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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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 After October 7, I learned that movements need grief spaces 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.

When activist Shahzaib Habib was killed by unidentified men on the night of June 6 in Rawalakot, Pakistan, protesters took custody of his body from the combined military hospital and staged a sit-in outside the hospital, demanding that an investigation be opened into his murder. Habib was a close associate of the leadership of the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, or JAAC, a coalition of local traders, civil society members and political activists who spent the past three years organizing demonstrations across Pakistan-administered Kashmir. 

According to JAAC, security forces opened fire on the vehicle Habib was traveling in. Police say they intercepted a “suspicious vehicle” whose armed occupants fired first.

Habib’s killing came in a week when a crackdown on the JAAC was intensifying day by day. Two days earlier, on June 5, Pakistan’s government had banned JAAC, declaring the nonviolent coalition — which came together around electricity bills and wheat prices — a proscribed organization under the 2014 anti-terrorism act. In the days that followed, a curfew was imposed on Rawalakot, phone and internet were cut across the region of Azaad Jammu and Kashmir, and the government deployed the Pakistan Rangers, a paramilitary force. Protests were met with violence, leaving 11 dead. 

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Kashmiri human rights defenders continue to fight injustices amid growing repression

Since the June 5 declaration, dozens of protesters have been arrested and many have reportedly been killed. But putting a precise number on either remains difficult. Media access to the region has been tightly restricted since the crackdown began, with phone and internet remaining suspended across much of the region.

Among those killed was one of the main student organizers: Usama Jamil, a PhD student at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad who was deputy secretary general of the Jammu Kashmir National Students Federation, or JKNSF. On July 27, according to student groups and civil society organizations, he was marching in Rawalakot, chanting for people’s rights, when he was shot and killed by security forces. 

The crackdown was not confined to Kashmir. Solidarity protests in Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi were met with arrests. In Lahore, police arrested activists and dozens of bystanders outside the press club during a peaceful demonstration on July 31. In Islamabad, the capital, 88 people were sent into 14-day judicial remand after a solidarity protest the same day. Human rights groups called the arrests part of a broader attempt to criminalize solidarity with Kashmir.

I asked Omer Khan, a member of JKNSF, about the current situation. “I don’t know how to answer this or where to begin,” he said. “A living hell was unleashed upon us, something this region has not witnessed in recent history. Our region was once one of the most peaceful, and now it has almost been turned into a war zone.”

“Dozens have been killed through direct state violence, and countless others have been injured,” he continued. “Food and medicine have been blocked. Frisking, raids and searches have violated the privacy and sanctity of people’s homes” and the entire region is under an undeclared curfew. 

He describes collective punishment as one of the more visible forms of state pressure, but says the psychological toll is harder to measure.

But for now, despite the killings, crackdowns and internet restrictions, the movement the government tried to outlaw is still organizing. On Sept. 9, the JAAC led a region-wide shutter-down and wheel-jam strike, a form of general strike that aims to shut down all businesses and halt all road traffic. As of today, protesters remain in the streets. 

How the movement got there 

Organizers say that the keys to the movement’s durability have been its flat structure, the strong participation of women, and how it has built trust and solidarity by delivering victories that affect people’s everyday lives. 

“I consider it the world’s most modern and well-organized movement, and its biggest achievement is that it built solidarity among people,” said Haris Ahmed Khan, a member of Progressive Student Collective, or PSC, who was arrested at a peaceful solidary protest in Lahore on July 31 and later released. “When a call is given, everyone gathers.”

The movement began on May 8, 2023, when residents of Rawalakot, the capital of Kashmir’s Poonch district, held a sit-in over the sharp increase in government-subsidized flour prices. Out of that sit-in came the district’s first organizing body, initially called the Poonch Awami Action Committee.

The movement might have stayed local if the government hadn’t handed it a second grievance. When electricity bills for the month of August 2023 arrived from the state-owned power department, people with higher usage rates found their bill had roughly doubled. What began as a flour protest in one district spread across Azad Jammu and Kashmir, as the Poonch district organizing committee folded electricity into its demands, and organizers in the Muzaffarabad and Rawalakot district joined in with a call for a shutter-down and wheel-jam strike. What started as scattered demonstrations turned into a sit-in in Rawalakot that stretched on for months.

Young leaders, lawyers and journalists all joined in. And slowly, the movement started gaining traction on social media.

“They had two or three pages [on Instagram and Facebook] that people trusted, so whenever news came from these pages, people knew it was authentic,” Haris Ahmed Khan explained. Speeches and announcements shared on these pages quickly spread, he said.

But organizers in Kashmir did not consider social media alone to be enough. They went to village councils and formed local committees. In Poonch district, they walked through every bazaar and convinced people to join the movement. They explained to people how they could get flour and electricity at lower prices. 

The movement won on its material demands when flour and electricity prices were lowered in 2024. With these wins, Omer Khan said, the movement proved something to people who’d been told for decades they had no power. 

“It instilled confidence in people across the state that it is possible to fight and to win,” he said. “In particular, securing the right to electricity at the cost of production was an unprecedented achievement in South Asia.”

By building confidence in the movement, these successes led to bigger demands and marked it as a threat to the state, Haris Ahmed Khan said. “People are now demanding public spending and want the state to spend for the people,” he said. “The state does not want people to reach this point in such a peaceful and organized way. So, this has become a threat to the state structure because people are demanding that the state work for them.” 

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Repression backfires in Pakistan, as oppressed Baloch people hold historic mass protest

In September 2025, Omer Khan joined more than 60 others at a protest outside the Islamabad Press Club. The demonstration didn’t go long. Police with batons charged the crowd, made arrests and held people for over eight hours.

“Women were treated especially badly,” Omer Khan said. “Locked up, they struggled to breathe and were refused basic things like light and fans. Some came out with bruises.” One woman who traveled in from outside the region to show solidarity was questioned by a male officer and had her phone searched, Omer Khan said.

Women have been at the center of the movement from the start, and Omer argues that’s not incidental to its resilience. “The movement was banned because it had spread across the state, especially among women, who have been suffering for a long time, arguably even more than the men,” he said. “This was reflected in the extraordinary mobilization of women, in earlier marches as well. They were the ones who organized and sustained the marches wherever they went.” 

Both Omer Khan and Haris Ahmed Khan credit the movement’s flat, local and deliberately decentralized leadership, as well as its delivering on concrete demands, for its ability to survive repeated crackdowns. 

“The JAAC was not centered around one or a few leaders,” Omer Khan said. “Instead, it was based on representatives from each district. This horizontal structure gave the movement remarkable flexibility, allowing it to absorb pressure and withstand repeated shocks.”

An election without a mandate

The movement has “evolved beyond purely economic demands and began to raise broader political questions, including the right to ownership and the right to self-rule,” Omer Khan said. 

The demands have extended to more, harder targets, including an end to special privileges and perks for the political elite, political and constitutional reforms, stronger local government, accountability for deaths and violence during the protests, withdrawal of cases against protesters, and improvements in public services and infrastructure, including health, education, roads and water supply. The government acquiesced to some of the movement’s demands in an October 2025 peace agreement, but JAAC says many of those commitments remain unfulfilled.

One major demand opposed by the government is the abolition of 12 seats in the 45-seat Azad Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly that are reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir who live elsewhere in Pakistan. JAAC argues the arrangement lets mainstream Pakistani parties engineer the region’s government from outside; Islamabad says the seats are constitutionally protected and can’t be touched without an amendment. 

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The elections Omer Khan predicted would lack legitimacy have now concluded, with Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz party, or PML–N, securing the majority. The movement boycotted the elections, arguing that they could not be legitimate while its leaders were facing a ban and the region was emerging from months of unrest.

JAAC had called for the elections to be annulled and for the establishment of a caretaker government, electoral reforms and a new Election Commission before fresh polls. Government officials rejected those claims, saying voters had given the PML–N a clear mandate and that the elections had been conducted fairly.

Tensions in Azad Jammu and Kashmir remain unresolved. In the massive  shutter-down and wheel-jam strike on Sept. 9, JAAC demanded implementation of the October 2025 agreement, while the government says it has fully implemented some demands and is working on others.

Internet access has been partially restored in several districts, but remains completely suspended in Rawalakot and Sudhnoti, while other areas have restricted access mainly for educational institutions and banks. The banned JAAC continues to demand the withdrawal of its proscription, the release of detained activists and an independent judicial inquiry into the June violence, including the killing of Shahzaib Habib and injuries to other protesters. Meanwhile, police continue to accuse the movement of attacking law enforcement personnel and using protests to challenge state authority.

“So many people have died that the movement has reached a point of no return,” Haris Ahmed Khan concluded. “People are demanding the U.N. intervene and ask Pakistan’s government to remove the Rangers from the ground.” Despite everything, he says, people are still standing with the movement and demanding justice.

This article A popular movement in Kashmir defies severe repression was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Twenty-five years after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, on the surface it may seem that American foreign policy has followed a course filled with continuity. A quarter century ago, the U.S. launched the “War on Terror” in response to 9/11. Today, Trump’s attacks on Iran have embroiled the country in another conflict in the Middle East.

Yet while the War on Terror gave rise to a disastrous wave of military intervention, it also produced a historic surge of antiwar activism, which played a critical role in discrediting “forever wars” across the political spectrum. Whereas the Iraq War began with 70 percent public approval, Trump’s war in Iran has been widely opposed from the beginning, with only around a third of Americans currently in support. 

Jeremy Varon, a historian at the New School for Social Research, recently released the first definitive history of antiwar organizing against the War on Terror. His book is entitled “Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War.” I spoke with Varon to discuss the organizing that took place against the war in Iraq that started in 2003, the impact the movement had, and how that activism has been popularly remembered — or, too often, forgotten. 

We also discussed the prospects for antiwar organizing today, when Trump’s attacks on Iran are wildly unpopular, and yet we lack a movement that can be a mechanism for raising the political costs of interventionism. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There is a very common impression — maybe the dominant impression of antiwar activism under George W. Bush — that the movement was a failure because it did not stop the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. I think that is a distorted perception of the impact the movement did have. What is your assessment?

The first thing to say is that success and failure are relative. And indeed, certainly with regard to the invasion of Iraq, the movement failed in its overarching goal to stop the war before it started. A lot of people intuitively knew that when the bombs started falling, disaster would follow, and that reorienting American policy would be like turning around a tanker, not a tugboat. 

If you look at American military casualties, the implosion of Iraqi society, civilian casualties and so on, the calamity that people feared came to pass. I can appreciate the sense of failure many activists felt, because the stakes were so high — literally life and death.

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Lessons from the movement to stop the ‘war on terror’

That said, the antiwar movement can claim accomplishments as well. It substantially delegitimated the war before it ever started, especially within the realms of global public opinion and even geopolitics. The United States went to war with just one significant military and political ally: the United Kingdom. It didn’t have the support of traditional allies in Western Europe, like France and Germany. Most of Latin America, Asia and Central Europe rejected the U.S. position. The United Nations, while not declaring the war illegal, fundamentally disapproved of it, and Secretary General Kofi Annan privately thought the war would be a grave mistake. So the actual military campaign was inhibited by both a domestic and a global movement arguing that the war was wrong-headed and likely illegal. 

In a way, the antiwar movement peaked before the Iraq War even started. On February 15, 2003, you had thousands of coordinated antiwar protests all over the world. Between 15 and 30 million people turned out to protest the war. It was the largest single day of protest in human history. For sure, many people on the streets that day were gravely disappointed that the demonstration didn’t have the intended effect of preventing the war. Some percentage maybe never came back to the antiwar movement, because they were so dispirited. But organizing the mass demonstrations built a protest infrastructure that lived on. The main antiwar coalition in the U.S. came into its own through those demonstrations.

I give enormous credit to the people who had the tenacity and stamina to keep grinding away at protest. I’m thinking of Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice, World Can’t Wait and all of these smaller grassroots formations throughout the country that continued to organize.

When the war started, public opinion in the U.S. was substantially in its favor, around 70 percent right after the “shock and awe” invasion. But that was a soft 70 percent, with people in the middle rallying around the flag. They wanted the swift victory Bush promised, which would mean limited American casualties. But as the war bogged down, the antiwar position grew steadily more salient, and antiwar sentiment grew steadily bigger. 

Eventually, public opinion caught up with the antiwar movement. The most recent polling is from 2023 or so. Something like 60 percent of the American public, by that point, thought that the Iraq War was a mistake. A similar percentage thought the Afghanistan War, long considered the “good war,” was a mistake. And a whopping 58 percent of veterans of both deployments think that the wars were not worth fighting.

We’ll never know with any certainty the extent to which the war itself or the antiwar movement was the driver of shifts in public opinion. But in my book I cite observers who argue that the antiwar movement likely limited the duration and intensity of the war in Iraq, and therefore saved lives. That’s a highly general statement, but I think it’s a fair statement. Others note that it may have constrained the neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration from pursuing military action in places like Iran and Syria, which had very much been on their agenda. 

In the book you write that, as the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq in 2003, “For months, the public had been schooled in the reasons for the invasion, and expectations for it. Americans were also versed, if to a lesser degree, in the case against the war. Events on the ground would determine which position was right.” 

I think that’s a very important point: In relation to the War on Terror, the movement created a counter-narrative about what the administration was doing and what actions were actually going to make us safer. And so when the war started going bad, there was already an explanation in place for why this was always a horrible idea and why there should be political consequences.

Yes, and this is important for understanding how public discourse and policy interrelate. There was a counter-narrative about the war coming from the movement. It said that Iraq doesn’t pose a clear and present danger, that there’s no proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, that lots of people are going to die, and that it may plunge the region into chaos. Over time, more and more observers could see the reality aligning with those warnings. 

Rather than having to create arguments against the war from scratch, people who were growing increasingly critical could appeal to an existing body of antiwar criticisms and bring them into the public square in a new way. Eventually, you have the political class catching up with where the public already was — aligned, more or less, with the core positions of an antiwar movement. It’s a long and complex process by which dissenting ideas achieve a kind of hegemony and then compel shifts in policy. Even endless wars can end, when they lose legitimacy in the eyes of the nation waging them. That process begins at the grassroots.

Of course, the end of the war came too late to spare untold death and destruction. But the antiwar movement at least limited the damage, and that’s a real achievement.

One of the ways in which the antiwar movement had a swifter impact was in shifting the debate within the Democratic Party. You quickly go from having the leadership of the party voting in favor of the war in Iraq, to there being a complete revolt from the base. This results in the rise of figures such as antiwar candidate Howard Dean in 2004, and it leads to the eventual Democratic nominee John Kerry trying to position himself as an antiwar candidate — even though he’s not an entirely credible one. 

In the 2004 election, George W. Bush was an incumbent, wartime president who most analysts expected to coast to victory based on the massive surge of patriotism after 9/11. And instead this election, in no small part, became a referendum on the war and became an extremely close race. If just 60,000 votes in Ohio had gone the other way, Bush would have been ousted.

During the electoral season in 2004, much of the antiwar movement considered Bush’s defeat to be the quickest way to end the war. The war had already started to crash and burn, but ultimately not badly enough to turn the tide against Bush. Remarkably, he won the so-called “security vote.” Bush had gifted political operatives, notably Karl Rove, who had him run on culture war issues and turned out droves of evangelicals. Last, there was an enormous effort by the right to discredit John Kerry over his opposition to the Vietnam War. As it is, he was a kind of wishy-washy alternative on the war in Iraq, whom the antiwar movement only grudgingly backed. 

It ended up being a close election. Bush’s win was a huge disappointment, even a shock for progressives. Still, the antiwar movement found a way to write another chapter.

By late 2005, the failures of the Iraq War — along with the callousness of the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina — had turned George W. Bush into a premature lame duck president, hamstringing him for the rest of his second term. I would argue that antiwar activism played a big role in that. What is your take?

After the 2004 elections, a new wave of antiwar activism emerges, with powerful new advocates and constituencies.

With Cindy Sheehan, most famously, it had a grieving Gold Star mother asking, “For what noble cause did my son die?” She was really asking, for Bush and the nation to hear, why the war was being fought at all.

For weeks in the summer of 2005, Cindy Sheehan and others set up Camp Casey — named after her son — near Bush’s ranch in Texas. Veterans, antiwar activists, celebrities, everyday people and important politicians all gravitated to it. It became ground zero, if you will, for the antiwar movement. And it got intense coverage: CNN, Anderson Cooper, Oprah Winfrey and all sorts of global media. It was the first time since the big demonstrations in 2003 that the antiwar movement drove the narrative. For millions of Americans, the suffering and folly of the war felt real in a new way. 

From the start, some families of 9/11 victims had opposed war, and their voices had unique power. You also had groups like Veterans for Peace working to communicate the bitter lessons of Vietnam to the American public. By 2005, they were joined by a growing mass of veterans of the Iraq War, and even active duty soldiers, reporting that American conduct had nothing to do with spreading peace and freedom and democracy. Instead, it was menacing Iraqis and turning the Iraqi people against the occupation. They had seen it themselves. 

With the activism of the military community, the antiwar movement took on a somewhat different class character. Sheehan is a kind of upper-working-class, all-American mom from small town California, and veterans typically hail from the working class. The U.S. military is a working-class institution. It is also racially a very integrated institution. So you have heartland spokespeople, speaking from a heartland perspective, denouncing a war that is chewing up their lives and falling far short of the high-minded ambitions that Bush had set for it. And I think this gives a kind of permission structure for everyday Americans, who may consider themselves conventionally patriotic, to say, “Wait a second. Who is this war helping?”

Then Hurricane Katrina hits in late August. The botched response is a massive policy failure for the Bush administration, which claimed it had things under control. The whole nation could see that was a lie. Camp Casey breaks up, with a whole contingent, led by Veterans for Peace, leaving Crawford, Texas and rushing to New Orleans. In and around the city, they distribute massive amounts of food, water and other necessities. They use satellite phones to help the Red Cross save people from rooftops. They help people get legal services and deal with insurance companies. They felt duty-bound to rally to the suffering present in America. And they absolutely made the connection of the misuse of resources to wage a foreign war that the country no longer wanted with the neglect of urgent problems at home. 

Then, in September, a pre-planned demonstration happens in Washington that very much connects conditions at home and overseas. It was in some ways the most ambitious of all the antiwar protests — three days that included lobbying, civil disobedience, art exhibits, interfaith events and on-the-ground organizing. 

By late 2005, you see a cratering of public opinion in support of the war. And the pro-war stance never again becomes the majority position. 

Soon enough, you have powerful people in Congress giving new credibility to the antiwar position. There was the famous “Murthquake,” in which John Murtha, a military veteran and initially a big supporter of the war, comes out against it. He himself said that the political class was way behind public opinion. 

And then you have the 2006 midterms, where this sentiment is translated into a major defeat for the Republicans.

Yes. The Democrats have blowout wins, functionally retaking control of both houses of Congress based on an antiwar message. After that it was really a question of when and not if the war ends, with the U.S. far short of having achieved the military and geostrategic objectives that Bush set. From 2006 on, you have the painful extrication of the United States from a quagmire of its own making. 

What I consider the most significant Congressional action after 2006 was the impaneling of the Iraq Study Group. That was a bipartisan group to diagnose what went wrong and advocate a way forward, which was ultimately some form of U.S. withdrawal. You have the eminences of the American foreign policy establishment basically calling bullshit on Bush’s signature policy. When they release their report, it’s a bestseller. It’s being sold in bookstores and airports and downloaded something like two million times. 

Reading the narrative you present in your book, and remembering all of the organizing that took place on so many different fronts, it’s startling how much of it has been utterly forgotten in the media and in the popular imagination. What do you think accounts for that?

The movement, in its own day, was woefully underreported on. I blame the legacy media and major cable outfits — almost all of the press, really — for confusing post-9/11 patriotism with an excuse to abdicate its responsibility to report on domestic dissent. For years, activists struggled to get sustained attention to their efforts.

I was part of this movement, but probably 90 percent of what I report on in my book, I had no idea was happening at the time. Part of the intent of the book is to give this big, robust, spirited, movement its due, while also understanding why knowledge about it was suppressed. 

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The larger purpose is to try to induce a broader legal, political and moral reckoning with the totality of the War on Terror. My argument is that we hear so little about the antiwar movement in part because we hear so little about the War on Terror itself. It’s as though the Iraq War never happened. It was so consequential, it was so costly in blood and treasure. But, historically speaking, it feels almost like a non-event. My college students know almost nothing about it.

I was born in 1967, and I came of age in the post-Vietnam War era. That war had a massive, lasting impact on American political life and culture. There was the “Vietnam Syndrome” that discouraged new wars. There was the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial in Washington. Every Hollywood auteur made a Vietnam War movie. It was understood that the United States had been through something big and traumatic, and that the nation needed soul-searching to examine its foreign policy, the meaning of patriotism and the appropriate uses of the military. 

The War on Terror, in its most intense phase, has not been succeeded by anything like that kind of public reflection. We badly need it. My thesis is that the War on Terror was so ugly, so confusing, so divisive, that we simply don’t know what to do with it. And when you don’t know what to do with something, the easiest thing is to ignore it. 

Of course, there are millions of people for whom forgetting isn’t a luxury: all the Iraqis who were murdered or displaced or dismembered, and all these veterans suffering from traumatic head wounds or who have missing limbs. We owe it to them to remember and learn from past mistakes.

Today, we face a unique situation in that Trump’s war in Iran is incredibly unpopular, and across political parties there is huge opposition to the U.S. getting into so-called “forever wars.” And yet, we lack any large antiwar movement that is actively raising the political cost of unpopular interventionism. 

It’s stunning. My take is that Trump doesn’t like “endless wars” for all of the obvious reasons. At the same time, he is eager to use the lethality of the American military to project his own power on the global stage. For him, stupid wars are simply wars that the United States can’t easily win. So he craves “victory.” He got very excited by the intervention in Venezuela and the initial strikes against Iran. And he thought that, with advances in military technology, we could have these quick-hit mini-victories with minimal, if not negligible, cost in American lives. 

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Where’s the resistance to the Iran war?

Right now, we’re in this weird limbo with the Iran conflict. On the one hand, it’s a war frightfully outside traditional constraints on a president, which Trump disdains. He doesn’t believe in limits set by Congress, international law, the U.N., or the opinions of allies. 

At the same time, he likely recognizes that some number of U.S. casualties would be unacceptible to Americans and would sink the war. So that lesson from Iraq, from Vietnam even, he does seem to get. My fear is that low-intensity conflicts, like in Iran, may grow routine and become background noise in American political life that never quite rile the public to demand their end. The trick for Trump is to continue waging war without prohibitive costs that would trigger widespread outrage among a disapproving but disaffected public. 

I think the midterms will be a crucial test of whether disapproving public opinion can have a real price. If the Democrats win big, we may have part of the answer.

I would love it if there were a dedicated antiwar movement addressing Iran as well as possible intervention in Cuba. Personally, I don’t think we’re going to have such a movement. Barring some dramatic escalation of the war in Iran, which is still possible, I think we’re going to have a continuation of the current circumstance where dissatisfaction with the war is one of a number of grievances with Trump — along with the public corruption, inattention to issues of affordability, vanity projects, et cetera. If Republicans get routed, public opinion experts will have to sift through the data to find out how important the war has been. 

What lessons do you draw from antiwar organizing in the years after 9/11 that you think are relevant for movements today?

I think there are strategic lessons for activists today. One is that, while a movement’s message matters, the messenger matters enormously as well. When it’s a Gold Star mother, when it’s a veteran, when it’s an ex-general, when it’s a formerly pro-war politician articulating an antiwar position, the message behaves very differently than it might otherwise. Effective movements always need to think about how to present and highlight those voices that have the greatest credibility among the broader public and political class. We may bristle at this dynamic, but historically our most successful social movements have understood that.

Another takeaway is the general power of conscientious dissent to alter political conditions. If you think of Bush declaring “Mission Accomplished,” which he did on May 1, 2003, it was a great moment of bluster. But then you look at the profound turning of the American public on the War on Terror over the two years that followed. It’s a remarkable difference. That change would have been incredibly hard to predict. 

That’s part of political life and part of life more generally. We can be thoughtful, we can be strategic, we can identify goals, but we can’t ultimately know the consequences of our actions in advance. 

America and the world would have been much better off if antiwar voices had genuinely been listened to, and not belittled and ignored. People with enormous expertise and good moral instincts captured the truth of the moment. So one needs to work really hard — against the biases of the media and government alike — to make one’s truth heard. There are rewards of stamina, even when things seem bleak. Any number of issues, from global warming, to Gaza, to the abuses of immigrants, feel incredibly bleak now. But temporary setbacks shouldn’t be a reason for resignation. History has too many examples of the rewards of holding on to hope. 

This article 25 years after 9/11, how do we build a movement to stop endless wars? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Twenty-eight years ago, a group of neighbors in downtown Tucson, Arizona, led by permaculture designer Brad Lancaster, cut curbs in their neighborhood to let rainwater into the verge, where they guerrilla-planted indigenous flora. These and other crimes made their once-barren neighborhood an urban refuge. Then they put on their lobbying hats; today, Tucson’s government gives financial incentives to do what the scofflaws once did illegally.

When I first moved back to Tucson part-time to find good care for my mother, I met David Walker, a friend of Brad’s with another ambitious vision: Use a huge, extremely destructive weed called buffelgrass — imported from Africa by the USDA and Big Cattle, for feed — to make beautiful adobe housing for the unhoused, while paying them to help build it. He imagined a network of brickyards, sponsored by the city and providing not only money but food, music, community and new skills to people in need, and to anyone. 

This felt like the best idea I’d ever heard, and once my mother was finally in good hands I helped gather a group of university students and others to start making it a reality. Long story short, today we have a functioning prototype brickyard where volunteers — and, soon, a number of unhoused people paid by a local non-profit — pull buffelgrass, mold it with dirt and water into 4-foot-long bricks, eat freshly cooked food and make friends. We’re working towards five buffelgrass-adobe structures, including a low-income row house and two low-income accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, in backyards volunteered by their owners. This isn’t mutual aid, or not only: Once these pilot projects prove viable, we’ll lobby the city to sponsor this kind of low-income housing at scale, for a fraction of the cost of commercial construction and a whole lot more social, ecological and aesthetic benefit. Never having lobbied before, I don’t know all that’s involved, but several city officials have been very supportive, and Brad has given us a good roadmap. 

Escaping the corporate maze

In Tucson, regular people — especially the less privileged — once built their own houses from dirt and plants and water, and could repair them when needed. Then, in the 1960s, the city razed most of downtown, uprooting hundreds of families to make way for a brutalist convention center meant to attract business dollars. Today, what remains of that old adobe neighborhood is one of the most prized parts of the city to live in and homes there command the highest prices. Building adobe structures citywide to serve the unhoused could be a way for the city to make amends for those 1960s-era crimes against people, community and aesthetics. 

Buffelgrass-adobe housing would also be an improvement over commercially built shelters, and not only because they’d be cheaper to build and run and a whole lot nicer to live in: The ways corporations make buildings, even “green” ones, ruin natural landscapes, emit massive carbon and fuel a race to the bottom among providers of raw materials. 

In other forms of housing for vulnerable populations, it’s the corporate structure itself that’s the source of the problem — but that, too, could be fairly straightforward to fix, at the municipal level at least. 

When my mother was diagnosed with dementia and keeping her in her home proved untenable, I found a nearby facility that was part of a statewide chain called The Villas. The place was as stately and manicured as its name suggests, but a host of dysfunctions appeared soon enough: neglect of some residents, conflict between staff and management, and so much turnover that I sometimes couldn’t keep track of who the director was, let alone staff. For want of activities, the TV often served as a caregiver. I visited other facilities that looked just as good, but all clearly had the same problems, or worse: one large branch of Atria Senior Living, with more than a billion dollars of revenues yearly, informed me that they didn’t even have a staff nurse for residents and so couldn’t administer medicines on an as-needed basis, for anxiety or anything else. (Atria did not respond by deadline for a comment request for this piece.)

I finally stumbled onto a large independent facility and was able to settle my mother there. This place is owned by a local couple who built it and now help to run it. They don’t advertise, and the building is unimpressive, but the high-ceilinged inside is airy and bright, with big windows everywhere onto a courtyard that — in contrast to the perfunctory runs of some corporate places — is lush and green, with a path that weaves through three distinct zones. It also has chickens and rabbits, plus one gregarious tortoise named Penelope; the owners know animals are good for those with dementia, and to hell with the small extra cost. Besides the full-time medical staff there is also a full-time activities director and a music director, and the TV stays off except for occasional movie nights. The staff changed little in my mother’s last years, and we both formed valuable bonds with several of them.

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Local ownership may not guarantee this kind of quality, but I’ve come to believe that corporate ownership guarantees quite the opposite. The hierarchy required to run a chain of facilities manufactures a kind of psychopathy: People at the top, making decisions for profit, are shielded by layers of management from what their decisions might mean. Local owners, by contrast, must face the results of their decisions; to be as cutthroat as chains they’d need to be actual psychopaths — and luckily that’s pretty rare.

To make eldercare less psychopathic at local levels, we could disincentivize ownership of more than one care facility. Getting good-enough city governments to do this would take lots of legwork, but it would be possible. Just as corporate lobbyists work hard to accomplish their aims — like building water-guzzling data centers in the desert near Tucson, against the city’s wishes — regular people can also lobby and win, as Brad and his cohort proved.  

Local change can be deeper change

Back when the Yes Men began in early 2000, we thought the world just needed a few giant tweaks. The final action of our first movie was a fictional mega-tweak: a reform of the World Trade Organization to serve human people instead of big corporate ones. Over the next two decades we never let go of the feeling that change at the top could occur through public pressure, and we communicated that through dozens of actions.

Today, of course, positive change at the federal level is unimaginable in the U.S. At that level, and in some cities and states, progress can only occur through changes in leadership — as has happened in New York City. But in most cities, and many states, the government’s good enough as it is: We just have to use it to fix what’s been broken in better, creative ways. That can also change worlds: Many movements, like women’s suffrage and marriage equality, spread city to city and state to state before changing national policy.

And who knows? The takeover of farming and manufacturing by big corporations destroyed rural economies, creating deep hardship that a tin-pot wannabe dictator turned into false grievances. Maybe building the muscles we need to declare independence from big corporations could not only help us to solve big problems now, but even help prevent future slides into fascism. That’s just theory; what’s certain is that it’s great fun to get our hands dirty. 

This story was produced in partnership with The Yes Men substack.

This article Making change from the dirt up was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Dwight Hua’s roommate knocked on his door at 5:30 a.m. on May 22, saying there was a notice for nearly 50,000 people in their city of Garden Grove, California, to evacuate due to the danger of a deadly chemical explosion at a nearby GKN Aerospace plant. Hua quickly left for a shelter in a neighboring city. But he had a lot of questions. 

As the evacuation stretched over five days, advocacy groups VietRISE — where Hua is a youth programs coordinator — the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and Orange County Justice for Palestine formed a coalition to demand “transparency about why a facility tied to global hazardous weapons manufacturing is operating in the middle of working-class immigrant neighborhoods.” Research led by the local chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement, or PYM, found that the company manufactured parts for military vehicles, including F-35 fighter jets, which are used in Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

“No one really knew that this was what we were living close to,” Hua said. “A company that makes money off of violence abroad is not the character of Garden Grove and its residents.”

Many residents who, like Hua, live just blocks away from the facility felt enraged when they found out. The coalition joined the People’s Embargo for Palestine, an international movement to establish an arms embargo on Israel, and began organizing actions to push the city to shut down GKN Aerospace and place a moratorium on military manufacturing in Garden Grove. They have been canvassing, showing up to city council meetings and circulating a petition that has drawn more than 11,000 signatures. Addressed to the mayor and city council, the petition demands “an immediate end to the use of our tax dollars, public land and public infrastructure to manufacture, store or transport the weapons that make this genocide possible.” 

While the Garden Grove City Council has canceled meetings and omitted GKN Aerospace from meeting agendas in the months since the evacuation, Hua said, the coalition has kept on growing in size and influence. Members continue to show up to city council meetings, canvass and meet with city officials, some of whom have shown support for the embargo.

The campaign for a weapons embargo is part of a larger international movement to stop global manufacturing and shipment of weapons to Israel. From Türkiye to Italy to the U.S., localized campaigns targeted at Israeli weapons suppliers have emerged, led by community groups and unions, and often supported by PYM chapters. Their goal is to end local complicity in the genocide — and ensure worker and community safety — through bans on weapons shipments through local airports and seaports, as well as shutdowns and moratoriums on weapons manufacturing facilities in residential areas.

Putting communities at risk for Israel

A coalition of community groups is leading an embargo campaign in New York City’s John F. Kennedy Airport, where dangerous explosives and F-35 bomber components bound for Israel have passed through the same runways as passenger flights. The campaign is calling on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to end arms shipments through public infrastructure. Most of the coalition’s efforts have been geared toward organizing and educating workers, especially unionized workers in warehouses and on planes. 

Abdullah Shehadeh, communications co-chair of Break the Chain, the coalition leading the campaign, said that workers were unaware they were handling explosives bound for Israel because they were mislabeled. 

“Workers feel very scared about what they’re doing in their day to day, not knowing that complicity like this is even possible for them,” Shehadeh said. “They didn’t sign up to be part of a supply chain of genocide.”

In outreach to workers, volunteers with the coalition also point out the dangers of handling explosives, noting that a munitions plant in Tennessee which manufactured the same explosives experienced a blast last year that destroyed an entire building and killed 16 people. 

Organized by New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter, Break the Chain was founded in 2025 by Palestinian liberation organizers in New York who wanted to focus on a tangible campaign to organize labor. 

The coalition is advocating for more transparency for workers and the public to know what is passing through their workplaces and communities. Volunteers with the coalition post educational flyers in Queens, New York, where many airport workers live, and hand them out on the air train that workers use to commute. The coalition encourages small businesses in the area to display informational posters and hold events in their spaces. A tool on the coalition website lets workers search for whether their employers are complicit in the genocide.

“It’s their right to know what they’re moving and to not be a part of a war machine that they didn’t sign up for,” Shehadeh said. “They should be moving civilian goods, not military goods or bombs going to a genocide.” 

Break the Chain also advocates for labor unions to pass resolutions calling for a ceasefire and end to military aid, to bargain for contract protections for workers who refuse to contribute to the supply chain of Israeli arms, and to work with elected city officials to explore expanding the rights of working-class New Yorkers. After meetings with union leaders and working groups, more than 20 unions have signed the coalition’s resolutions, including the United Auto Workers, Association of Flight Attendants, National Education Association and 1199SEIU.

Shehadeh said the coalition’s activism is “an intersection between labor, Palestine, and community and public safety.” He is concerned that if the explosives are mishandled or improperly stored, there could be a catastrophic explosion threatening the lives of the more than hundred thousand people who pass through JFK every day, as well as nearby communities. 

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Pro-Palestine activists arrested blocking New Jersey port

Garden Grove and the area of Queens surrounding JFK are both predominantly immigrant communities. Shehadeh said the transfer of weapons through JFK is an example of how “massive private profit fuels endless conflict, and the environmental health and moral burdens fall on working-class communities here in New York City.”

“A handful of billionaires line their pockets with profits from weapons contracts, while we are seeing crumbling infrastructure in our subways here in New York City; we’re seeing climate change get worse and worse,” Shehadeh said. 

Embargo campaigns at the ports

Activists in Texas have called on the Port of Houston to place an arms embargo at their ports, where critical parts for the F-35 fighter jet pass through to Israel. Upon learning from a PYM report that the Houston port was shipping parts for the same weapons used to bomb schools, refugee camps and hospitals, activists came together with PYM and local groups to form the Houston Arms Embargo Campaign in 2024.

The campaign took inspiration from PYM’s global Mask off Maersk campaign, which calls on people to get Maersk to end its contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and Israeli Ministry of Defense to ship military components to Israel. Under the contracts, the logistics and shipping giant handles everything from tactical vehicles used to transport Palestinian prisoners  to parts for armored tanks and aircraft and artillery systems used for slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon. According to a recent report published by PYM and Oxfam, Maersk shipped millions of pounds of cargo to Israeli military manufacturer, Elbit Systems, between October 2023 and July 2025.

PYM organizer Fouad Salah said that localizing the campaign has helped activate constituencies from students and workers to faith communities, and built relationships with 40 national and local organizations, including other Palestinian campaigns, and anti-gentrification, Black and Latino groups. 

There are similar campaigns at major ports in California, Louisiana, New Jersey and more. In New Jersey, activists used their own bodies and cars to block a port from delivering weapons to Israel in May.

“So many of the ports in this country are implicated in the transport of military cargo that’s used in an ongoing genocide, and I think this is a really important piece because this is public infrastructure, these are not military ports,” Salah said. “As constituents, we should have a say in what happens with our public infrastructure.”

Like the Break the Chain campaign, the Houston Arms Embargo Campaign has been flyering at community centers, parks, malls, mosques and churches. They have also circulated the Houston Arms Embargo petition, engaging constituents in the idea of an arms embargo and encouraging them to get involved. The campaign has also held free lunches provided by local restaurants for people interested to learn more about their work. In July, they held a picnic at a park to bring the community together for the campaign’s one-year anniversary, which was well-attended despite the Texas heat.

“The power is with the people, but for the people to exercise that power, they need to be educated and conscious of what’s going on, and so a lot of our tactics revolve around getting the average Houstonian aware and agitated about what’s happening at the port,” Salah said.

Many people Salah comes across don’t know much about how the ports near their homes are shipping weapons to Israel; once they find out, he said, they generally support the campaign and want to help. He said many people “have watched Palestinian children limbless crying for their mothers and fathers because of a genocide being committed by weapons manufactured and transported from the United States, and at a certain point, there is an ethical line that a person draws.”

He said that having a localized campaign at the ports gives people a place to feel like they can do something about it. 

“We were able to build a campaign that took [people’s general desire] to stop the genocide in Gaza, and hone it in to something that is happening in our city,” Salah said. “I think this gave people a sense of real purpose and real direction. It gave them a real, concrete, tangible thing that they could channel their energy into.”

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Similarly, Hua said that having a community-based coalition has empowered residents by giving them a platform for action.

“Having a coalition has really been a space for community members to be able to feel empowered to be involved in shaping their community,” Hua said. “We want to continue to strengthen the community power and not let this get swept under the rug, and so we are continuing to show up to city council meetings and continuing to build that power.”

This article US communities are organizing to end complicity with genocide in their backyards was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

There is a particular kind of political amnesia that can overtake movements in difficult times. We remember the victories but forget the arguments that preceded them. We remember the marches but forget the years of patient organizing that made them possible. We remember solidarity as a feeling rather than a political practice.

Alice Echols’ “Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic” is a useful antidote to that amnesia.

Echols tells the story of interracial and cross-racial organizing within the Black freedom movement through two organizations that bookend the decade: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, and the Black Panther Party. The Panthers’ commitment to armed self-defense, and later debates over militancy and guerrilla warfare, form part of that history. Echols’ central concern — and the focus of this review — is the difficult work of solidarity: how movements build relationships across differences in race, power and political position.

This book arrives at an important moment. Across the United States and elsewhere, racism, xenophobia, and religious and white supremacist nationalism are again being mobilized to divide people who might otherwise have common interests. Authoritarian movements understand something the left sometimes forgets: people who can be persuaded to see one another as enemies are much easier to govern.

The question of how we build solidarity across difference is therefore an urgent question of power.

From Black Power to “Radical Chic”

The title captures the book’s historical arc.

Black Power meant, among other things, the assertion of Black autonomy, self-determination and political power.

White Heat comes from SNCC organizer Bob Moses’s metaphor for the transformative potential of white participation in the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. Nearly 1,000 mostly white college students traveled to Mississippi that summer to support Black voter-registration efforts. Moses hoped their presence would expose white America to the reality of racial violence and help generate political transformation beyond Mississippi.

And then there was “Radical Chic,” Tom Wolfe’s infamous 1970 caricature of wealthy white liberals hosting a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Manhattan penthouse. Wolfe transformed cross-racial political solidarity into a punchline: wealthy liberals playing at revolution, fashionable people dabbling in radical causes. Echols argues that the essay became more than a satire of one awkward party: It helped create a durable political language for attacking solidarity itself.

What happened between those moments is the heart of the book. Echols resists a simple story of interracialism giving way to Black nationalism, or a morality tale in which one side was right and the other wrong. She describes experiments in solidarity that were sometimes extraordinarily productive, sometimes painful, and often both at once.

That complexity is precisely what makes this history useful now.

Solidarity is not sameness

The early SNCC experience illustrates both the promise and limitations of interracial organizing.

SNCC brought Black and white activists together in a shared struggle against segregation and disenfranchisement. But Freedom Summer also intensified questions about power inside the movement. What did it mean for white people to participate in a movement led by Black people? Could interracialism reproduce the racial hierarchy it was supposed to challenge?

Echols gives this contradiction a particularly revealing form. Some Black SNCC organizers noticed that local Black people who had repeatedly ignored their appeals to get involved would suddenly listen to newly arrived white male volunteers. In other cases, white volunteers arrived in Mississippi with assumptions about how things should be done, even taking over office work that Black staff had been doing. The conflicts revealed a deeper problem: The racial hierarchy SNCC was trying to dismantle could reappear inside an interracial movement.

These questions shaped the organization’s strategy and eventually contributed to SNCC’s turn toward Black Power and the expulsion of white staff in 1966.

Echols’ history offers no simple verdict on interracial organizing. It shows how coalitions can generate real political power while reproducing some of the very inequalities they are trying to overcome. The people in her history wrestled with that contradiction, producing new strategies, organizations, alliances and political possibilities.

Their experiences point toward a more demanding alternative to divide and rule: organized solidarity capable of turning difference into political power.

Organizing is more than mobilizing

One of the book’s most important lessons for the present concerns the difference between mobilizing and organizing.

The 1960s are often remembered through spectacular images: marches, demonstrations, sit-ins, crowds in the streets. But the power of the movements Echols describes depended on much more than protest.

It grew through people living in communities, building relationships, developing political confidence, creating institutions and learning how to act collectively. One example is the Freedom Schools organized during Mississippi Summer. Their purpose went beyond political messaging. Organizers developed curricula intended to help people understand their communities and develop the confidence and skills to participate in changing them. The schools became part of the infrastructure through which Freedom Summer could turn a national moment of attention into deeper local organizing.

Freedom Summer did not emerge from nowhere. Neither did the Panthers’ survival programs or their legal and political defense networks. This infrastructure depended on relationships and material capacities built over time.

The mass protests following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and more recently against Trump’s authoritarianism, demonstrated extraordinary popular anger. But mass participation alone does not create durable power. Movements need the capacity to bring people into action — and then to keep organizing them after the cameras leave. They need structures through which people develop political agency, and organizations capable of surviving repression, disagreement, electoral cycles and changes in public mood.

We need movements that can mobilize. We also need movements that can organize.

The politics of the “ally”

Another question running through the book has become familiar on the contemporary left: What should people do when they want to support a struggle that is not their own? Echols offers no simple answer.

White activists sometimes became important organizers and collaborators. Others became what Echols calls “awkward allies” or “clueless comrades.” The harder question concerned the terms of participation: what could meaningful support look like in a movement organized around Black self-determination?

Ella Baker advocated for a broad movement expansive enough even to include what she called the “matron in the fur coat.” Her approach was not merely rhetorical. When SNCC was getting started, Baker hired Jane Stembridge, a white Southern theology student and poet, as the organization’s first paid staffer. Echols notes that historian Clayborne Carson has suggested SNCC might have collapsed during that first summer without the energy and skills Baker and Stembridge brought to the work. Baker’s organizing philosophy centered on developing people’s capacity rather than accumulating authority. As Echols notes, she believed that “strong people don’t need strong leaders.”

Solidarity is a relationship, not a performance. That does not mean every contribution carries the same value or that movements should welcome everyone without conditions. It means that meaningful participation depends on relationships of trust, accountability and a willingness to support work that one may not control.

The Panthers offer a particularly interesting example. They remained committed to Black political autonomy while deliberately cultivating relationships with white radicals, lawyers, journalists, publishers and other supporters. These relationships could be politically useful, but they also created tensions. White radicals sometimes struggled with being asked to play supporting rather than leading roles, while the Panthers had to navigate relationships with people whose social position was fundamentally different from their own. Huey Newton later acknowledged the importance of progressive white activists to the Panthers, even as relationships between Black and white radicals remained fraught.

SNCC’s evolving approach to white radicals points toward another way of thinking about this relationship. Stokely Carmichael, later Kwame Ture, increasingly argued that white activists should organize in their own communities. White radicals were encouraged to confront the institutions shaping their own lives, including the military draft and the Vietnam War. Bob Moses himself worked with white antiwar organizers such as David Dellinger, A. J. Muste and Staughton Lynd.

Carmichael’s argument proposed a different structure for solidarity: people developing power in their own communities and around the forms of oppression shaping their own lives while remaining connected to a broader struggle.

That approach can help shift solidarity away from paternalism. Rather than entering someone else’s struggle primarily as a helper, people are asked to examine how the systems they are fighting also shape their own lives, communities and possibilities. That can create a more grounded basis for political commitment.

There is a tension here as well. A politics built around one’s own stake can narrow into self-interest, with people feeling responsible only for struggles in which they can identify themselves as directly affected. The challenge is to begin from one’s own lived position without ending there — to build power where we are while recognizing the larger systems that connect our struggles.

Autonomy and coalition can coexist.

The material side of solidarity

Echols also pays unusual attention to something movements sometimes overlook: the practical resources needed to keep political work going. Movements need lawyers, meeting spaces, printing presses, transportation, ways to communicate, food, bail money, staff, research, childcare, and, of course, money. 

The Panthers’ relationships with white lawyers and other supporters offer a useful example. Their legal defense efforts depended on people who could provide skills, money, publicity and access to institutions that the Panthers themselves could not easily command. In courtrooms across the country, mostly white left-wing lawyers defended Black radicals against prosecutors and police forces. These relationships could strengthen the movement materially and sometimes helped expose the workings of the state itself. 

Political economy is inseparable from organizing. Good intentions do not build legal networks, communications systems, or the other infrastructure movements need.

Resources, however, also create relationships of power. A movement dependent on wealthy supporters can become vulnerable to their influence. A donor may want to help without understanding the political work — or may expect gratitude, access, influence or even authority in return.

Movements often need resources from people outside their core constituencies. The challenge is to build relationships in which those resources expand collective power rather than quietly shifting power toward those who control them.

Rather than resolve this contradiction, Echols shows why movements have to confront it.

Repression and the politics of division

Movements do not operate in a vacuum.

Echols shows how repression can reshape a movement from within. COINTELPRO and local police “Red Squads” amplified existing rivalries and ideological divisions inside the Panthers, helping create a climate of debilitating paranoia. Panther chief of staff David Hilliard captured the bitter irony: The party had been created to help Black people determine their own destinies, yet increasingly “the state — FBI, police, Red Squads — is deciding our fate.”

Repression also pushed the Panthers toward coalition. Echols traces how the pressure of state surveillance and police attacks encouraged the party to seek alliances with other radicals and left-leaning liberals, including through the 1969 United Front Against Fascism, a broad coalition that brought together the Panthers and other groups concerned about state repression and the threat of fascism.

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Ingredients for building courage

Authoritarian politics thrives on fragmentation. It encourages workers to blame migrants rather than employers, poor people rather than concentrated wealth, and racial minorities rather than the institutions that reproduce inequality. It turns religious difference into a political weapon and cultural difference into evidence of threat.

The parallels between the present and the 1960s have limits. The present should not be reduced to a replay of that earlier period. The underlying political problem, however, is familiar: Those in power often seek to divide people who might otherwise recognize their shared interests and build power together.

Echols’ history shows what becomes possible when movements resist that fragmentation — and what can happen when they cannot. 

“Radical Chic” and the attack on solidarity

Perhaps the book’s most surprising contribution is its treatment of Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.”

Wolfe’s 1970 essay mocked a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party held at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Manhattan penthouse. The image was almost irresistible: wealthy white liberals in evening clothes mingling with Black revolutionaries, champagne and revolution sharing the same room. Wolfe turned the gathering into a joke about fashionable people playing at radicalism.

Echols argues that something more consequential happened. “Radical Chic” helped establish a political language for dismissing cross-racial solidarity as fundamentally unserious: the rich were hypocrites, the radicals were dangerous, and everyone involved was performing for status.

That framing has proved remarkably durable. Echols traces how the idea of “radical chic” migrated into conservative politics, becoming part of a broader effort to portray progressive politics as the indulgence of cultural elites rather than a response to real systems of exploitation and racial domination.

There is an important tension here. Some of the people who participated in these relationships undoubtedly were motivated by status, fashion or a desire to be close to something exciting. Yet the imperfections of individual participants do not tell us much about the value of solidarity itself. Treating privileged or imperfect allies as evidence that coalition is inherently fraudulent can become a way of making solidarity seem suspect.

Echols shows that cross-racial solidarity persisted in forms far removed from Wolfe’s caricature. Black radicals continued to find unexpected points of connection with white lawyers, journalists, activists, jurors and ordinary people who encountered their politics through organizing, political trials and community work. What mattered was whether those relationships could produce greater political understanding and collective power.

That distinction matters now. In a political culture increasingly eager to reduce solidarity to social-media signaling, celebrity activism or elite posturing, cynicism can spread easily.

We should be capable of criticizing performative solidarity without becoming cynical about solidarity itself. The first can sharpen political judgment. The second can become political disarmament.

A history worth putting to work

“Black Power, White Heat” offers no formula for building the next movement. Its value lies in the richer political history it gives us for thinking about our own organizing — and in the questions that history leaves us with:

How do we build solidarity across real differences in power and experience?

How do we combine autonomy with coalition?

How do we organize people rather than simply mobilize them?

How do we build institutions that can survive repression?

How do we develop political power within our own communities while remaining committed to a larger movement?

And how do we build relationships strong enough to withstand the deliberate efforts of those in power to divide us?

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Echols’ story offers no easy answers, and the people she writes about did not have them either. Their collaborations were productive and fraught, sometimes exhilarating and sometimes heartbreaking. That is precisely why this history is useful.

The left does not need another mythology about the 1960s. We need its contradictions.

For those of us trying to build movements now — against racism, militarism, ecological destruction, exploitation, xenophobia, patriarchy and authoritarianism — this history offers something more valuable than nostalgia. It offers political literacy.

Read it with your organizing group. Read it with your political education circle. Argue about it. Ask where the people in the book succeeded and where they failed. Ask what their dilemmas look like in your own community.

Because solidarity is something we build.

In an age increasingly defined by attempts to divide us, building solidarity may be one of the most important forms of power we have.

This article is co-published with ZNetwork.org.

This article What the 1960s can teach us about cross-racial solidarity was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Every Aug. 30, the world marks the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. Beneath the official statements and solemn commemorations lies a stark, unsettling reality: the practice of making people vanish — and holding them in silence away from the world — remains a favored tactic for powerful regimes seeking to crush dissent. The goal of authoritarian states is to cut dissenters off from the outside world until public attention fades. 

Yet as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani highlighted during a global leadership summit last month, solidarity is far more than a moral sentiment; when organized effectively, it acts as a concrete strategy to pull those trapped in state-enforced shadows back into the light. 

Six years ago, when CIVICUS, a global alliance dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society, launched the Stand As My Witness campaign, we made that exact wager: that the surest way to protect an imprisoned or disappeared defender is public visibility. In practice, that means turning quiet solidarity into loud, coordinated action, sharing their stories, mobilizing petitions, amplifying their voices across borders, and forcing governments to act. The objective is simple: to make their continued detention impossible to ignore.

Since 2020, the campaign has put faces to some 50 detained defenders and helped win freedom for 32 of them. Among them are Loujain al-Hathloul, who stood up for women’s right to drive in Saudi Arabia; Floriane Irangabiye, who set up a radio station to profile the lives of exiled Burundians; and Muhammad Ismail, who spoke out against human rights abuses by security forces in Pakistan. Solidarity works. That is exactly why we cannot stop now. 

Refusing erasure

Authoritarian regimes rely on the quiet assumption that if a prisoner is hidden long enough, the outside world will simply move on. Countering this state-enforced oblivion requires bringing individual names, faces and struggles back into the light.

Khurram Parvez has spent decades ensuring that victims of state-enforced disappearances in Kashmir are not forgotten. For that work, the prominent human rights defender was jailed in November 2021 under India’s draconian anti-terror laws. In exposing how security forces made citizens vanish, Parvez became a target of the same machinery of erasure himself.

In 2023, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared his imprisonment unlawful. Though an Indian court recently granted him bail after four and a half years without trial, state authorities moved instantly to halt his release. His ongoing ordeal is a reminder that when those who document disappearances are silenced, an entire society loses its voice.

Narges Mohammadi’s story reveals both the power of witness and its fragility. The Iranian Nobel laureate who has spoken out against torture and the death penalty has been repeatedly arrested, re-sentenced and subjected to periods of incommunicado detention — a form of short-term enforced disappearance designed to cut her off entirely from family, legal counsel and the outside world. 

Her ongoing persecution maps almost exactly onto the world’s attention span: when global pressure was high, she was granted temporary relief; when it eased, authorities placed her in punitive isolation and handed her additional sentences. In May, after collapsing in prison following suspected heart attacks, she was released on medical bail, some 45 pounds lighter and barely recognizable. Her cumulative sentence still stands at 44 years. A conditional release is not freedom, and the threat of return — and total isolation — has never lifted.

Buzurgmehr Yorov’s decade behind bars illustrates how states turn the justice system itself into a tool of erasure. Arrested in 2015 after taking on targeted political clients and speaking out against their torture, the Tajik lawyer has faced continuous punishment for refusing to stay silent. Held incommunicado and repeatedly placed in solitary isolation, he has been subjected to secret trials behind closed doors that pushed his sentence out to 2043, when he will be in his 70s. Though the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called for his immediate release years ago, Tajikistan continues to keep him in the shadows. Silencing the advocate to bury the abuse is the ultimate act of state-enforced invisibility.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya embodies a newer frontier of enforced disappearance: the deliberate targeting of those who keep others alive. Director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, he was detained by Israeli forces after refusing to abandon his patients, and he has since been held without charge, cut off from his family and the outside world as his health deteriorates. 

He is not alone. He is one of 14 Gaza doctors whose release Physicians for Human Rights-Israel is now seeking before Israel’s Supreme Court. Amnesty International has warned that his life is in grave danger, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has ruled his detention unlawful, and Médecins Sans Frontières has called for the release of all arbitrarily detained Palestinian healthcare workers. Their vanishing carries its own chilling logic: when the very people who run toward catastrophe to save others can be made to disappear, no one is meant to feel safe.

Breaking the architecture of erasure

Demolishing this system of state-enforced silence cannot be left to traditional diplomacy or closed-door negotiation alone. Protecting the space for dissent requires transforming public solidarity into an active, organized strategy.

At that same forum, Mamdani challenged governments to consider who among today’s vilified activists will be glorified in retrospect once history passes judgment. Parvez, Mohammadi, Yorov and Dr. Abu Safiya are direct answers to that question, alongside dozens of other defenders sitting in cells or secret detention facilities.

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And the space to defend them is shrinking at an alarming rate. Through the CIVICUS Monitor, we have tracked a steady global closing of civic freedoms — to the point where a mere three percent of the global population now lives in countries with open civic space. Across 83 countries now classified as “closed” or “repressed,” states rely on a familiar playbook: new laws branding activists as foreign agents, cross-border surveillance, and a news cycle so crowded with crises that political prisoners risk slipping into total obscurity.

Human rights defenders are not a threat to national security. They are often the last line of defense between a society and its own collapse: the journalists, lawyers and organizers who strive to hold power to account when institutions fail. Defending them is not charity; it is self-defense for democracy.

When powerful regimes attempt to bury dissenters in prison, global solidarity becomes a lifeline. Just as worldwide public pressure was instrumental in freeing Nelson Mandela after 27 years of state isolation, public witness remains the most formidable tool we have today. Thirty-two former political prisoners are free because ordinary people chose to speak up when states demanded silence.

As Mamdani noted, it is often in the darkest moments that true light becomes visible. The current darkness around civic freedoms is undeniable. Our ask remains deceptively simple: Learn a name. Say it out loud. Stand as a witness. Let us make sure that Khurram Parvez, Narges Mohammadi, Buzurgmehr Yorov, and Dr. Abu Safiya are not still waiting in the dark when the next anniversary comes.

This article Why solidarity is vital to freeing imprisoned human rights defenders was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When Minneapolis organizer Alec Stewart pulled out of his parking spot on June 16 and headed to work, it seemed like an ordinary day. That is, until Homeland Security Investigations, a detective-like sub-agency of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, rolled up with multiple squad cars and dragged him out of his vehicle. 

“I was never told I was arrested,” said Stewart, who goes by Mac. “I was not told what for. I was not shown any warrants. I had no idea [I was going to be arrested] until I was in cuffs.”

Mac was among the thousands of Minnesotans who rallied to defend their neighbors this January when Trump inundated Minneapolis-St. Paul with federal immigration agents who outnumbered regular police 3 to 1. Residents responded with one of the most sweeping, complex and powerful movements of the decade, mobilizing a multitude of existing relationships and organizations to craft a shield capable of fighting off Trump’s domestic militia. Using the encrypted app Signal, they built networks to track officers and warn potential arrestees. They launched mutual aid networks to support those who were in hiding to avoid becoming targets of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. They blockaded roads, tailed ICE vehicles and went out on a one-day general strike. 

The charges faced by Mac and his 14 co-defendants, all of whom were arrested on the same day, carry multi-year sentences. The government claims all 15 people indicted “did knowingly conspire … to prevent by force, intimidation and threats, officers and employees of the United States Department of Homeland Security … from discharging the duties of their officers,” while individual defendants have been charged with additional crimes like assault on a federal officer. The alleged “conspiracy” involved everything from conversations in Signal chats about plans to blockade an ICE processing center, to assigning working groups for the Jan. 23 General Strike, to possessing homemade defensive shields or just following federal officers — as tens of thousands around the country have done. 

What’s particularly alarming to the defendants and their allies is that the charges don’t cite any specific officers who were assaulted, and the government’s evidence includes mundane activist chatter: discussing protests and ICE locations, posting an article from the anarchist website CrimethInc. Anything provably tied to organizing, or just radical ideas, became proof of conspiracy: renting a U-Haul, purchasing a trailer from Facebook Marketplace, calling on Facebook for the public to “become ungovernable” — all were alleged evidence of malicious intent. 

What’s also alarming is how that information was gathered. Recently, the defense filed a motion that revealed the existence of Operation Puppet Master, a program to surveil and investigate Twin Cities labor unions, churches and community groups in advance of the filing of criminal charges. Unions in which defendants were member leaders had their finances quietly inspected, including their national unions’ political donations. Undercover officers attended protest planning meetings and covertly recorded unsuspecting citizens. The level of surveillance was shockingly broad: Homeland Security Investigations had near carte blanche to categorize almost any organization that could oppose sweeping deportation arrests as potentially criminal. 

If the government can make these charges stick, it could have a profound chilling effect on one of the largest social movements of the 21st century, and could chart a pathway for the Trump administration to effectively criminalize any opposition. That is why these 15 defendants have vowed to fight the charges, and why they have a committee of supporters who are doing what it takes to support those who have been singled out.

They came for everyone

“I think they picked us out because we’re good organizers,” said Treasure Thoreson, a special education teacher who was among those indicted. All 15 of the defendants are union members, and many are leaders in their locals. Thoreson is an executive board member of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators and was a captain during their confrontational strike in 2022. When Trump came back in 2024, she knew deportation defense had to be the priority. She built on her strike experience as she began to organize against ICE in her neighborhood, working with a group of rank-and-file union members called the Workers’ Solidarity Circle.

“This is purely a way to try and send a message of fear and of repression,” Thoreson said of the charges. That opinion was echoed by everyone working on the Minneapolis case, and also by those doing jail support for criminalized protesters across the country. 

The Minneapolis 15, as the defendants have become known, are the latest in what is becoming an institutional strategy by the federal government. In the fall of 2025, a 12-count indictment was issued relating to a shooting of an officer during a July 4 protest outside of the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas. In September, Trump labeled “antifa” a “Domestic Terrorist Organization” and connected the Prairieland case to it. Prosecutors in the case used “antifa” ideology as evidence of “providing material support to terrorists” — support that allegedly came in the form of offering “property, services, training, communications equipment, weapons, explosives, personnel (including themselves) and transportation.”

The Prairieland indictments cast a wide net and tried to implicate protesters, some of whom barely knew each other, in the shooting based on their attendance at the demonstration, participation in a Signal channel coordinating direct actions and, in one particularly shocking situation, having moved a box of political zines that were considered evidence. 

Many of these defendants were ultimately convicted of charges like rioting or providing material support to terrorists and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, for a cumulative sentence of more than 450 years in federal prison. The defendant who transferred the box of protest literature received 30 years for “corruptly concealing a document or record.” 

“The outcome of this case will haunt movements for decades to come,” wrote the Prairieland defense committee in a public statement. “The Trump administration is using what happened on July 4 to test its ability to criminalize dissent and chill all opposition.” 

Also last fall, six demonstrators, including a congressional candidate, were arrested while protesting the Broadview ICE facility in the Chicago suburbs and charged with felony conspiracy to impede a federal official, among other charges, though the felony charges were eventually dropped. Then, in January, 39 people were arrested at the Cities Church in St. Paul for protesting against the ICE officer who served as their lay preacher, and charged with interfering with religious freedom. These arrests galvanized the media because former CNN host Don Lemon, who was covering the event as a journalist, was among those charged, thus sending the message that reporters could be treated as perpetrators. 

Reuters found at least 655 cases brought in 2025 and early 2026 under 18 U.S.C. Section 111, the primary law being used against people accused of interfering with ICE, which punishes anyone who “forcibly assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates or interferes with” federal officers. This was the rationale given by masked federal immigration agents for arresting 42-year-old Minnesota resident Becky Ringstrom after surrounding her car and pounding on her window with a metal object. As a result, she was told, her information was entered into a government database, presumably allowing the administration to further build out a list of activists who challenge their authority. 

What’s different about the Minneapolis case, is that it uses another statute, 18 U.S.C. Section 372, focusing on alleged coordination, which widens its potential scope. 

With arrests mounting, charges escalating, and the government employing broad infiltration and surveillance, those who are organizing the defense committee hope that their model can be reproduced by communities around the country if and when their resistance is criminalized.

The best defense

“A lot of what the defense committee is trying to do is bring attention to the fact that this happened and show support for these people,” said Emily, a Minneapolis organizer who is a part of the defense committee and asked that only her first name be used for fear of government reprisal. 

When activists are arrested, they are at a huge disadvantage in terms of resources and finances. A defense committee is critical to pooling community connections and skills that can support them as they head towards trial. 

Because legal costs and the expenses of other consequences from facing such extraordinary charges can become insurmountable, creating a fundraiser was the first order of business. The fund had reached over $390,000 as of Aug. 27. Immediate support is often the next priority: helping the defendants pay their rent, get groceries and figure out day-to-day needs, particularly since in this case the defendants were ordered to have no communication with each other by the court. 

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Steadfast resistance under occupation from Minneapolis to Palestine

“I think that’s another reason they’re doing this is to scare people that this could happen to you if you do anything to protect your neighbors,” Emily said. “You could be facing legal charges and have to go through that process, which could take months, if not [longer].” 

This is why Mac says “the process is the punishment,” since the time and money it takes to even win a case, or see it through until it is dismissed, can be enormous. Since the evidence includes things most of the city was doing, the slogan “Minnesota, the land of 100,000 unindicted codefendants” has spread.

While financial and legal support are absolutely critical, so, too, is ensuring that the defendants stay a part of the public conversation and are supported by larger institutional players. Some members of the defense committee work with the media, while others connect with community groups. And as members of unions, the co-defendants have a built-in base of support. 

“Today, the Trump administration is trying to criminalize those who speak up for their neighbors — trashing civil liberties, transparency and accountability — and then pepper spraying those who dare to call them out,” said Randi Weingarten, the national president of American Federation of Teachers, of which Thoreson’s union is an affiliate. 

Union membership is mentioned in the indictment, as is the historic Jan. 23 general strike, which suggests that labor activism is part of why the Minneapolis 15 were singled out. Unions have played an especially large role in the movement against ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis, above and beyond that single-day strike. Unions like Unite HERE helped to transport vulnerable immigrant workers to and from work, and others, like CWA Local 7250 and SEIU Local 26, built mutual aid networks to support those who couldn’t work for fear of ICE arrest. The Minneapolis Federation of Educators had one of the most central roles, working with parents to prevent ICE arrests at schools by establishing hundreds of weekly watch shifts each week.

Most movements that have faced extreme legal repression, from the Black Panthers to the New Left, have had to maintain long-term support for political prisoners. These efforts are necessary to help to ensure that no one is left behind, though they can require significant time and financial resources. But they also help the larger project survive, which in this case means maintaining the systems of mutual aid and direct action that activists are invested in.

“It would be tragic to see all the work we’ve done get hamstrung by this politically repressive move,” said Mac, echoing what other defendants have said: The best form of support is to continue to defend our communities. 

“[We need to] keep on going and doing what we have been doing — organizing, developing decentralized local groups that can have each other’s backs, so that when something happens again, we have this protection — and to continue to get unions involved,” said Emily, in a point echoed by the defendants.

The committee is eyeing upcoming court dates over pretrial discovery motions that will determine how widely the state can cast its evidentiary net. Discovery can be punitive in the same way that the length and cost of a court case can. The process can be used to pull private conversations and information about dissidents into the public record. This can include conversations and internet activity that range from embarrassing to incriminating, often forcing activists to go through a painfully humiliating process of exposure that leads them open to further repression. Putting limits on that is a priority for the committee. 

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With the federal government’s wildly outsized indictment and sweeping surveillance tactics, the outcome could be precedent-setting for what options federal authorities have when looking to infiltrate a particular locality’s anti-ICE network. Given that Trump has also used ICE as a kind of federal protest police, his federal allies need a legal victory that would allow Trump to target any city that defies him.

The only thing that will stop that, besides good legal counsel, is having the community behind them to remind prosecutors and judges that their actions are observable and have consequences ranging from protests to lawsuits and election losses. Trump’s attacks on civil liberties and democracy are sustained primarily where resistance wanes. While the neutrality of courts has held in some cases and bent to Trump’s will in others, what happens outside of the courtroom is just as important as what happens inside it.

This article The movement to defend the Minneapolis 15 was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.