skills from work or family life that are useful in dealing with conflict. This builds confidence, which also reduces fear. In the nonviolence trainings I’ve been offering, I often ask participants to get in small groups and share a time when they navigated a scary situation and kept their cool, paying attention to what helped them. Together we create a “fear toolbox” on newsprint to help us remember what works for us in a pinch.

Sometimes hard experiences teach us the most. When I was lead marshal for a march in early 2017, a man with a long robe, long hair and a beard inserted himself in front of local justice leaders holding the lead banner, just before the march was about to start. First, I calmly asked him to move behind the banner. He repeatedly refused. When I learned that “Philly Jesus,” as he’s known, had a history of this sort of thing, I asked other marshals to help, to no avail. The march started anyway, and our attempt to encircle the interloper so the marchers could pass him only escalated the conflict. Some marchers yelled that we should physically remove Philly Jesus, while others criticized us for surrounding a mentally ill person who was holding a thick walking stick, which in hindsight was not a smart choice.

The turning point came when I realized how dysregulated I was, stressed to a degree that was making me ineffective. First, I took a deep breath. That simple step allowed me to acknowledge that I needed to call in the action lead, a well-known pastor whom I had worked with before. I explained the situation to Rev. Gregory Holston, and he strode to the front of the march. After reassuring those most upset by Philly Jesus’ presence, the tall reverend began walking beside the robed figure, transforming the scene. Suddenly it looked like Jesus was accompanying the pastor instead of stealing the show.

When the march was over, I was still feeling unsettled, so I asked Ingrid Lakey, who had been at the back of the march, to lead a debrief for the marshals. She invited us to get in touch with how we were feeling, then led a discussion about what had happened, including what had eventually worked. That debrief cemented three learnings that I have recalled many times since: Remember to breathe; don’t be afraid to ask for help; and always debrief with friends to name what you learned.

Assessing and reducing risk

There is a difference between anxious energy, which makes it hard to think straight, and fear that is a response to real risk. Staying grounded can help us assess which is which and choose a response that feels appropriate for the situation.

Not long ago, I supported a nonviolent direct action where participants briefly trespassed on federal property, which has become more risky during the second Trump administration. After the protesters finished their action and crossed the street, a Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, vehicle sped around the corner and spun around like a stunt driver in an action movie. The agent jumped out to face the protesters with aggressive body language and an accusatory tone of voice. 

I’d seen DHS respond to protesters with excessive physical force under the Obama and Biden administrations. Knowing the Trump administration’s tolerance for state violence only increased my concern about the agent’s aggressive signals. Although I was the police liaison and had planned to immediately introduce myself to any law enforcement, I trusted my intuition that I should not approach the agent until he calmed down.

If armed government agents do appear at or near the polls this election — or armed militia, for that matter — there are ways to respond that reduce the risk of a confrontation. 

In the midterm election in Arizona in 2022, when right-wing Oath Keepers tried to intimidate voters by photographing them and their license plates, it took a while to get a judge to ban their behavior. In the meantime, ordinary people countered their intimidation by creating a welcoming atmosphere for voters, creating a protective perimeter around the polls, and handing out water and snacks. 

In Washington, D.C.’s primary this year, when National Guard troops entered the polls, volunteers confronted them and insisted they had no legal right to be there, while filming the encounters. As Daniel Hunter reported in Waging Nonviolence, “After forceful haranguing, the troops left without further incident.” 

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Understanding which government department we are dealing with can help our assessment of risk. While any armed agents at the polls constitutes illegal voter intimidation, the National Guard is generally better trained than ICE, which is particularly prone to violent lawbreaking. Identifying who we are dealing with will also help us pass on accurate information to lawyers who will petition for an injunction.

Showing up to potentially chaotic situations is not going to be everyone’s role. Our bodies have different experiences of trauma, vulnerability to police violence and physical stamina. As individuals, we need to assess how much risk we are willing to take. At the same time, we know from movement history that in times of crisis, more people become willing to risk their own safety to protect their communities. Speaking honestly about the various factors that impact our individual and group risk — race, citizenship, gender identity and health, to name a few — can help people identify their own limits before they are in a dangerous situation, or know when to leave if one escalates.

In the meantime, train and practice 

No matter how much training we have, none of us know for sure how we will react if we are pepper-sprayed or witness other people being hurt. That’s why the civil rights movement put so much emphasis on preparation, which greatly reduces the risk that we will lash out. That is why I’m offering nonviolence trainings in partnership with the LGBTQ Connection PAC, which is augmenting its usual deep canvass work with this kind of preparation. 

Freedom Trainers, a decentralized network that teaches strategic noncooperation, is offering two-day trainings and a host of resources for the specific ways authoritarians may try to stop people from voting. The Election Safeguards Response Network, or ESRN, is a nonpartisan coalition connecting national, state and local organizations in election defense. Indivisible has a series of online trainings that are drawing thousands and which include guidance on how to talk about this election. 

If all you can find is online training, take it, and then find a local group to plug into, especially if you already have de-escalation skills. If you can’t find a local group, recruit a few friends and commit to some grounding practices before you go to the polls. Maybe sing or pray or touch the grass together. Or read aloud Daniel Hunter’s reminder in the Election Defense Scenarios: “This regime desperately wants you afraid. … Don’t comply. Because here is the other truth: They fear you. They fear activated voters who are engaged. They fear a free people who show up, stay loud, and refuse to be turned away. Go be that.”

By showing up grounded and together this election, we are building the movement we need for the long haul.

A portion of this article was previously published by Friends General Conference.

This article How to combat fear at the polls this November was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article was originally published on The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook.

We tend to imagine the dissident as a particular kind of person, one who’s born unafraid, temperamentally a rebel, built from some sterner material than the rest of us. It’s a comforting story, and it’s comforting in a way that quietly lets us off the hook. If dissidents are simply made differently, then their courage is admirable but not instructive. We can applaud it, but we are excused from it.

The great gift of Gal Beckerman’s “How to Be a Dissident” is that it dismantles that story, gently and completely. Beckerman — a staff writer at The Atlantic who has spent a career studying how change actually begins — went looking for what dissidents across history and around the globe have in common. What he found is not a personality type. It’s a set of practices. Dissidence, in his telling, is not a calling reserved for the few. It’s a human capacity, and capacities can be cultivated.

The book is organized as 10 imperatives — among them Be Pessimistic, Be Funny, Be Reckless, and Be Immortal — and under each, Beckerman gathers figures who could not seem more unlike one another: Socrates and Ai Weiwei, thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Iris Murdoch, the famous and the nearly forgotten. It is part intellectual history, part biography, part field manual. Its through-line is a journey every reader can recognize: the solitary moment of seeing a truth clearly, the frightening decision to say it out loud, and the long question of what that act leaves behind.

Some of the imperatives are bracing precisely because they cut against what we expect. “Be Pessimistic,” as I read it, is no counsel of despair — it’s the insistence that the dissident does not need optimism’s permission to act. You don’t have to believe you’ll win in order to refuse to comply. “Be Funny” recovers humor as a serious instrument, the thing that punctures the false solemnity on which authoritarian power depends. These are not slogans. They are, genuinely, instructions.

But the book’s most empowering move is subtler than any single chapter. It’s Beckerman’s steady attention to the fact that most of the people in these pages were, for most of their lives, conformists. They were not waiting for the barricades. They held jobs, kept their heads down, made the small daily accommodations everyone makes. And then something — a death, a lie too large to swallow, a knock on a neighbor’s door — moved them across a line they hadn’t planned to cross. Dissidence, Beckerman shows, usually begins not with heroism but with a refusal: a single moment when a person decides that they will not, this time, betray what they know to be true.

That reframing matters, because it relocates courage. Courage is no longer the possession of the extraordinary. It’s a decision available, in principle, to anyone, including the version of each of us who has spent years being reasonable, being careful, being quiet.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the book’s account of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo — the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo — and it is, for me, the heart of the book.

They weren’t activists. They were ordinary Argentine women whose children had been “disappeared” by the military junta in the late 1970s — seized, tortured, killed and erased, while a terrified country was instructed to notice nothing. Public assembly was forbidden. So the mothers did something almost absurdly modest: they went to the plaza in front of the presidential palace, and because the police told them they couldn’t stand still there, they walked. They walked in a slow circle, week after week, wearing white headscarves made from their children’s cloth diapers, some embroidered with a missing child’s name.

That was the whole of it, at first — a handful of women walking in a circle. It looked like nothing. It was, in fact, one of the bravest acts in the modern history of the hemisphere. The junta could disappear individuals in the dark; it could not so easily explain away mothers grieving in broad daylight, in the most public square in the country, refusing to leave. The Madres made the regime’s central lie — that nothing was happening — impossible to sustain. Their persistence drew the eyes of the world. And their small circling walk became one of the moral forces that stripped the dictatorship of its legitimacy and, in time, helped bring it down.

The mothers paid for it. Some of the Madres were themselves disappeared, including one of the women who founded them. Beckerman doesn’t soften that. But the lesson he draws is the one this moment most needs to hear: the walk worked. The simplest, most repeatable act of public refusal, performed by people with no power and no plan, became a movement that outlasted the men with all the guns.

If I have a criticism, offered in friendship to a book I admire, it is this. “How to Be a Dissident” is magnificent on the individual’s journey to the threshold of refusal, and somewhat thinner on what happens once the threshold is crossed. Beckerman is, by his own framing, writing about conscience — the inner voice, the personal act. But a dictatorship is not brought down by an aggregate of brave individuals each refusing alone. It falls when those refusals become organized, sustained and collective.

And here the Madres themselves gently correct the book that celebrates them. Their power was not only moral courage, though it was certainly that. It was also infrastructure. They found one another. They built a practice — the same plaza, the same day, the same circle — that others could see, and join, and repeat. They turned private grief into a public and durable thing. The leap from the lone dissident to the movement is the leap that determines whether authoritarianism actually falls, and it is a leap of organization as much as of conscience. Beckerman gets us, brilliantly, to the edge of that leap. The crossing is work he mostly leaves to us.

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I don’t hold it against the book. A book that tried to do everything would do nothing well. But a reader should know that “How to Be a Dissident” is the beginning of the syllabus, not the whole of it.

Still, and this is what I most want to say, read this book, and read it now. We’re living through a season engineered to make people feel small: to make conscience feel naive, refusal feel futile, and the safe move always the quiet one. Beckerman’s answer to all of that is patient and devastating. The dissident is not a different kind of human being. The dissident is an ordinary person who, at some specific and frightening moment, decided not to betray what they knew.

That moment is not reserved for the heroic. It’s not behind us, in history, or above us, in greatness. It stands in front of nearly every one of us, and probably sooner than we would like. “How to Be a Dissident” will not make the moment easier. What it will do — and this is no small thing — is make sure that when the moment arrives, you recognize it, and you remember that ordinary people, walking in a circle, have faced down far worse and won.

This article Being a dissident is a capacity, not a calling was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When Robin Gurung was 3 years old, his family was forced out of Bhutan. Today, as a 37-year-old organizer and co-founder of Asian Refugees United, or ARU, the reality of that exile remains carved into the landscape. On a recent trip to India’s border with Bhutan, just 20 miles from his family’s former home, Gurung encountered a sign reading, “Please do not cross the borderline.” In a photograph he took, the blue-tinted mountains of Bhutan rise in the distance behind the sign. Yet Gurung still could not cross that border line. 

The photograph captured the strange closeness of a place that had shaped his life from a distance: the country that forced his family out. He spent nearly two decades in a U.N. refugee camp in Nepal before coming to the United States in January 2012 to rebuild his life.  Now, he helps lead a community-wide effort to defend former Bhutanese refugees who are suddenly facing detention and deportation in the country they have come to call home.

Gurung kept his exact location private. “I am not scared, but I am very cautious,” he said when I asked whether he feared retaliation for his advocacy work. During our interview, he joined me from a dimly lit room during a power outage. We first connected on Facebook Messenger, but a weak connection forced us to switch to WhatsApp. From there, he spoke about the advocacy and organizing work he and his colleagues at ARU have led to protect the rights and future of the resettled Bhutanese community.

The border was close, but so was the history it represented. Gurung knew what it meant to lose a home because his family had lived through it. He also knew what it meant to rebuild after displacement. That history now informs his response as members of the same refugee community face a new threat of displacement in the U.S.

As of the filing of this report, upward of 75 former Bhutanese refugees have been deported to Bhutan, only to be taken to the Indo-Nepal border and left stateless once again.

A primary motivation for Gurung’s advocacy work stems from his own history and his acute awareness of how his grandfather, alongside thousands of others, had endured severe injustice at the hands of the Bhutanese regime. “It is actually a privilege to advocate on behalf of the community.”

Gurung’s family was among 100,000 Lhotshampa, a Nepali-speaking ethnic minority in southern Bhutan, who were driven from their homes during a campaign of discriminatory citizenship policies, arrests, torture and forced evictions.

In the early 1990s, Gurung’s grandfather endured 18 months of imprisonment and severe torture that broke his jaw and left him so badly injured that others assumed he had died. After his release, he spent time in a hospital, where his injuries had changed him so much that his own son barely recognized him. The family fled Bhutan in early 1992. Gurung remembers fragments of their escape: leaving behind their dog, Bittu, and riding on a truck as they crossed out of the country. His grandfather never fully recovered from the torture and later died at a regional hospital in Morang, Nepal.

After years in refugee camps in Nepal, Gurung and thousands of others eventually found a new home through a third-country resettlement program. Beginning in 2008, countries, including the U.S., resettled more than 90,000 Bhutanese refugees. For many, resettlement offered the possibility of finally leaving displacement behind.

That sense of security shattered in March 2025, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, began detaining former Bhutanese refugees in the U.S. For people who had already lost citizenship and spent years in refugee camps, deportation carries a deeper threat. It raises the possibility of returning to the statelessness that began with their expulsion from Bhutan.

But fear has not defined the community’s response. Across the diaspora, ARU has worked to turn individual emergencies into collective action.

When ICE came knocking

ARU formed to build community power and intergenerational leadership among Asian refugee communities. Before the deportation campaign began, the organization worked on political engagement through a partnership with civil rights group Asian Law Caucus, and as a coalition member of the Asian American Leaders Table, a grassroots network uniting local groups to build collective political power. 

That organizing infrastructure became critical when the detention began.

In the second week of March 2025, while launching a youth program and media studio, Gurung learned that ICE had detained community members. Days later, as he drove to the United Nations to renew his annual pass, Bhutanese community activist Bishwa Chhetri sat in the passenger seat calling community leaders and members across Pennsylvania and Ohio, where many of those detained lived, to find out more about the detentions.

The calls revealed the scale of the crisis, but they also exposed a problem: The community had no national system for coordinating information, legal support or immediate assistance to families.

Chhetri said that there was a severe lack of organized mechanisms to track factual information on ICE detentions. In addition, “finding legal representation was a bit of trouble,” he noted, emphasizing that a vast majority of the detainees had no legal representation at all. Recognizing the overwhelming scale of the situation, he and his peers quickly concluded that a single organization could not manage the emergency on its own. Although some community groups in Pennsylvania and Ohio got involved during the early phase, ARU eventually became the sole organization within the community dedicated to carrying out this specialized advocacy work.

What began as an emergency response soon became an organizing project. After returning home from New York, Gurung reached out to the Asian Law Caucus and launched a rapid response partnership. Regarding this collaboration, Aisa Villarosa, manager of the Asian American Leaders Table at Asian Law Caucus, said, “Without community organizers like ARU, the law and lawyers alone cannot provide the holistic support, empowerment, education and creativity to explore every possible avenue for justice.” Rather than simply referring cases to lawyers, ARU built a community-based system around the legal response. Organizers reached families quickly, explained developments in familiar languages and helped people navigate an unfamiliar system.

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The approach reflected a central principle of ARU’s work: People most affected by state violence should have a leading role in fighting it.

“I was exercising these freedoms because of the movement leaders from the generation before me, so I feel a sense of responsibility and gratitude to continue doing the same,” Gurung said. “If we don’t fight back, those in power will continue to suppress others — power has to be checked and balanced because we need to create a system of accountability.”

Young community members in their 20s stepped into organizing roles. They translated for elders, tracked detentions, communicated with relatives, arranged transportation and accompanied people to court. What started as an improvised response gradually became a network capable of mobilizing when another person was detained.

Building a community defense network

ARU granted me access to an August 14 virtual staff meeting, offering a direct look at the day-to-day logistics of this rapidly expanding defense network. On screen, seven young organizers, including Gurung, sat before webcams, coordinating cases across regional hubs in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Their conversation moved fluidly between Nepali and English, blending the language of home with the cold shorthand of the legal system: “FOIA,” “public defender.” At one point, a team member used the word “habeas,” prompting another organizer to ask what it meant. The first organizer paused to explain it in plain language, even though he had no legal training himself.

The exchange captured something essential about the group: They were learning the language of a system they had not been formally trained to navigate, teaching one another as they went. Between key clicks and routine case updates, the stakes came into sharp focus: A juvenile in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was being tried as an adult and facing up to five years; families were reaching out in panic; green card holders were confronting the possibility of an eventual deportation. 

As this rapid response effort grew, ARU faced another lingering challenge. Fear and confusion were spreading just as fast through the community as the detentions themselves.

To counter this, the organization held virtual mass meetings, organized Know Your Rights sessions and conducted outreach in ways that reflected the linguistic and cultural realities of former Bhutanese refugees. Volunteers also became a bridge between families and legal organizations.

“We had to be alert 24/7 to be available for the families of deportees,” Gurung recalled. “In the meantime, media visibility was imperative.”

The intensity came with a personal cost. “It was mentally too much pressure, but we had no choice,” Gurung said. Having struggled with his own mental health issues since 2024, Gurung experienced a severe mental health crisis during the height of the organizing campaign in 2025, even as new cases continued to emerge. 

His experience points to a broader reality of grassroots defense work. The people creating safety for their communities often do so without the institutional resources available to larger organizations.

The partnership with the Asian Law Caucus helped address some of that gap. Attorneys provided legal expertise while community organizers reached families, built trust and helped connect legal strategies to the realities people faced.

For ARU, the distinction between legal defense and community organizing remained fluid. A family facing deportation might need an attorney, but it might also need someone to translate, arrange transportation or accompany a relative through court.

Mohan Karki’s case illustrates that reality. ICE detained Karki in mid-2025 and separated him from his pregnant wife. She decided to fight the removal order. ARU organizers, including Gurung, traveled to Ohio to pick her up and drove her to federal court proceedings in Michigan. While Karki remained in custody, she gave birth to their baby in June 2025 and continued attending court hearings through December.

“When I first met her, I was very much inspired,” Gurung said. “She had to give birth while her husband was in custody.”

For organizers, cases like Karki’s show why community defense cannot stop at the courtroom door. Families need sustained support as they navigate a system that can reshape their lives overnight.

From individual cases to a broader movement

Those experiences have also pushed ARU beyond individual deportation cases. The organization has built relationships with groups working on statelessness, including United Stateless, connecting the experiences of former Bhutanese refugees to a broader movement of people who lack recognized citizenship or face the threat of statelessness. 

For Gurung, that connection is personal.

“This was very personal in terms of knowing what it means to become stateless, what it means to become a refugee,” Gurung said. “We came to this country after being well-vetted. The idea of deportation to Bhutan was not safe for community members — that idea was very wrong.”

The campaign, Gurung said, is about more than protecting individual families. It is also about preventing one generation’s displacement from becoming another generation’s future. Highlighting the systemic barriers that worsen this crisis, Villarosa points out that the U.S. immigration laws and courts lack a uniform, comprehensive definition of statelessness.

“If we don’t fight back, we are giving license to those in power to decide our fate,” he said.

That belief has pushed ARU toward broader coalition building while keeping the Bhutanese community at the center of its work. The organization is strengthening relationships with groups confronting related forms of state violence and working to ensure that the experiences of former Bhutanese refugees inform wider organizing around statelessness and immigrant rights.

That work now shapes ARU’s next phase.

What comes next?

More than a year after the first detentions, ARU continues its rapid response work while building longer-term community power. Gurung said ARU continues to respond to developments affecting former Bhutanese refugees while coordinating a coalition effort to bring Bhutanese organizations together around a joint response.

Community education has also become a central priority. ARU is working to educate and organize community members so they have the knowledge and collective capacity to respond when new challenges arise.

The organization is also pursuing legal and international advocacy. A Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, lawsuit by the Asian Law Caucus remains underway, seeking government records, policies and communications from ICE and the Department of State regarding the sudden detention and deportation of Bhutanese-American refugees. Alongside this domestic legal pressure, representatives from ARU recently met with U.N. Refugee Agency officials from Geneva, Washington, D.C., and the Asia branch to address the ongoing crisis and statelessness risks facing former Bhutanese refugees. 

Locally, ARU is participating in a collective effort to pass a Welcoming County resolution in central Pennsylvania’s Dauphin County that would prevent cooperation with ICE.

These efforts show how a rapid response campaign can grow into a broader organizing strategy. ARU is combining community education, coalition building, legal action, international advocacy and local policy work to challenge the conditions that leave families vulnerable.

Still, the community has built something that did not exist when the first detention calls arrived. Organizers have established rapid response channels, trained community members, accompanied families through court and connected the Bhutanese struggle to broader movements addressing statelessness.

For Gurung, that work remains rooted in the freedoms he gained after nearly two decades in a refugee camp.

“It is a rollercoaster ride,” Gurung said, describing the challenges and complexities of ARU’s ongoing advocacy work.

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Reflecting on why he continues organizing, he returns to the experience of people whose freedoms were denied for years, much like his own.

“Having spent close to two decades in refugee camps in Nepal without rights, I finally gained my freedom,” he said. “When a fellow community member faces deportation, it motivates me to keep fighting for their rights as well.”

Those freedoms came after decades of displacement. Now, community members who understand the cost of losing them are fighting to protect them. ARU’s response continues to evolve, but its central strategy remains clear: build collective power so families facing state violence do not have to face it alone.

Standing just 20 miles from the home he lost, Gurung was reminded of how easily a line on a map can divide a life. Today, as ICE attempts to redraw those same boundaries of exile in the U.S., ARU is drawing a line of its own. By transforming personal trauma into collective defense, they are making one thing absolute: their community will not be forced backward, and no one will ever face statelessness alone.

This article In danger of statelessness, Bhutanese refugees build power against deportation was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.