As we approach the one-year anniversary of the National Guard’s occupation of Washington, D.C., it’s worth pausing to learn what D.C. resistance has to teach us — especially heading into the midterms.

Many of us are carrying real fear about how far Trump might go to interfere with this election. Our fear isn’t unwarranted. But it doesn’t have to be ungrounded, either. Yes, he will say outrageous things. Yes, the heads of the Department of Justice and FBI are trying to keep power for their boss and intimidate voter rights groups. Yes, if Trump could stop elections he would. 

But an authoritarian who has to sabotage an election is doing it from a place of weakness. Trump is not Narendra Modi, who steadily gained popularity (until a grassroots “cockroach” movement turned the tables). Trump is in political freefall with cratering poll numbers and is lashing out; his only path to retain power is undermining the will of voters.

Much of his weakness now has to do with how our movements have harnessed backfire. Trump’s use of ICE is limited by the fierce national resistance to his paramilitary. Backlash against the voter suppression of Callais brought Black voters in Alabama and other states to the polls in force. Trump’s power of controlling narrative isn’t as strong as it used to be. Even Fox News avoided re-airing his recent rant about the 2020 election. Admittedly we have more to do, but he is overreaching — his seizure of ballots in Fulton County in January to boost his Big Lie only woke up more people in the election protection space to the threat he posed. 

So rather than let our fears run wild, we can ground them in what’s already happened and how people responded. That’s the idea behind my “Election Defense Scenarios” book. It’s an attempt to lay out the scenarios of election sabotage — from National Guard at the polls to disinformation, Department of Justice threats and last-minute rule changes. In many cases, we don’t have to imagine what might happen — we can look to very recent history.

D.C. is one of the clearest examples we have. The city faced a wide array of threats and prepared for the June 16 primary without letting fear set the terms. Here’s what they did.

D.C.’s challenges

Some of the challenges were the ordinary kind that come with any election reform. D.C.’s primary was the first election in the city’s history to use ranked-choice voting, after voters approved Initiative 83 in 2024. That meant there had to be a real voter education lift — organizers needed to teach people how ranking works. And there were the usual worries about longer lines as poll workers and voters adjusted to a new system. 

But bigger issues loomed. By election time, D.C. had been living with a federalized National Guard presence for nearly a year, including a month-long federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department the previous summer. Ahead of the July 4 “America 250” celebrations, federal officials announced a “summer surge” that added roughly 2,500 more troops, bringing the total in the city to over 5,000.

The threat of the National Guard loomed large. At an estimated cost of over $1 billion per year for Trump’s domestic deployments, the National Guard has harassed citizens and decreased trust in the military. During the 2020 election, organizers say, National Guard troops had been deployed following Black Lives Matter protests and reportedly told people in line they had to get out of line to enforce the city’s curfew — an incident that went undocumented because no one had thought to film it in the moment.

Surprisingly, National Guards were deployed from Democratic-led states, including Michigan (and immediately after the election, Minnesota and Hawaii). At least Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has since removed its troops. 

Previous Coverage

Here is a proven formula for protecting the vote while keeping the peace

Using National Guards to interfere with elections was repeatedly threatened. As the Brennan Center reported, “It is illegal to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to any polling place.” Yet, Trump said, “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement” at polling locations.

Alongside the troops came fears of political interference — a worry sharpened by D.C.’s unusual constitutional position. Congress controls D.C.’s budget and has repeatedly attempted to gut the city’s local governance. When President Trump was asked what he’d do if Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George — a self-described democratic socialist whose campaign was frequently compared to Zohran Mamdani’s — won the mayoral primary, he answered, “I wouldn’t like it — and maybe we take back Washington, run it on the federal basis. We won’t put up with it.” Organizers couldn’t dismiss the threat as bluster. It had legal teeth: Congress and the president hold unique levers over the city.

Each location has different conditions and scenarios. But no matter where you are, we can still learn a lot from what D.C. did to make their election a success.

The GOTV machine kept running

Groups with get-out-the-vote chops, like grassroots movement Free DC, ran the playbook for turning out voters. They did things like matching voter files to canvassing tools, texting unregistered residents and working precinct by precinct to make the case for coming out to vote. Free DC in particular leaned into its base-building structure. It gave volunteers the tools to text out surveys asking people when they planned to vote, then follow up with 20 people closest to them whom they’d personally commit to reaching. 

It’s classic deep-organizing infrastructure, repurposed for a high-fear election environment. Because the threats loomed so large, many organizers wondered if turnout would sink. In the end, good organizing plus frustration over being occupied for nearly a year drove the highest primary turnout since 1994.

But turnout operations don’t answer the question: What do you do about troops near the polls?

Build a coalition where none existed

D.C. needed more robust election protection infrastructure than it had before. The DC Election Protection Coalition came together under the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Advancement Project, alongside Free DC, Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, the Washington Interfaith Network and more than 100 other partner organizations.

They trained hundreds of nonpartisan volunteers, who were divided into two tracks: election protection field attorneys (for people with legal backgrounds) and grassroots poll monitors (for everyone else). Both were stationed outside voting locations across all eight wards to answer questions and help resolve problems as they came up.

Long before Election Day, National Guard troops became one of those problems. The official election protection hotline fielded a report that the National Guard was outside a drop off box in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. Keya Chatterjee, co-founder of Free DC, decided to go check out the situation. When she arrived, she immediately whipped out her phone, capturing a video of armed Florida National Guards members right outside one of D.C.’s 450-pound, six-foot, double-locked ballot boxes. The Guard members said they had not been told to stay away and showed no knowledge they were apparently infringing on the law.

Keya’s documentation forced a response. After footage was shared with the D.C. Attorney General and Board of Elections, they opened a direct line to the Joint Task Force overseeing Guard operations in the city — and got a written commitment that troops would keep a 50-foot distance from polling locations on Election Day (an affirmation, at least, of what the law says).

This move did several things. Yes, it smoothed the way for a cleaner election. But the video confrontation went viral and helped model handling fear in productive ways. Seeing Keya talk directly to the National Guard showed residents how to stick up for their rights — a behavior a few folks would end up having to do on Election Day. 

Train monitors

Everyone in the coalition wanted to reduce people’s fear. They didn’t always agree on how.

The traditional election protection approach for communicating with the public tends to minimize threats. The instinct is to keep messaging that elections are being run freely and fairly. But D.C. residents are already living the violence of Trump’s occupation.

Federal marshals shot and killed Julian Bailey in northeast D.C. in February. Car pursuits by the U.S. Park Police resulted in at least two deaths, including bystander Nolberto Meza, after the agency loosened restrictions on high-speed chases. And a damning report from Brookings Institution shows that nearly 7 in 1,000 children in D.C. have had a parent snatched away by ICE or other federal agents. In such a context, speaking to people’s lived experience is more reassuring than disguising the ugly truth.

The advice to name the threats maps onto recent messaging research. Following extensive qualitative and quantitative testing, ASO Communications and others found, “speaking about the anti-voter agenda increases self-reported desire among pro-voter Americans to feel concern over this agenda (+5-10 [percent] over the course of the survey), to engage in politics (70 percent are more motivated), and to motivate friends to vote (+5 [percent] over survey). We can frame voting as an act of resistance.” They noted that concrete descriptors about how the regime is keeping people from voting created the greatest engagement.

The DC Election Protection Coalition took up that approach as they trained their monitors.

The two approaches weren’t always perfectly in sync. Some election protection trainers taught volunteers to document, document, document if they saw Guard troops acting illegally — take horizontal videos for the widest capturing of information and file a formal incident report. By contrast (even sometimes in the same training!) grassroots groups’ guidance put the emphasis on making sure the voter in front of you got to vote right now — heckle, press, advocate directly for the Guard to leave, rather than only documenting for later.

Those need not be contradictory instincts so much as complementary ones — document for accountability (and video tape!), intervene for the person standing in line. And coalitions built for a genuine crisis rarely resolve every tactical disagreement in advance. What made the coalition work wasn’t perfect unanimity — it was offering space for each group to share its approach knowing we’re moving in the same direction.

Expand the circle

Election protection efforts are too often narrowly built around technical expertise in election work. By building the coalition with grassroots mobilizers at the table, it brought in the expertise of those who knew how to rapidly mobilize. To combat the often fractured disconnect between grassroots election work and traditional election protection, Freedom Trainers and All Voting is Local, as one example, have teamed up to host cross-silo sessions between these groups to strengthen ties.

One of the D.C. coalition’s sharper moves was pulling in local rapid response and mutual aid networks so they were feeding into the same control room as the election protection operation. That meant in addition to information like “which polling place has a printer problem,” groups like Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid fed into a citywide picture, including neighborhood locations of ICE activity and checkpoints. That meant volunteers had better information about what was going on across the neighborhood that day.

The day of the election 

June 16 brought the ordinary hiccups of any election — printers breaking, standard supply issues — but D.C.’s neighborhood-level organizing infrastructure meant problems got solved fast. In the summer heat, one neighborhood network located a leftover cooler of water and got it to a polling site to help overheated voters and volunteers. In Columbia Heights and the other seven sites approved to stay open past the normal closing time because of long lines, volunteers swarmed with snacks and drinks to help people stay in line as long as it took.

There were also multiple National Guard interactions that went unreported. According to Keya Chatterjee, West End Library did have National Guards come into the poll site. Monitors were already at the site and immediately began telling them to leave and filming the confrontation with armed troops. Monitors repeatedly insisted the military had no legal basis to be there, and after forceful haranguing, the troops left without further incident. 

A decision then had to be made: Do we release this or not? I can’t speak to the exact decision-making, but the reports of the National Guard at polling sites appeared sporadic (not a coordinated threat) and had limited impact because monitors moved fast. It seems voters still voted. 

All this affirms the mantra of “record, record, record.” Even if it ends up not being released to the public, getting the facts on record is critical.

The plans that didn’t happen

Because ranked-choice tabulation can take days if no candidate wins a first-choice majority, organizers built a “patience campaign” in advance — a plan to spend up to a week reminding people that a delayed result is not a stolen one, and that counting ballots correctly takes time.

They also built a second, sharper contingency in case results were seriously contested or tampered with: a template borrowed from their experience organizing on May Day 2026. People were told if things went seriously wrong, to recreate the May Day activity — morning intersection blockades, a midday march to the Capitol, evening gatherings — all under a “no work, no school, no shopping” banner.

It did not have to be activated. But having a real plan for nonviolent noncooperation ready was itself part of what let residents and organizers approach Election Day with confidence instead of dread.

The threat isn’t over — and neither is the lesson

Trump’s “take back Washington” threat hasn’t gone away just because the primary is over. Bills to weaken D.C. home rule continue through Congress, and the National Guard’s presence has been extended through the end of Trump’s current term — to the next presidential inauguration in January 2029. 

D.C. has to take the takeover threat seriously, knowing not all threats will materialize.

As D.C. is marking one year of occupation, Free DC is inviting organizations and elected officials to sign on in opposition to the troops’ presence. The ask uses simple messaging like, “Publicly oppose any effort to prevent the seating of duly elected officials representing D.C. or any other jurisdiction.” And from individuals, Free DC is seeking support asking governors to get their troops out of D.C..

But D.C.’s story matters well beyond D.C. What happens in D.C. affects us all. And heading into the midterms, what happened during the primary is some of the clearest evidence we have for how to prepare for what’s coming.

Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

Folks working on election protection need to get more comfortable with confrontation. A recent guide on responding to National Guard at polling places somehow left out D.C.’s lessons entirely. They said, yes, document — but there was no mention of confronting the National Guard as D.C. monitors did, telling troops they aren’t legally allowed to be here and insisting that they leave.

On the other hand, those of us coming out of organizing need to learn and respect the rules that already govern election work, and recognize we’re not the first people to think seriously about defending an election. There’s a deep well of experience to draw on, from movements across the U.S. and around the world — which is a lot of why I wrote the “Election Defense Scenarios” booklet with stories from each scenario.

What’s clear throughout is that we can defend our elections. Don’t get bogged down by the noise and while you can take every threat seriously, it doesn’t mean they’re all going to happen — and they may be calculated just to slow you down. So keep on the work, building with people across silos and teaching people to stand up for their rights.

This article What D.C.’s election defense under occupation can teach us was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

It was on the third day of the revolution that the mood changed. Once again, many thousands of Albanians had descended on Tirana’s central square after work. Once again, the speeches and banners were focused on stopping a wild and legally protected coastline from being razed for a luxury resort. But this time the vibe was tense. Some people had entered the crowd who were angry, screaming abuses and trying to set fire to the placards. 

Ilir Kaso, an artist and lecturer at Tirana University of Arts, stood nearby with his two daughters, aged 11 and seven. “My daughters were very frightened. My youngest asked to leave the protest, and so we did,” recalled Kaso. But as they emerged from the crowd, they found themselves facing what Kaso describes as “the flamingo group,” a collection of a hundred or so protesters wielding pink flamingo banners and a few pink polystyrene flamingos on poles. “‘Papa look, flamingos, let’s go there,’ said my youngest, and immediately I understood what we had to do.”

The flamingo group was a loose coalition of artists and environmental activists based in Tirana. The partnership had first formed more than a decade earlier under the banner of “Friends of Vjosa,” a movement to stop one of Europe’s last wild rivers from being splintered by 45 hydroelectric dams. Kaso became a part of what proved to be a very successful campaign. It birthed Europe’s first Wild River National Park, and on a personal level, it transformed Kaso’s art, pulling him away from abstraction and towards nature. He and his wife named their first daughter after the river.

When trucks and bulldozers suddenly rolled into a protected part of the river’s delta in late April, and started fencing off a large section of the coastline, the coalition quickly remobilized, meeting in person and via WhatsApp groups to work out how to stop the destruction. Kaso attended the first small protests along the fence line, photographing the flattening of ancient sand dunes where turtles nested, and the laying of concrete over wetlands that host hundreds of migratory bird species, many of them endangered.

Kaso had followed but not posted in the WhatsApp debate over which bird should be the symbol of their campaign. The environmental activists wanted one of the more threatened species to be made prominent — the Dalmatian pelican, the Northern lapwing — but the artists had decided on the flamingo, an easily recognizable bird with an iconic color and shape. After seeing how the bird had become a refuge for his frightened children, Kaso quickly started tapping out a message in the chat.

“I wrote about what happened and how we could create somewhere stationary, a shelter where we flamingos can stay all together and bring in the children, to protect them but also to expand the good vibes,” he said. “Because children have such good energy, they don’t have doubts or traumas like us. And we cannot wait for this protest to be damaged and become violent. This bad energy is going to destroy everything. We have to fight this with good energy, but by going out of the crowd.”

Kaso had experience setting up a shelter like this. During the pandemic he had helped to open and run a community school for his daughters and other young children in his area. The experience had a profound effect on how he taught his art students. After the pandemic, he rejected rigid lesson plans and formulas to be more curious and open to their ideas. “The children taught me a lot,” he said with a smile.

The artists and activists in the WhatsApp chat immediately embraced Kaso’s idea. Not only was there a shared fear of violence derailing this uprising, but the surging size of the crowds was clearly straining families. Every evening, between the speeches on the square, messages were going out over the microphone about lost children who needed to be found. On the chat, artists started offering to bring coloring pens and run drawing sessions. The next day, 20 feet of paper was laid out beside the Pyramid of Tirana, a tree-lined landmark between the square where protesters gathered and the prime minister’s office that they marched to. It was instantly flooded with grateful parents and curious children.

The Children’s Corner, as it is now called, has become an established feature of the revolution, entertaining children for approximately three hours every evening. On busy days, more than a hundred children will sit on the ground drawing their favorite birds, singing into megaphones, or playing with flamingo placards, while a dozen adults strive to monitor activities. It has become a hub not just for families but the flamingo group itself, who use the space to synchronize their chants, strategize about their movements, and pass out their pink foam placards to fellow revolutionaries.

Kaso describes the Children’s Corner as the sun of the protest, always radiating with light, fun and good vibes. And the flamingo group has taken on the role of dispersing those vibes to the rest of the protest. When a speech has been particularly aggressive or divisive, a flamingo parade will take flight, weaving into the crowd, and then chanting, drumming and dancing to relieve the tension. Then they will return to the Children’s Corner to recharge.

“The Children’s Corner is very important for keeping this protest peaceful,” Kaso said. “I think it is our most important weapon, like a Trojan horse, against the people who want to end this protest and make it a mess. It means the police cannot throw their gas and create aggressive situations. Also for the people — we are telling them we are here with our children and our families, so we have to be careful.” 

The space has triggered an outpouring of generous donations, though much has had to be turned away. Food from strangers was considered too risky, while taking money might give the impression this was a commercial childcare service. But offers of more coloring pens and art materials have always been readily accepted.

Not everyone has welcomed the corner though. Some have accused it of diluting the revolution, of reducing it to a kind of theater, while nationalist groups have taken exception to anything connected to the flamingos, screaming “we are eagles!” (Albania is literally called “land of the eagles” in Albanian, and its flag features a double-headed black eagle.) On particularly busy days, Kaso and other volunteers have had to form human chains to stop the surging crowds from accidentally trampling the children. But each time there has been a confrontation or danger, the corner community of flamingos and parents have collectively stepped in to diffuse it.

After some 60 days of continuous protest, featuring many hundreds of thousands of Albanians packed within a few square blocks, there has been remarkably little violence. Some eggs were thrown at the cars of politicians as they entered the nearby parliament building, and some windows were broken at a local police station after six egg-throwers were pepper-sprayed, arrested and held there before being released. 

With the help of art materials and studio space from NGOs and private donors, many hundreds of pink foam flamingo banners have been produced and handed out. In the city, they’ve started to function like a pride flag, a marker stuck outside bars and cafés to show solidarity with the revolution. “Most of the time we connect revolution to war and destruction and going back,” Kaso said, “but this is a big lesson for us about how we can think about a revolution. And the children are the most important part to teach us this.”

Corporate aggression backfires

Besjana Guri is tired. She started our interview by getting a date wrong by a decade and then laughing. The environmental activist has attended every day of the revolution so far, using a projector to screen rousing flamingo-themed videos on the wall of the prime minister’s office. “If you ever think of not going once, you feel you are betraying the protest. You have to go,” she said.

Guri co-led the award-winning campaign that turned the river Vjosa into a national park, and a year ago she founded Lumi (which means river in Albanian), a small organization focused on empowering women and children to protect their local environment. Two days before the Vjosa’s delta was turned into a construction site, Guri had been meeting with women in the nearby village of Zvërnec to discuss the threat to the region and organize a response.

The delta region where the Vjosa River meets the Adriatic Sea is mesmerizingly beautiful — a delicate tapestry of salt marshes, lagoons and forests. Known as Vjosa-Narta, the government awarded the coastal area full protection status in 2017. But over the last decade, as Prime Minister Edi Rama has cemented his grip over Albania’s politics, that protection has been stripped back and caveated to the point of being meaningless. 

In 2018, Vjosa-Narta’s protected status was downgraded to allow an old military base within it to become a (still unfinished) airport. “The airport was the tip of the iceberg,” said Xhemal Xherri, a project manager at Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania, or PPNEA. “We always knew that somehow this airport would bring resorts to the area.”

Then in 2024, the law enforcing the protection was amended to allow the government to essentially overrule it if an opportunity was lucrative enough. A month later, Jared Kushner, son-in-law of the U.S. president, shared designs on Instagram for a huge luxury development along the coastline. Then in January of this year, the villagers in Zvërnec found themselves under virtual house arrest while Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s wife, toured the area with a troupe of architects, business associates and security guards.

But when the trucks rolled into Vjosa-Narta in late April, it was still a shock. Albanian law required public consultations, an environmental assessment and various government permits to be awarded before construction could begin. The law no longer appeared to matter. Within a week, a coalition of environmental organizations had sent representatives to document the damage as access roads were crudely carved into the pristine coastline. A week after that came the first protest. 

By the time Guri and a hundred other activists and villagers had converged on the vast construction site, it had been enclosed by a fence which ran right into the sea. Watching them from the other side of the fence was one elderly security guard, and a few bored police officers. The men eventually agreed to open a gate and let the protesters inspect some of the damage. “They thought we were just ecoactivists, we were harmless,” Guri remembered.

Before the protest finished, some villagers insisted on toppling over a small section of the fence — a symbol of their disgust. For them, this was not just about land destruction but land ownership. Their community had lived on this coast for generations, yet the land had been sold to Kushner by a Florida-based real estate mogul with links to cocaine-trafficking and document forgery. Some families had spent 20 years in court battling over the ownership of the land, and despite there being no legal resolution, they were suddenly being denied access to it. For now though, the fence was flimsy. It could be pushed over using body weight alone. 

When the protesters returned the next Saturday, the fence and the whole mood was different. Now the barrier was concrete-based, and topped with thick curls of barbed wire. Looking through it were dozens of muscular private security guards, dressed all in black, faces obscured by sunglasses, baseball caps and masks. As the protesters marched along the fence they were shadowed by a column of police officers. “The feeling was not good,” Guri said. “It felt like there were terrorists here, people who wanted to scare and intimidate us.”

It was during the protest on the third Saturday that the intimidation turned to violence. The protesters had marched along the barrier to the beach, and with the tide low, an area of sand had been exposed that was blocked only by barbed wire. A lone villager ignored the warnings of the guards and carefully stepped over it. He was instantly pounced upon by the men in black, who wrestled him to the ground, punched him in the face and dragged him away by his arms across the beach. Another masked guard then fired pepper spray into the angry crowd, blinding both the protesters and the strangely passive line of police officers between them.

Guri was not able to attend the protest that day, but like hundreds of thousands of others, she watched a video of the assault on social media a few hours later. “Everyone that saw that moment, it was really a feeling that they were the ones being dragged,” she said, her eyes closed. Online, the video was being paired with rallying songs and nationalist poetry, and it was spreading like wildfire, well beyond the networks of activists, artists and villagers who were attending the protests. By the next day, a poster was circulating alongside it, headlined “Albania is not for sale!” It called for a protest in Tirana’s central square at 6 p.m. that evening.

Kaso arrived at the protest early so he could take photographs as people arrived. “I was physically trembling when I saw this huge group of people approaching,” he recalled. “It was amazing. A mix of responsibility and euphoria. A feeling that another chapter is coming. I never imagined all these years of fighting for nature and the river could be so helpful.” Guri was late, after spending her Sunday in a village outside Tirana, then hitting heavy traffic. “When I got there, I saw — I cannot count how many people. But for sure 600 people and more. I haven’t seen a bigger protest in the last 10 years for an environmental issue,” she said.

Guri was so inspired she later spoke to the crowd: “I said it took us 10 years to protect the Vjosa river and finalize the national park, but if we continue like this, we will only need 10 days to cancel this project and save the Narta.” With the speeches wrapped up, and the protest coming to an end, a chant built up among the crowd: “See you tomorrow, tomorrow more.” The template for a revolution had been set. 

“The protest kept growing every day. For the first few weeks it was only growing. Not only ecoactivists but all types of people. And the majority was young people,” Guri said. “They came with banners and funny memes and interesting quotes. Then we added the element of the flamingos. That’s when the creativity began, and the creativity has really kept this protest alive.”

Building an anti-corruption revolution

Xhemal Xherri of PPNEA, along with all the activists I’ve spoken to, is adamant that the Flamingo Revolution has no leaders, that it is a spontaneous and amorphous movement featuring a patchwork of groups unified by a love of nature. The closest it comes to forming an agenda is when the crowd cheers or jeers after a speech. But PPNEA has been quietly instrumental in preparing the soil from which this revolution has bloomed, and building the relationships that could lead to its eventual success.

Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

PPNEA was the country’s first environmental organization, established as it was transitioning away from communist dictatorship in 1991. The group took the government to court over irregularities in the airport construction contracts (the case is ongoing), and has been organizing protests against the exploitation of Vjosa-Narta for years. As Albania’s politicians were voting in the law change that meant Kushner’s luxury resorts could turn from CGI dream to reality, a hundred PPNEA activists were protesting outside parliament to condemn them.

The day before the first protest outside the construction site, for which PPNEA brought in bus-loads of Tirana-based activists, the organization invited a delegation of EU diplomats to witness the destruction firsthand. A month later, a PPNEA representative was in Strasbourg, France as the European Parliament voted in a resolution condemning the change to Albania’s law on protected areas, and making its repeal a non-negotiable condition of Albania’s accession to the EU. 

Six Green members of the European Parliament then attended the protests in Tirana at the end of June, making stridently pro-revolution speeches that were adored by the crowds. Just days earlier, Prime Minister Rama had explained to a Euronews journalist how officials in his government were “fanatics of the EU faith” who would do “whatever it takes” to gain membership. The country has been seeking candidature and tirelessly negotiating its way into the bloc since 2009. 

Despite this powerful endorsement from the EU, the fanatical Rama has not softened his stance on the protesters. From the beginning he has dismissed their concerns as delusional, the product of a coordinated online disinformation campaign by Iran, which he claims has simultaneously targeted both Albania and Israel as the two countries deepen their diplomatic ties.

But for Xherri, the reason social media algorithms have been promoting the Flamingo Revolution is not because of foreign interference, but simply because everybody in the capital is going to the square and posting about it. This includes many Albanian social media influencers, who have been privately requesting briefings from PPNEA on Vjosa-Narta, and amplifying the organization’s posts to new audiences.

Construction of the resort has been quietly paused, and the barbed wire fence has been removed, but so far the government has conceded nothing. Even if Rama were to repeal the law change that triggered this revolt, and consign Kushner’s project to the dustbin of history, it is unlikely to be enough to placate the people now surging through the city every evening. As the crowds have grown, so too have their demands. Today the protesters are just as likely to chant for both Rama and the leader of the opposition to be put in jail for corruption, as they are to call for nature to be protected. 

Over the last few weeks, the numbers out protesting have stabilized, with a few thousand marching each week night, and the crowds ballooning again at the weekends, especially now that Albania’s sizable diaspora is returning to be a part of the revolution. The activists I talk to are all confident that the government will eventually yield, and the law will be repealed. 

But when it comes to winning wider political changes, Kaso references a so far isolated incident, early in the revolution, where a group of protesters spontaneously marched out of the city and blocked a highway leading to the country’s main airport for several hours. 

“The people have shown the prime minister how this protest can be escalated. Maybe one or two hundred people, which is nothing for this protest, could block the entrance of the highway which connects the city to the airport, and stay there for 24 hours, which is going to be a big loss for travel companies,” he said. “​​I don’t want to see everything escalate in a dangerous way, but if necessary we don’t only have to be creative in aesthetic ways — with posters and colors and children. We can do it in other ways.”

For now though, the flamingo group are continuing to power this protest with pink placards, good vibes and children drawing their favorite birds. And no matter what happens next, Kaso is happy. “For me the revolution has already been successful,” he said. “It’s already changed a lot. If tomorrow we are not going in the road anymore, I know very well that life in Albania is not going to be the same.”

This article How creativity — and children — have kept Albania’s revolution alive was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Agadez, Niger — On any given day, you will find a group of up to 1,000 people, including women, children, the elderly and people with disabilities, standing in the Sahara Desert, eight miles from the nearest town, holding signs that read “We don’t want to stay here,” “Refugees in the desert without protection” and “We don’t feel safe here.” 

Since Sept. 22, 2024, they have maintained a daily sit-in at the humanitarian center where they are being held. At nearly two years, it has become one of the longest continuous refugee-led protests in history — and almost no one knows about it. 

They are refugees, the majority from Sudan, others from Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo and Cameroon. They are among approximately 2,000 people living at the Agadez Humanitarian Center, which is managed jointly by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, and Nigerien authorities. Established in 2017 with funding from the EU, Italy and the UK, Agadez was intended as a “transit point” for refugees awaiting resettlement. 

Instead, according to sources in the camp who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, refugees are held with limited movement, no asylum processing and no resettlement path. Some have been there for more than eight years. Nigerien authorities have claimed to offer local integration, but refugees report it happens without their consent.

“We’re stuck between a homeland that can’t be returned to and a humanitarian center that can’t be lived in,” the anonymous source said. “We are held in the desert, without the most basic necessities of life. This is our suffering.” 

The protesters have made their requests clear: resettlement to safe third countries, improved living conditions until then and an end to their “de facto detention.” 

But they are not suffering in silence. They are still standing proudly, despite intimidation, aggression and violence from the Nigerien police and military forces, and indifference and complicity from the agency meant to protect them.

Desert conditions in Agadez are an active threat to survival. Temperatures regularly exceed 105 degrees Fahrenheit, making exposure, dehydration and heat stroke constant risks. Ironically, when the former head of UNHCR in Niger, Emmanuel Gignac, visited the camp, he complained on camera of the heat to refugees and insisted they only talk in the shade. Compounding the heat risks is a lack of medical care, refugees said. And for nearly a year, most have received no food rations. 

UNHCR has repeatedly stated the center is “not a detention facility” and residents enjoy freedom of movement, a claim refugees refute. They point to mandatory passes for non-local travel, which are difficult to obtain from the local government, and often refused. Even with them, refugees face obstructions and payment of bribes at checkpoints, said a source.

A Cameroonian woman, Armelle, told InfoMigrants that when she tried to travel beyond the city of Agadez, Nigerien police stopped her. According to a refugee spokesperson, the police told her, “How dare you decide for yourself — you’re a refugee, you need permission.” 

One refugee summed up the situation, “I see no difference between the place I am in and a prison. What matters to me is conveying the truth about what is happening here.” 

The system that traps them

“The peaceful protests in Agadez aren’t an isolated event, but part of a broader refugee-led movement that has emerged wherever refugees have found themselves trapped in systems of indefinite containment,” said David Yambio, executive director and cofounder of the organization Refugees in Libya, which advocates for migrants and refugees in North Africa and Europe.

Yambio is himself a refugee from South Sudan. Born in 1997, he fled war as an infant with his family, and endured forced recruitment as a child soldier. Later he survived detention, torture and enslavement under notorious Libyan police chief Osama Almasri Najim in Tripoli. 

Through Refugees in Libya, Yambio has built a network that connects refugees across Libya, Tunisia, Niger and other North African countries who say UNHCR has failed to protect them. Together, they are documenting abuses and sustaining pressure on UNHCR. The organization is working with deported leaders of the Agadez protests to fight for those still trapped in the camp. 

“No community chooses to sustain a peaceful protest for more than 670 days unless every other avenue has failed,” Yambio said. 

Agadez is part of the EU’s strategy to externalize its borders and stop people fleeing wars from reaching Europe. “European borders no longer begin at the Mediterranean, they stretch deep into Libya, Tunisia, Niger and beyond,” Yambio said. 

The majority in Agadez are refugees of the war that erupted in Sudan in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a conflict that has killed tens of thousands, displaced more than 15 million and unleashed ethnic violence in Darfur that the UN describes as bearing “the hallmarks of genocide.” Others have fled conflicts in Chad, Ethiopia, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, where political violence, insurgencies and instability are fueled by past colonial legacies and modern-day exploitation. 

Refugees do not set out for Europe lightly. Many try to find a home in neighboring countries first, but when that process is frustrated, as in Niger, with no work, no schooling for their children and no hope of a safe return to their home country, they move on. Europe is not their first choice; it is their last.

The Mediterranean nations of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya are the main avenues for refugees trying to seek safety in Europe. But authorities in those countries do the bidding of European governments by violently expelling refugees fleeing so they can’t reach Europe. In Libya and Tunisia, the EU funds “coast guard” operations not to save refugees, but to intercept migrant boats at sea and return them forcibly, often to Libya — where they face detention, extortion, torture and slavery. 

Other refugees intercepted in North Africa and the Mediterranean are dumped in the desert, abandoned near borders or sent to Mauritania, Niger and the Aegean Islands, where the EU funds mass detention centers. Algeria alone has deported over 80,000 people to Niger since 2024. 

These mass expulsions are not isolated acts but part of a coordinated “chain deportation corridor” in which European money, channeled through international organizations, finances a system of containment. In the Aegean Sea, EU-backed “Closed Controlled Access Centers” confine asylum seekers in detention for months under constant surveillance. In Mauritania, the EU and Spain fund migrant detention facilities known for inhumane treatment. The EU presents these centers as humanitarian, but the effect is to warehouse people indefinitely far from European courts, accountability or empathy. 

Agadez, likewise, operates as a legalized black hole: Refugees are held in a desert camp, their asylum claims are unprocessed, and while protesting peacefully against their detainment, their freedom of speech is criminalized by the authorities detaining them there — all paid for by European taxpayers.

If they try to travel past the nearest city, they are forcibly returned, often at gunpoint. One refugee explained, “We’re not migrants — we’re refugees fleeing war. But they treat us like criminals, as they don’t want us to reach Europe.” 

Inside the movement

The peaceful protests aren’t spontaneous. Refugees formed an elected National Refugee Committee shortly after the protests began in September 2024 to coordinate daily sit-ins, initiate hunger strikes, create petitions and write open letters. They use social media, particularly X, to document their plight, sharing photos and videos that reach the outside world. 

Nigerien authorities refuse to negotiate with the committee and warn refugees not to participate in it, a refugee spokesperson told me. “[The government] told us if refugees are part of a representative body, you won’t obtain your rights,” he said.

The sit-in has continued every day since it began on Sept. 22, 2024, through desert heat as high as 112 degrees Fahrenheit, punitive food ration cuts, arrests, police brutality, harassment and illegal deportations. 

Children participate, holding signs that count the protest days, starting at day one. The protesters chant a single slogan: “We don’t feel safe; we don’t want to stay here.”

The movement has faced repeated crackdowns. In January 2020, after refugees set up a protest camp outside UNHCR headquarters in the city of Agadez, security forces arrested more than 330 people. According to refugees who were present, security forces beat protesters, including children and pregnant women. The arrestees were locked in cramped unsanitary conditions without food for two days, sources say, and were only released after 48 days.

The sit-in that began in 2024 was met with escalating repression. In February 2025, UNHCR suspended food aid at the request of Nigerien authorities seeking to quell the protests. 

The following month, Niger’s National Eligibility Commission for Refugee Status, or CNE, issued a statement criminalizing all refugee committees, which read in part, “There is fundamentally no right to resettlement. … Therefore, organizing and participating in demonstrations of any kind within the Agadez Humanitarian Center to demand resettlement is intolerable.”

Eight protest leaders were then arrested, beaten and held for 10 days. 

“I am still suffering the consequences of that arrest, physically and psychologically,” one of the leaders said. “I got a broken finger on my right hand, severe headaches and have constant pain.” 

At a meeting where UNHCR was present, CNE revoked the protesters’ legal refugee status, and they were then illegally deported to Chad.

In August 2025, six more leaders were arrested in a raid involving 15 military vehicles, and were also deported to Chad. Their whereabouts remain unknown. The Nigerien military came to the detention facility, rounded people up and, as captured on film, threw one man headfirst into the back of a pickup truck, hands tied behind his back, and drove away with him. He has not been heard from since.

Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, told The New Humanitarian that these arrests “may constitute enforced disappearances, and a grave violation of Niger’s obligations under human rights law.” 

“All six of those arrested were part of the committee that has been peacefully organizing in defense of the rights of refugees in Agadez,” she said. “I do consider them human rights defenders.”

Reached for comment, UNHCR said it learned of both sets of arrests after the fact, although sources in the camp say that UNHCR staff witnessed and did not intervene in the March 2025 arrests and beatings.

A UNHCR spokesperson said the agency “met with” Nigerien authorities after both arrests to “express its concerns and advocate for international protection standards.” At the deportation hearing, UNHCR said it provided “technical guidance” that “under international law … revocation [of refugee status] must be based on individualized assessments and must not be used as a punitive response to peaceful protest or collective action” and “any alleged violation of national laws and regulations should be addressed through the ordinary justice system.” 

The agency did not answer why it failed to prevent the deportations, despite the freedom of expression and speech rights ordained by the founding documents of the United Nations, and despite the agency’s international mandate to supervise how states implement refugee law.

Yambio said that retaliation against refugees who speak out isn’t isolated to Niger: “Across Libya, Tunisia and Niger, refugee leaders are increasingly labeled as troublemakers or threats to UNHCR rather than recognized as legitimate representatives.”

Complicit, negligent or incompetent?

UNHCR has issued multiple statements defending its operations. In January 2025, it said: “While we fully respect their right to peacefully protest and acknowledge the difficulties they face in a Agadez’s arid conditions, we urge the group to engage with us in a constructive manner and reconsider the assistance and local opportunities that have been made available.” Yet peaceful protesters have been arrested, beaten and deported on UNHCR’s watch. 

The agency acknowledged it “didn’t think [pausing food vouchers] was a good solution” but implemented it anyway. When pressed, UNHCR said in an email that it had “expressed deep concern” about its own suspension of food rations. The agency resumed food rations in summer 2025, but limited them to just 270 people it deems “most vulnerable.”

“UNHCR’s role is very weak, they treat us without humanity,” a Sudanese man held in the camp for more than seven years told me. 

UNHCR did not respond when asked why it has consistently failed to prevent violent crackdowns in the camps it operates, despite its legal mandate to protect refugees. 

On May, 25 2022, a 27-year-old man, Musab Muhammad, was shot dead at the center’s children’s school. Authorities tried to force his widow to sign a false death certificate claiming he was killed by a stone, but she refused. UNHCR supported the government’s claim that he had not been shot. But multiple witnesses confirmed the details of the incident — that security forces shot him, unarmed. “We refugees heard shooting, officers were firing tear gas and live bullets, they killed our brother in cold blood,” one man in the camp said. 

Reached for comment about Muhammad’s death, a UNHCR spokesperson said that “UNHCR deeply regrets the loss of life and the suffering” and “as a general principle … condemns the use of excessive force against refugees.” The spokesperson said that UNHCR provided Muhammad’s family with burial costs and “psychosocial support and counselling,” but “does not have the authority to conduct criminal investigations of use of force by Nigerien authorities.”

According to sources in the camp, medical care is also substandard. A health clinic nine miles  away provides only about 10 percent of promised services, detainees said. They said that they also lack access to translators or ambulance service from the camp to the clinic. 

A spokesperson for the National Refugee Committee says eight residents in total have died since 2024 of preventable causes, including hemorrhage and anemia. Their families granted permission to share their names.

On April 30, 2025, Saeed Ahmed, 34, a key organizer in the camp, died of anemia. Sources say that the health center was closed when he arrived, and then doctors failed to treat him. “Saeed was happy with his friends, a fighter,” said Amir, a former detainee. 

The other seven were Makina Wadi, 35, who died of severe postpartum hemorrhage with no doctor attending; Mohamed Abdallah and Abdallah Hashim, both 27, friends who met in detention in Libya before being forcibly deported to Niger; Imad Yousif, 30, described as someone who always demanded his rights and defended the rights of others; Nour Alhuda Musa, 28, a mother of five; Zubeida Abdelgabar, 33, a widow and mother of one; and Zahra Dawood, 33, a mother of three.

Asked for comment, UNHCR maintained that all cases of illness receive medical follow-up and that “access to health care is ensured through a protocol with the Agadez Commune Sanitary District. … The health and well-being of asylum-seekers and refugees remain our priority, and any loss of life is deeply regrettable.” 

The colonial continuum

Many observers note a disparity between the treatment of people fleeing wars in Africa and that of Ukrainian asylum-seekers. The fact that “some refugees are afforded full protection and rights, and others are not, demonstrates what many refugees experience as colonial continuity and segregation within the international protection regime,” Yambio said. “During displacement of Ukrainian refugees, UNHCR publicly and behind closed doors engaged European institutions, EU member states and the UK to establish exceptional protection mechanisms.” So why isn’t UNHCR doing the same for brown and Black refugees in Africa? 

The situation in Agadez can’t be understood in isolation. Refugees are fleeing wars fueled by the very forces that extract Africa’s resources and keep people trapped. The roots of modern tensions in Sudan lay in the policies implemented by the British colonial administration between 1899-1956, which divided the area along racial lines, privileging Arab-identifying groups in the north, while marginalizing African communities in the south and west, including Darfur. This divide and rule legacy, embedded in post-independence governance has fueled cycles of violence and displacement ever since.

External exploitation of the African continent continues. The United Arab Emirates, or UAE, fuels the Sudanese civil war by arming the RSF — who are accused of committing war crimes and genocide — with weaponry procured from U.S. arms manufacturers. The UAE’s motivations are strategic and economic securing access to Sudan’s gold and regional influence, while millions of Sudanese people are displaced.

This is no accident of history, but a pattern of extraction, destabilization and containment that mirrors colonialism. External powers fuel conflicts and extract Africa’s minerals, while underfunding the facilities built to contain people fleeing the destruction they cause. 

The resettlement crisis is global, but the UN system is failing to respond effectively. In 2025, only 200 resettlement places were allocated for all of Niger, against an assessed need of more than 15,000. None of the 200 went to the refugees in Agadez, according to sources there. 

Reached for comment, UNHCR said that more than 700 refugees had been resettled from the center since 2018, but didn’t dispute refugees’ assertion that CNE is currently failing to process claims. UNHCR told protesters in Agadez, “Less than 1 percent of refugees globally benefit from resettlement, so don’t expect it.” 

UNHCR’s former Special Envoy for the Central and Western Mediterranean Situation Vincent Cochetel confirmed in March 2025 that the UN did not support “a right to resettlement.” 

“There are almost no resettlement opportunities in Niger and priority must be given to Malian and Nigerian refugees,” he wrote on X. 

Asked by Waging Nonviolence about the prospects of resettlement for those held Agadez, UNHCR said, “The final decision always rests with the third country, not with UNHCR.” Effectively, a UN agency is declaring itself a neutered organization, with no power to resettle war refugees.

The spread of containment

Agadez is no anomaly. It has effectively been the pilot for Europe’s new Return Regulation, passed in June 2026, which makes offshore detention an official policy. 

“It’s not simply a humanitarian crisis or just operational failures of UNHCR, but a wider systemic mechanism in which refugees are increasingly contained rather than protected,” Yambio said. 

This extends far beyond Agadez. “UNHCR has repeatedly supported and agreed with governments implementing migration containment policies, embracing the Italy-Albania so-called return centers, the UK-Rwanda deportation deal, and blessed and congratulated Europe on its Return Regulation,” Yambio said. 

UNHCR’s own admissions reveal a confirmed pattern: awareness of abuses and choosing compliance over protection. 

“Resolving the situation in Agadez requires restoring refugee protection as the primary objective of international refugee law,” Yambio said. “It requires UNHCR to recover the independence necessary to confront abusive states. It requires Europe to end policies of externalization.”

Neither the European Union nor the United Kingdom’s ambassador to the UN responded to requests for comment.

“What begins with refugees rarely ends with refugees,” Yambio continued. “The migration containment policies being developed today increasingly shape domestic legal systems tomorrow.” As journalist Neal Ascherson wrote in a 1996 article about the al-Masari affair: “The way a state treats its aliens is the way it would treat its own subjects if it dared.”

In the Sahara Desert, the nonviolent protests will continue, signs will still rise, the refugees still remain standing in the desert. Their words are clear: “We are human beings; we have the right to a decent life. Through pain and hope, we refugees of Agadez, Niger, don’t want to stay here in this desert.”

They are sharing the stories of how they fled wars and genocides and how they’re seeking justice on X at @refugeesniger @RefugeesTunisia and @RefugeesinLibya.

The choice of nonviolence isn’t incidental. In a system designed to render them invisible, protesters have chosen a strategy that forces the world to look. They have chosen to absorb violence without returning it, not as a form of passivity, but as a strategy grounded in their reality. Their discipline in the face of brutality lays bare the moral asymmetry of the system that claims to protect them while imprisoning them.

This article Inside the longest refugee protest in history was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Thirty-six days after a joke about “cockroaches” became a youth movement, India’s education minister was gone. On July 25, Dharmendra Pradhan resigned after weeks of protests over failures in the public examination system and demands for political accountability. The Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, declared victory — “Cockroaches won. Democracy won.”

For a movement that began online in May and grown into a nationwide agitation, forcing a cabinet minister from office was an unmistakable political concession. But almost as soon as the protesters packed up, the meaning of that victory became less certain.

Three days later, the movement was already threatening to return to the streets. The CJP said over 100 protesters been arrested nationwide, with cases filed in the states of Delhi, Assam, West Bengal and Bihar, despite assurances that demonstrators would not face punitive action. CJP spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka warned that the agitation could resume if those arrested were not released.

Bihar police announced that the protesters had been released and would face no adverse legal action. But the assurance did not hold in other states, like West Bengal and Assam, where more than a dozen are still being detained.

Removing a minister was a visible symbol of accountability; ensuring that other promises made to end the protests were actually honored would require something harder — sustained organization after the crowds had gone home.

A movement that couldn’t be decapitated

When Delhi last saw a mass youth mobilization, over the citizenship law in 2020, the state answered by naming the organizers in a conspiracy chargesheet: Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam have now been held for more than five years under India’s 1967 anti-terror law and were refused bail again on July 4, 16 days before the cockroaches marched on Parliament.

It began as a joke. Amidst a youth uproar over invalidated examination results, during which India’s highest judge referred to the nation’s youth as “cockroaches,” a Boston-based student from India, Abhijeet Dipke, posted on X, “What if the cockroaches marched?”

Previous Coverage

The strategic satire of India’s Gen Z ‘Cockroach’ movement

The joke carried a serious message: The protesters who turned out in response, under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party, saw themselves as people the political system had stopped listening to.

But the Cockroach Janta Party — a parody of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, the Hindu right-wing party that has governed India since 2014 — had few of the trappings of a serious political party. There was a website where people could sign up; there was an Instagram account that had grown rapidly; and there was Dipke. By July, he was leading the sit-ins and the marches from a stage in Central Delhi — a founder the movement had acquired without ever electing one, and who insisted, along with everybody else there, that the CJP had no leader.

For five weeks, Delhi Police dealt with a protest that offered nothing conventional to target. There was no office to raid and no membership list to seize — the two things that allowed police to quell earlier movements.

So on the morning of July 18, police went for the one man everyone knew.

Sonam Wangchuk, an engineer and education reformer from the Indian Himalayas, is 59 years old and was 20 days into a hunger strike. He had lost more than 18 pounds. Police carried him from the protest site and took him to hospital.

Wangchuk had become the most recognizable face in a movement that insisted it had no leader. He runs a school in the region of Ladakh for children who struggle in India’s examination system and is a recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, often described as Asia’s Nobel.

Delhi Police said they acted on a High Court order and medical advice. Protesters tried to stop officers from taking Wangchuk away, leading to what police described as a “slight commotion.”

But the police statement did not end with Wangchuk’s health. It also asked the remaining protesters to leave. They did not.

Taking a man 20 days into a hunger strike to a hospital could be explained as a medical decision. Asking everyone else to clear the square was something different.

By that afternoon the square was fuller than it had been all month, with people packed under sheets of black plastic strung between trees, facing a stage with nobody on it. The banner behind the empty platform still read “Hunger Strike.” Removing the hunger striker had doubled his audience.

And that was the problem the Cockroach Janta Party exposed: How do you shut down a protest when there is no leader to remove, no organization to dismantle and no one person whose arrest can make the crowd disappear?

Two million children, one exam, 89 leaks

The packed square is Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory of huge stone sundials about half a mile from India’s Parliament, and the only place in central Delhi where a demonstration is permitted at all. For five weeks it was a tent city of students, parents who had spent their savings on high-stakes test coaching, teachers, lawyers, a few farmers’ unions and a great many people in their 20s who had never protested before.

What brought them there was an examination. Every year more than two million Indian teenagers sit the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, or NEET, for fewer than 130,000 undergraduate medical seats. Whole towns exist to coach children for it — Kota, in Rajasthan, held around 250,000 aspirants at its peak and still houses roughly 85,000 to 100,000 in hostels and cram schools built for nothing else. In May, nine days after the exam, the government cancelled the results over an alleged paper leak and told two million candidates to take it a second time. Several students died by suicide in the weeks that followed.

On May 15, the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, while hearing a case about fraudulent degrees, turned to unemployed young Indians and called them cockroaches who attack everyone because they have nowhere to go. He said afterward he had been misunderstood.

But Dipke, a 30-year-old political strategist watching from Boston, had already asked on X what would happen if all the cockroaches came together. Rinku Kumar was one of the millions who answered. He is a 23-year-old English teacher at a coaching center in Nawada, in the poor eastern state of Bihar, India — nobody’s stereotype of an activist. He traveled to Delhi because a protest he had been watching on his phone had begun describing his own life back to him.

For decades a protest in Delhi became a national event only if television decided it was one. At Jantar Mantar that assumption had visibly broken: Some protesters did not want mainstream TV crews at the site at all. Instead of waiting for prime time, they filmed everything themselves, livestreamed speeches, circulated their own footage of the police lines and followed independent reporters directly. The grievance had become a meme, the meme a crowd, and the crowd had built its own distribution network. Part of what the CJP was winning was the account of itself.

That is how a coach from Nawada ended up in the same square as Ashutosh Ranka — an Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur graduate with a degree from the London School of Economics and a stint at McKinsey behind him. In June, Ranka was named one of the movement’s three spokespeople, alongside the investigative journalist Saurav Das and the researcher and filmmaker Vijeta Dahiya. Their life paths had nothing in common, but the protest had handed them the same vocabulary of jobs, exams and accountability.

A leaflet circulating that week wondered whether India was still a democracy or had become a “deMOCKracy,” then graded the government in its own vocabulary, saying it flunked this lesson.

The day the internet went off and 10,000 people walked anyway

The CJP called a mile-long march to Parliament House for July 20, the opening day of the monsoon session and of Parliament, but permission was refused. Instead, the state prepared by switching off mobile internet around the site, closing metro stations and putting up barricades.

More than 10,000 marched anyway, the turnout swollen by anger at Wangchuk’s removal.

The placards had stopped asking politely. One carried Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s photograph with “Resign” across his face and a performance review printed beside it: “You are a government servant, you work for us, we pay your salary, we the people of India fire you.” Two balloons tied to the same hand read “Grow a pair.”

Delhi Police denied using violence, though NPR watched officers fire tear gas and hit demonstrators with sticks. I witnessed it, too. The tear gas came in from the Parliament Street side and the crowd did not run so much as fold and re-form 100 feet back.

Nearly 180 protesters injured and 70 detained. Several videos show police attacking marchers; none has surfaced showing the reverse.

Pradhan, who had spent June dismissing the protesters as disruptive elements, upgraded them that week to a “B-team of terrorists” trying to “divide the country.”

That kind of rhetoric has been effective in the past, according to Tanuj Gaurav, a doctoral researcher at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the campus that has been the center of Indian left student politics for decades and a standing target of this government. “The moment you raise a question, you’re linked to the enemy,” he told me. “After that, nobody wants to ask questions anymore.”

Then, on the same day it called them terrorists, the government invited Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka two of them to meet Health Minister J.P. Nadda. Dipke announced the invitation from the stage. Shortly afterward he was reportedly detained.

They stopped waiting for television to notice them

Here is the test the movement passed twice in three days. On July 18 the state removed the famous man; on July 20 it removed the founder. Neither removal stuck. Wangchuk went on issuing statements from his hospital bed and was part of the talks that followed. Dipke was released within hours and was back on the stage by then. The protest did not pause or splinter, but it also never had to find out what would happen if either man stayed gone.

The next day it stopped marching altogether, while keeping the sit-in going. “We will not march again because the police will hurt the youth again,” Dipke said.

The discipline was visible on the tarmac on July 20. One volunteer had turned a stretch of road into a gallery row of watercolors weighted against the wind. They depicted cockroaches marching on Parliament, a government drawn blind, mute and deaf. A handwritten sign invited strangers to sit and add their own; another asked people not to touch the pictures, only to photograph them. It read as a rule about wet paint, and it was, but it also described how the whole movement worked: Make the thing, let everyone copy it, keep no object anybody could be arrested for holding.

Thirty-six days after a joke, a cabinet minister was gone

On July 24 Wangchuk broke his 26-day fast after written assurances on exam accountability.

His decision, however, did not settle the central political demand driving the wider movement: Pradhan’s resignation. Wangchuk said his immediate priority was protecting students from further violence and legal action, and suggested that Pradhan’s departure could still follow. The youth-led CJP, meanwhile, continued protesting, refusing to accept the government’s attempts at compromise.

The next day Pradhan resigned, saying he deeply respected the aspirations of the country’s youth — a respect that had taken 36 days and a hospitalization to locate.

With demonstrations persisting despite the government’s attempts at compromise, Pradhan’s resignation became the concession capable of bringing the confrontation to an end.

Hours later, CJP spokespeople sat beside two ministers at a joint news conference. “All our demands have been accepted,” said Ranka, asking everyone to go home. The party posted four words: “Cockroaches won. Democracy won.”

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a political theorist and one of India’s most widely read columnists, wrote in the Indian Express that the resignation alone changes little, but that a generation failed by its elders had made a government drunk on its own power look small and had shown it can be moved.

The state had gone looking for the movement’s head and failed. The movement, which had none, had taken down a minister.

Now watch the demands get smaller

In June, they wanted a minister gone. On July 13 they wanted a law. The CJP’s voluntary tech team published a five-point charter for rebuilding how India runs public examinations — closer to draft legislation than to grievance. It asked for a new Public Examinations Act and for the National Testing Agency that runs the exams to be dissolved and rebuilt as a statutory body with permanent staff and compulsory audits. It called for an independent ombudsman, a judicial inquiry opening automatically under a retired judge after every leak, refunds and compensation turned from favors into legal entitlements, and a permanent parliamentary committee to keep watching after the cameras left.

After July 20 they added two more demands: Don’t prosecute us, and apologize for hitting us.

They began by asking the government to fix an examination that two million children sit. They ended by asking it not to arrest them for asking.

What they were given was the minister and very little else. On compensation, the government agreed it would pay “whatever maximum possible” under existing rules for each of the more than 20 families of students who died by suicide, not the $105,000 each that the CJP demanded.

On criminal cases, protesters won a promise that nobody would be pursued in states the BJP governs — and because India’s police answer to state governments, that covered only part of the country. Since then 11 people have been arrested in West Bengal, 10 of them Muslim, six in Assam, and three protesters were injured when police opened fire in Bihar.

On the apology, the movement received nothing at all.

The CJP says it will now identify officers from protest footage and take them to court; the cameras pointed at that crowd for five weeks will become an evidence file.

But footage works both ways: A 36-second clip on a protester’s phone identified a senior officer by his own badge as he struck a woman standing at the roadside. Police accepted he had lost his composure and took him off protest duty, but he has not been suspended and no case has been registered. In other words, a protester’s phone named an officer within 48 hours, and the state answered with a change of desk.

A committee to look into what the last committee said

And the charter? On July 26 Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a task force to make the examination system reliable and transparent. It will be headed by Nandan Nilekani, who cofounded the software giant Infosys and built Aadhaar, the biometric identity system now held by more than a billion Indians.

New anti-leak legislation went to Parliament the next day. Pralhad Joshi, the head of two cabinet ministries, was handed the education ministry on top of his other responsibilities.

Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

A task force is not nothing, but it is not new either. After the 2024 NEET leak, the government appointed a committee under K. Radhakrishnan, the former head of India’s space agency, to make the exams fair. Jairam Ramesh of the opposition Congress Party answered the announcement on July 26 by asking what became of it, noting that the government has still not finished implementing that committee’s 101 recommendations.

So the cockroaches asked for a statute and were handed a committee — a second committee, set up to consider what the first committee’s 101 recommendations were supposed to have fixed. A minister is only a head, a statute would have been a structure, and a task force is mostly a way of agreeing that something ought to happen later.

When the street is the only place left to complain

India’s cockroaches are the newest arrivals in a global wave more than two years old — youth movements organized online, often under the skull-and-straw-hat flag borrowed from the manga “One Piece,” that have shaken governments from Nepal and Peru to Morocco, Madagascar and Kenya since Bangladesh’s students brought down Sheikh Hasina in 2024.

Their records should be read as a warning rather than a template. Nepal’s movement carried the rapper and Kathmandu mayor Balendra Shah to the prime ministership in March, and three and a half months later he had shown no visible progress on the inequality and unemployment that carried him there. On July 9, a 25-year-old Dalit man running a motorcycle taxi set himself on fire over a six-dollar parking fine, triggering new protests. In Madagascar, the president fled and the army installed a colonel.

What researchers keep finding is the trap the CJP now sits inside: movements built online can be remarkably effective at forcing political change, but often struggle to turn that momentum into democratic governments that remain accountable and responsive to the people who brought them to power. But the deeper problem is not how the movement was built; it is what it was built around. Mehta, the political theorist, believes that India has run out of institutional ways to lodge a complaint or make anyone answer it. “The street is our only channel,” he wrote.

That is why the cockroaches were organized the way they were. Leaderlessness was a choice, not a default — one many movements have made since the committees, the regulators and the courts stopped functioning as places where a complaint could be filed. It buys speed and makes a movement hard to decapitate. It also leaves no one authorised to sign anything.

It is also exactly why the charter has nowhere to go. There is nobody obliged to read it, and nobody left at Jantar Mantar to ask why nobody has. Every quality that made this movement impossible to stop — no leader to arrest, no office, no list — is the same quality that makes it impossible for anyone to hold the government to a promise, which is to say: The armor has led to paralysis.

The walls at Jantar Mantar have been painted over. Rinku Kumar has gone back to Nawada to teach English. The charter sits in a drawer in a ministry whose minister has resigned, and a new task force will report in due course on what the last task force recommended.

Somebody has to still be standing there in six months to ask what became of any of it. That is the one job a movement without standing structure cannot do.

The cockroaches were never short of leaders — Dipke had a stage, and the government found two names to summon within the hour. What they never built was anything that would outlive the people holding the microphone. A leader can be detained on a Monday afternoon, and Dipke was. The concessions came fast because the crowd was large. But the crowd will not likely be large in December.

Shruthi Manjula Mohan, a young professional based in New Delhi, contributed reporting and visual support to this story.

This article What India’s Cockroach Party won — and what’s next was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

“I didn’t enter activism through theory,” explained activist Hillary Semeyan Lenantoiye in an email. “I entered through lived experience.”  

When Lenantoiye was growing up in northern Kenya’s Samburu County, the rain became less and less frequent. The river ran dry and the livestock, the lifeblood of her Indigenous pastoralist community, shrunk to bone. For the Samburu, cycles of drought, which have intensified with climate change, drive food scarcity and foster conflict and violence as people struggle with fewer economic resources. Families are forced to migrate, girls drop out of school due to household duties and the pressure to marry early, and women, who walk longer and longer distances for water and firewood, bear the weight of an entire family’s survival.

Over the years, Lenantoiye realized that while Indigenous peoples were often researched, spoken of and targeted by climate mitigation programs, they were not included in sharing possible solutions or accessing resources to support those solutions. This lack of meaningful inclusion led Lenantoiye to found the Inclusive Culture Action Network, or ICAN, — a Samburu-led climate and human rights organization with an emphasis on women, youth and traditional Indigenous knowledge. 

“Indigenous communities already have the solutions,” she wrote in an email to Waging Nonviolence. “They just need to be trusted, empowered and included.”

In 2025, Lenantoiye joined the Nobel Women’s Initiative’s Sister-to-Sister Young Feminist Leadership Program. Through the initiative, which fosters solidarity and support among emerging feminist leaders focused on peace-building, human rights and climate justice, Lenantoiye has been connected with young leaders from around the world, including Karen Bailón, an Ecuadorian climate and gender justice activist and Daniela Alba, an Indigenous activist originally from Bogotá, Colombia. Though each of the three comes from a unique background, they agree on a central principle: the importance of empowering women, youth and Indigenous peoples in climate action and mitigation efforts both locally and internationally. 

On centering intergenerational impact and equity

Karen Bailón came to climate activism via feminism. 

Raised by a single mother in Ecuador’s Manabí Province, where female-headed households are common, Bailón saw the challenges women faced and became involved in spaces dedicated to empowering young women. It wasn’t until college, she wrote in an email, that studying of environmental defenders — and the violence often perpetuated against them — revealed how protecting nature and protecting people are one and the same struggle. 

“It was through that understanding that gender and climate became inseparable for me,” she wrote. “Especially as Indigenous women are disproportionately affected by both.”

Previous Coverage

Ecuador voted to stop drilling in the Amazon — a year later they are still trying to kick the oil industry out

In particular, she cites the story of Indigenous environmental defender, Alicia Cahuiya, founder and president of the Association of Waorani Women of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Despite threats, Cahuiya not only helped Waorani women have a bigger stake in decision making but led a resistance against oil exploration and extraction in Yasuní — one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. At the center of this resistance, Bailón describes, has been Cahuiya’s journey to “recognizing herself as a political subject with the right to demand water, food, education and a living forest for her children.” 

One thing Bailón has taken from Ecuador’s Indigenous communities is the importance of centering intergenerational conversation — something she has found lacking in larger forums around climate solutions. 

In 2024, when Bailón attended the sixteenth Convention on Biological Diversity as a delegate from Latin America and the Caribbean, she realized that the increasing participation of youth in the climate justice movement hadn’t translated into a real voice at the international level. Despite references to “intergenerational equity” in official documents, young people, much like women and Indigenous peoples, continued to be excluded from spaces where binding decisions are made. 

“Young people are not mere observers,” she wrote. “We are the generation that will live with the consequences of today’s decisions.”

This understanding led Bailón to begin working with GreenCheck, a youth-led nonprofit that redistributes resources to community-led climate initiatives around the world. Through her work, Bailón has connected and co-created climate solutions with more than 200 young people across climate-impacted Global South communities. It is a role she finds “deeply meaningful,” as it helps those closest to the climate crisis to lead the response.  

“What we call ‘climate solutions’ in the realm of international politics often already exists, in practice, within Indigenous and local communities,” Bailón wrote. “They simply haven’t been recognized.” 

On resisting tokenism

For Daniela Alba, another young leader in the Nobel Women’s Initiative’s Sister-to-Sister Young Feminist Leadership Program, climate justice is grounded in her upbringing in Bogotá, Colombia, and in the teachings of her Indigenous Muisca grandmother and the cosmology of her people. For the Muisca, she explained, Mother Earth and Bachué, the creator of water, are the first spirits you encounter in life. 

“It is not then that the land belongs to us,” she said. “It is that we belong to her.” 

As an Indigenous woman and a survivor of gender-based violence and forced displacement, Alba’s vision of climate justice has not only been shaped by indigeneity and ancestral knowledge but also the “deeply wrapped and intertwined” scars of both personal trauma and colonial violence, she said. It is these multiple truths, often contradictory to Western binary thinking, that not only underpin her activism but have led to her work as the advocacy coordinator for Social Justice and Ecology Secretariat, a Rome-based Jesuit organization. 

Tracing the Roman Catholic Church’s long and brutal history of violence, capitalism and colonization, Alba described her focus on the faith-based sector as a step toward reconciliation for historical and institutional acts of violence undertaken with so-called good intentions.

“The harm that causes reverberates throughout many, many centuries,” she said. “So I honor the sacrifices my ancestors made so someone like myself, against all odds, could exist in these spaces.”

But institutional harms, Alba noted, persist today.

In November 2025, Alba attended the 12-day COP30 conference in Belém, Brazil — the first such climate conference in the Amazon. Outside the “blue zone,” where official negotiations take place, she witnessed how despite peaceful protests, Indigenous peoples were denied both entry and dialogue with Brazil’s President and were instead barred by security and military personnel. Meanwhile, during the events themselves, Alba felt there was a level of tokenism she described as “out of hand.”

Alba has seen this contradiction across multiple conferences, organizations and institutions. The voices of Indigenous peoples, women and other marginalized groups are often promoted for press briefings before being “tossed to the side,” she said. Given her relative access to a powerful institution, Alba has worked to counter this erasure by centering the voices of local communities in her work as well as her approach to climate justice. 

“My duty is not to speak for them,” she said. “But to listen to their voices and from that, create momentum within faith-based organizations at an international level.”

At COP30, against the backdrop of state violence and marginalization, when many people, Alba said, were “sick and tired” of witnessing the same thing happen again and again. Nature, she felt, had other plans. In the Amazon, and in Belém, in particular, the rain often fell with such intensity that delegates could barely hear one another above the roar. As Alba sat on a panel, the group debating whether to postpone the event, she explained that she would cede her time to listening to the Earth.

“There’s nothing I can tell you that she won’t,” she said. “But do you know how to listen?”

On Indigenous knowledge for contemporary climate solutions

Five years ago, when Lenantoiye founded her organization, ICAN, she knew the best approach to climate action in Samburu County would be community-led, practical and grounded in response to the realities of pastoralist communities. Since then, ICAN programs have included promoting sustainable rangeland management through Indigenous grazing systems, using local knowledge of weather patterns to foster climate awareness, and facilitating more than 100 intergenerational community dialogues. 

“Rather than replacing traditional systems, we build on them,” Lenantoiye wrote,  “integrating Indigenous knowledge with modern climate solutions to create approaches that are both culturally relevant and sustainable.”

Lenantoiye’s work has also focused extensively on Samburu women.

Across the region and globally, drought, conflict and resource scarcity not only impact women economically but can increase their risk of gender-based violence. A 2018 study, for example, found that during a heat wave, the risk of intimate partner femicide can rise by as much as 40 percent. Similarly, in drought-stricken Samburu county, women face increased risk of violence as limited resources place additional stress on families, Lenantoiye said.

Addressing environmental challenges without considering gender dynamics only risks reinforcing existing inequalities, Lenantoiye wrote. Within the Samburu community, ICAN has supported women, who are often excluded from decisions about land and resources, to organize savings groups and start small businesses.

“I have witnessed once invisible women and youth now speaking up about land, livelihoods and climate solutions,” Lenantoiye wrote. “The resilience and determination of young girls in my community continues to inspire me.”

Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

For Lenantoiye, the same goes for Samburu youth. 

Much like women, young people bear many of the consequences of climate change and extreme weather. Boys guarding livestock are often placed on the frontlines of resource violence while girls, due to decreased food and income, are at higher risk of child marriage. This increased vulnerability prompted Lenantoiye to involve youth in tree planting, rangeland restoration and cultural storytelling. 

To date, ICAN has mobilized over 2,000 youth on climate action, governance, culture and socioeconomic empowerment. These projects have included establishing high school environmental peace clubs, offering community radio training opportunities, and facilitating intercultural and intergenerational forums focused on climate adaptation and peacebuilding. Involvement in local climate action, Lenantoiye believes, not only gives young people a voice in their community, but helps shape a different kind of climate leadership. 

“When women and youth are given space, knowledge and opportunities, they don’t just adapt,” she said. “They lead transformation.”

This article Indigenous women already have the climate solutions was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The Waging Nonviolence Fellowship is a five-month journalistic training program that offers the opportunity to work closely with experienced editors and generate a body of clips on an undercovered movement beat. Fellows will each write five monthly feature articles (at least 1,500 words long) for Waging Nonviolence over the course of the program. 

This is a remote (U.S.-based) position with a flexible, self-determined schedule. Fellows will receive an initial stipend of $500, and then $250 per published story.

With mentorship from senior editor Jessica Stites and editor-in-chief Eric Stoner, participants will fine-tune their ability to pitch, report and write compelling movement stories. Fellows will have an initial meeting with the editors and additional meetings as needed throughout the program. 

Fellows are expected to take initiative in seeking out stories, reliably meet deadlines and respond quickly over email while working on a piece.

This is an opportunity to pursue stories of true substance (not clickbait) that are read by leading movement thinkers, organizers and activists. Our writers have gone on to write and work for Democracy Now!, Vox, The Guardian, The Intercept, The New Republic, Rolling Stone and elsewhere.

Requirements

• Experience in reporting or reported analysis on social movements
• Excellent writing skills; ability to turn in clean copy
• Passionate about movements organizing for peace and justice

Preferred

• Established connections to groups, activists and communities at the forefront of today’s social movements, such as racial justice, labor or democracy defense.
• Knowledgeable on the history, theories, strategies and tactics of civil resistance/nonviolent action.

Waging Nonviolence welcomes people of all backgrounds and encourages people from groups that are underrepresented in media to apply. 

How to apply

We are now accepting applications for the Fall 2026 fellowship. Resume/CV not required. To apply, please fill out this form by August 10, 2026. 

Who we are

Since our founding in 2009, Waging Nonviolence has become the leading source for news, analysis and original reporting on social movements around the world. 

We tell in-depth, compelling stories about how ordinary people are fighting for a broad range of social, economic, racial and environmental justice issues — and challenging authoritarians around the world. To demystify the work of social change, we get behind-the-scenes with organizers to unpack the strategies and tactics they use to build a more just world. While most media focus on why protests are happening, our stories seek to uncover the how.

We have been called “an indispensable platform for exploring creative and strategic resistance” by journalist Naomi Klein, and “the essential journalistic resource on civil resistance” by Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth.

This article Announcing the first Waging Nonviolence Fellowship was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Earlier this year, Gallup asked a national sample of Americans whether they would support an AI data center being built in their local area. Seventy-one percent opposed it, 48 percent of them strongly. Opposition to living near a nuclear power plant was markedly lower, at 53 percent. Republicans, Democrats and independents all rejected data centers. Asked why, respondents most often pointed to environmental concerns: water, energy, land use, noise and air pollution — and the lack of community consent.

At Social Change Lab we recently ran a randomized controlled trial with 3,467 participants to answer a question the AI accountability movement has been wrestling with: Which of AI’s many harms actually move people from concern to action? We tested 11 different arguments, from environmental effects to job losses and the harms of algorithmic bias; from AI enabling more pervasive surveillance to the risk of superintelligent AI leading to human extinction. 

The results showed that AI’s environmental impacts were the strongest predictor of willingness to act. Job displacement — the issue people mention most unprompted, ranked much lower. Extinction risk came last. And the emotion most strongly associated with action was not fear or anxiety, but anger.

Previous Coverage

The data center backlash that’s uniting America

These findings should concentrate the minds of climate organizers and funders alike. Data centers have become a focal point for public anger not just over AI but over climate policy around the world. Unlike abstract metrics such as “CO2 parts per million,” every data center is tangible; it requires a planning application, a zoning decision, a water permit and elected officials willing to approve — or reject — it. These local decisions create concrete opportunities for organizing.

In the United States, the movement to halt data centers has grown with remarkable speed: The New York State Assembly recently passed what could become the country’s first statewide moratorium; Seattle became the largest American city to adopt one after residents generated more than 96,000 emails to the city council; and more than 500 organizations from 47 states have joined the Stop Data Centers Coalition. 

“Concerns about data centers are agitating even people who have never taken a public stand on any issue before,” Deeda Seed of the Center for Biological Diversity told Waging Nonviolence in June. “They’re willing to take a stand on this.”

But the movement is growing far beyond the United States. In fact, one of the clearest victories so far came in a Dutch town that few people outside the Netherlands had heard of before 2021.

The case of Zeewolde

In February 2021, Meta proposed building a 200-megawatt hyperscale data center on 410 acres of reclaimed farmland outside Zeewolde, a town of just over 22,000 people. It would have consumed at least twice as much electricity as the town itself. Residents, farmers and Extinction Rebellion campaigners objected not just to the scale of the project, but to the secrecy surrounding it. Officials had spent two years negotiating with Meta while keeping the company’s identity out of the public record, and many residents felt scarce renewable energy was being handed to a foreign corporation for little local benefit. 

The campaign worked on two fronts at once. Locally, they plastered posters on the town hall, organized a residents’ petition and waged nonviolent direct action. Days before the December vote, 20 Extinction Rebellion activists occupied the council building’s public hall with banners reading “We want Greta, not Meta,” until police cleared them out. Nationally, allies in The Hague were pressing a different lever. Part of the land Meta needed belonged to the state, and motions in both chambers of parliament urged ministers to use that leverage. 

Campaigners lost the first vote when the council approved the project in December 2021. But they won almost everything that followed. Within months the Dutch government imposed a moratorium on new hyperscale developments; local elections delivered a council majority to the anti-data center Leefbaar Zeewolde Party; the Dutch Senate blocked the sale of the government-owned land Meta needed; and by July 2022 the company had abandoned the project. The Netherlands subsequently restricted hyperscale facilities over 70 megawatts to just two designated sites.

In Zeewolde the fight was against a single project. In Ireland it was taking on the whole tech industry, which began aggressive expansion in the 2010s. Resistance to data centers came early there, too — and initially it was successful. In 2018, Apple abandoned a $1 billion project in Athenry after objectors ran the approval to the Supreme Court of Ireland. 

The government’s answer was to back the tech sector harder, using legislation to route large applications past local councils. Data centers kept coming. Organizers built a real coalition to stop them, united around a  moratorium bill in the Dáil, the lower house of Ireland’s parliament. 

But when a moratorium arrived, in 2021, it was instituted by the grid operator, which stopped issuing connections around Dublin for fear of blackouts. Nobody had voted for it, and when it lapsed in December 2025, there was no political win to defend. Friends of the Irish Environment, Friends of the Earth Ireland and ClientEarth are now suing to overturn the new rules. Data centers used 23 percent of Irish electricity last year, up from five percent a decade ago, and they are forecast to reach 31 percent by 2034. 

Zeewolde’s win was written into national law by a parliament that a grassroots campaign had won over. Ireland’s pause arrived as an engineering judgment — and departed as one.  

A global movement

Outside Europe and the United States, the sharpest conflicts are often about water.

In Santiago, Chile, community opposition forced Google back to the drawing board in 2024 after a court ruled that its proposed Cerrillos district data center had failed to account properly for climate change in assessing impacts on the city’s overstretched aquifer. A second Google project in nearby Quilicura was halted by residents the same year.

“We don’t need more data centers here taking our water so people in the Global North can draw funny pictures on AI,” Tania Rodríguez, founder of the Chilean water rights group Mosacat, told Time magazine.

In neighboring Uruguay, campaigners went to court in 2022 to discover what Google was planning. They learned the proposed cooling system would use 2 million gallons of drinking water a day from a supply under severe strain. As the campaign  said, “No es sequía, es saqueo,” or “It’s not drought, it’s pillage.” The project ultimately proceeded only after Google agreed to reduce its scale and abandon using water for cooling.

The movement is spreading. In Australia, Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium while community groups like Tomorrow Movement organize against major projects in Western Sydney. In France, data centers are featured in municipal election campaigns. Across Africa, where at least 11 governments have spent more than $2 billion on AI-enabled surveillance systems (including CCTV, license-plate readers, facial recognition and command centers where the feeds converge), AI infrastructure often raises concerns about surveillance as much as energy use. Abeba Birhane’s concept of “algorithmic colonialism” puts a name to a familiar pattern of extraction and unequal power, something of particular concern in authoritarian contexts. 

The climate movement has spent decades searching for an issue that is local, immediate, genuinely winnable and has broad political appeal. Data centers may prove to be exactly that. Communities have shown that these fights can be won. So how can others do it? And will the movement have the resources to take on the best-funded industry in history?

How to fight a data center

Of the thousands of people all over the United States and around the world who are stepping up to fight AI data centers, the vast majority aren’t lawyers or politicians. Most are regular people who are using what skills they have to fight off a raw deal for their community. In Central Oregon, farmers have organized tractor parades to city hall in protest; in Maryland, a concerned beauty salon worker quit her job and led a successful fight for a moratorium; and in Apex, North Carolina, an unlikely coalition of teachers, parents and IT professionals came together to defeat an AI data center. These are people using their skills and everyday know-how to build power with neighbors — and you can do it, too. 

1. Find out what they haven’t told you

Almost every successful campaign begins with research.

Companies consistently announce projects in terms of investment, jobs and innovation while leaving crucial questions unanswered. They use shell companies, non-disclosure agreements or opaque planning processes to hide the details — and the most important information is often what’s hidden.

How many permanent jobs will the facility really create? What will it mean for electricity prices and grid reliability? Where will the water come from, and where will it go? What subsidies or tax incentives have been offered? What noise, air and light pollution will nearby residents experience?

Residents can find the answers to these questions by researching online, scrutinizing planning applications, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, talking to people fighting projects by similar companies, checking zoning documents, and more. The work doesn’t need specialist skills so much as determination — you already have the tools you need. The Commons Social Change Library recently published a practical guide for organizers wherever new projects emerge.

And doing this work tends to motivate others to show up and help out. We can all contribute something, even if that’s making food for folks searching the internet: Anyone can fight and anyone can win.

2. Build the broadest coalition

One of the most successful things about this organic movement so far has been the ability of groups to focus on common goals instead of differences. A huge majority of Americans oppose AI data centers. Again and again neighbors with different politics, ideas, professions and class backgrounds are uniting because they agree on one thing: They don’t want an AI data center in their community. Conservatives and progressives find themselves making the same case at the same council meeting.

That breadth is really important. Tech companies often expect opposition from the “usual suspects” and have their arguments rehearsed. But they are much less prepared to push back on church groups, local businesses, sports clubs, zoo staff, neighborhood associations and concerned residents who have never attended a public meeting before. 

3. Understand what winning looks like 

Once some information is gathered and a group of people is getting together, a lot more resistance is possible. Moratoriums are popular because they buy time once people recognize that we are on our back heels in the fight against Big Tech. Some pundits have complained that this isn’t a full solution, and it’s not — a moratorium isn’t radical at all, it just means pausing to reboot since we are up against the richest companies that have ever existed. Slowing things down is part of the stage for achieving something bigger. 

Because of the power imbalance and loose rules for big companies, the two most common wins right now are reactive: stopping individual data center projects and winning moratoria or bans. Neither is perfect, but both can be building blocks towards more transparency, robust regulation and eventually building alternatives that fit with what communities actually want. Ultimately, part of why data centers are so hated is because they are externalizing so many costs onto people — from increased public health risks, to higher costs of living, to dangerous pollution. 

Winning is about understanding those trade-offs and moving the discussion toward investing in things we actually want and need, like public libraries and skate parks and safe bike lanes, all of which create jobs. When students, environmental advocates and neighbors came together to defeat a data center in New Brunswick, New Jersey, local officials immediately shifted to the other option on the table and kicked plans into gear to build a public park instead. That is the alternative: more shade, more trees, and spaces to gather and exercise, instead of a creepy box full of wires and chips.

Resourcing the fight

As we’ve noted, this organic, volunteer-based movement against AI data centers is one anyone can fight and anyone can win, and movements can and often do come about and grow organically. But, some of the most successful movements throughout history, from the U.S. civil rights movement to the Indian independence movement, were resourced in their earliest stages. Such an influx of funding helps ensure a movement can be sustained beyond local fights and scale to a more cohesive, strategic, national or global campaign. 

Yet, funders often arrive to movements last, hopping on the bandwagon once an issue has become popular. The lag is structural: Philanthropy funds organizations, and the most effective groups in passionate moments often don’t have official names, let alone 501(c)(3)s or professional grant writers. Often, they start with a WhatsApp group, a church hall meeting or an improvised coalition of neighbors. By the time a grant cycle catches up to a movement, the legislative windows have sometimes passed. 

That is exactly where the data center movement finds itself today. Across the U.S. — and increasingly around the world — data center resistance movements have energy and are building more and more momentum. What they often lack are the things that allow movements to grow: organizing staff, legal support, trainers and the connective tissue that allows communities to learn from one another instead of reinventing every campaign from scratch. Foundations can step up now to help ensure this fight goes even further than just local wins. 

Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

There is good reason to invest early. Some of the most successful environmental campaigns of the past two decades — from the movement against fracking to the coalition that helped secure the Inflation Reduction Act — were strengthened by philanthropic support before victory looked inevitable. Early funding allowed organizers to build sustainable networks rather than simply react to the next crisis.

That precedent is why Climate Emergency Fund has moved more than a third of its 2026 grants to groups organizing around data centers and AI, sometimes before those groups have a name. It serves as a form of venture philanthropy: Fund early, move fast, stay close to the communities doing the work. We are already seeing funding requests arrive from four continents as resistance to AI infrastructure becomes an increasingly global phenomenon. 

Many funders tell me they want to focus on affordability, democratic resilience or climate. The fight over AI infrastructure sits at the nexus of all three. It is about rising electricity bills, secret deals behind NDAs and the fossil fuel infrastructure that underpins the industry’s growth. 

AI is often presented as inevitable. Yet the infrastructure behind it still depends on local planning decisions, water supplies, electricity grids and politics. Those decisions remain contestable. Zeewolde, Cerrillos, New Brunswick — these were all stopped by committed groups of regular people who found out in time, who showed up and who kept showing up. For a climate movement searching for local, tangible and winnable campaigns, this might be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

This article The data center fight is going global was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This is an excerpt from “For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness,” originally published at Convergence.

The truth is, most of the groups and organizations that make up our movements do not have a strategy for winning. They might think they have a strategy. They might tell themselves they have one. They certainly tell their funders or dues-paying members they do, and on their websites there is plenty of stuff written under the header “Our Strategies.” They have mission statements, vision statements or other grandiose paragraphs in flowing prose that say what they think they’re doing. They have lists of programs — the things they do, hope to do or once did.

But they have not, for the most part, spent real time and energy getting a grasp on the challenge their organization exists in order to solve. They are not usually clear on their purpose, beyond the visionary sense and in the narrower, more practical sense — the specific part of all this grave need around us for which they are going to actually take responsibility; the specific point of intervention they are going to make and how that specifically is going to add value to our greater project of liberation. They are rarely clear on the role they play in the broader ecosystem, nor are they willing to adjust it because of what else is going on around them. They don’t often, if we’re honest, have a coherent plan for how to get from here to there despite the real constraints they will face from the world around them and the opponents who continue to forward their own interests. They do not usually know what they want to win in practical terms, nor how they will measure their successes or failures. In fact, they do not often genuinely measure these successes or failures at all, beyond what ends up in self-congratulatory social media posts, glossy end-of-year reports, inflated fundraising documents and glowing emails to the base inviting them to the next thing. They do not, almost ever, know how to make the strategic decision to shut down programs that are failing or sunset their organization to make way for something else. They are aided and abetted in all this by leaders who are conflict avoidant, by members who are more concerned with their belonging than on good strategy, by consultants and facilitators who have made a living helping groups stay on the surface and maintain their business as usual, and by funders who expect this kind of behavior and decide on their survival based on it. And they push one another to do this too, by competing over media attention and limited funding, and bullshitting each other at conferences and coalition meetings.

I know, because I have been in movements for over two decades, played a leadership role at Occupy Wall Street, built organizations and supported some of the cutting edge movement groups of our time. I know, because I have led movements like this, run organizations like this, have been a facilitator like this, have been a fundraiser like this, have been a bullshitter like this myself. Mostly, I have done this out of fear of conflict. I thought I was being good, being noble: avoiding conflict to shield people from pain, to keep resources and activity flowing, to keep my people happy and connected, to keep the train moving. But none of this led to the work we were doing becoming greater than the sum of its parts, or prevented the pain of loss in the long-run anyway. And years later, I can see that I avoided conflict for selfish reasons, too: to shield myself from having to actually justify the thoughts and feelings driving me, to protect my ego, to protect my place in the group (and my income), to maintain an image of confidence and success and security that masked my fear of failure. I avoided conflict to protect my team from loss, but, honestly, to protect myself from loss too.

Conflict avoidance is widespread in our movements and the organizations that drive them. We avoid conflict by diffusing tension with humor, discouraging anger, expressing negativity with passive aggression and gossip instead of discussing things directly. We sweep conflict under the rug, find surface-level tensions on which to spend our energy or project grievances onto some external actor (like, for example, a facilitator). We replace deep planning with an untenable pace of doing, or with producing documents everyone can agree on but that ultimately don’t change much. We use tools like stack, where people are called on in the order they raised their hands, or progressive stack, where the order is arranged based on the facilitator’s sense of people’s identities. And these tools, although reasonable, often lead to circular, abstract conversations where people are not responding to one another directly but rather saying whatever they wanted to say when they raised their hands 15 minutes earlier. When we see tension come up in a conversation, we move on to the next person on the stack, and the opportunity for engagement flutters off into the ether instead of landing at someone’s feet. We encourage compromise toward a middle ground to avoid polarization, and though compromise is good in many contexts, it can also be the avoidance of choice — a way to mediate conflicting interests and desires rather than pushing to get somewhere deeper, sharper, clearer. We let folks stay on the surface, and accept indirect statements, behaviors that don’t line up with stated intentions and ideas that would fold under cross-examination. We hire facilitators who do all this for us too: steer us away from the bumps, protect the agenda at all costs, smooth things over to support the group feeling connected and help us get to the end instead of to the bottom.

But I have also seen good strategy, been led by people committed to doing the hard work of making it, and even — I am lucky to be able to say — tasted its fruits. It almost always rests on a real orientation to power — wanting it, being willing to sacrifice for it, and it almost always begins with the willingness to tell the truth, even when it is difficult.

On the precipice of good strategy

This retreat center has weird chairs. They are folding chairs without legs, so the bottoms lie flat on the carpeted floor, and the backs sort of crank backward into an L shape, but it’s easy to flop over or sink into them, especially late in the day. I often have to get the participants out of their seats to keep them from drifting.

It’s the fall of 2021 and I’m with Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, or CAAAV, a long-time New York City community organization that’s been remaking itself for the past few years, organizing Asian tenants to break the relationship between the real estate sector and the government so that their base — mostly Chinese and Bengali tenants — can afford to stay in their homes, in their neighborhoods, in this city. Right now they have an active campaign in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and are building a new base of Chinese, Bengali and Korean tenants in Queensbridge Houses, a public housing complex in Long Island City, Queens. We’ve spent some months now reading Richard Rumelt’s strategy book “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy,” designing what he calls a strategy kernel, and putting it through the wringer. They have gone toward conflict many times already — something we have learned together is critical to good strategy — and they are getting sharper and deeper, but something still isn’t quite landing.

We abandon the weird chairs, and move to stand in a half-circle around the big whiteboard where they’ve scribbled and diagrammed for the better part of a week. As we stare quietly, I am struck, not for the first time, by the scale of the task before them. I wonder how on earth they will beat this much more powerful opponent, how they will turn their small advantages against the opponent’s weaknesses. So I ask, What’s actually going well? Where are you growing? Where are you strong?

Emily, one of the veterans, says: Chinatown. They struggle there too, of course; they constantly feel under capacity, without enough time, without enough money. But they punch above their weight, are in the middle of a campaign that they really have a shot at winning, and are building a solid base. The others agree. They have been in the community for ages; this is the part of the work that CAAAV has always been known for.

I continue: Ok, so then why not take the Chinese organizers out of Queensbridge and put them there? Why not throw down where you have something going already, and really throw your full weight behind the campaign you’re in?

This question is not altogether innocent. I have a sneaking suspicion that no one has made this suggestion because if they moved all the Chinese organizers out of Queensbridge, it will more or less crush that operation, require them to let go of it. Someone says something to this effect. Most of the others nod, and seem to move on, accepting the boundary and continuing to gaze at the whiteboard, as if staring at it hard enough will reveal something hidden.

But then Em, a young Chinese organizer who has been doing that work in Queens, interrupts the quiet pondering: Well, what if we just . . . didn’t do the organizing in Queensbridge anymore?

We all take our eyes off the whiteboard and look at Em. It is significant that this question comes from Em, someone who is doing the work and demonstrating commitment and care for the leaders being developed there. It feels like people are taking this option seriously for the first time, but I know the group might still back away here. They are thinking now about the leaders who they have organized there — poor and working-class Asian tenants who are sacrificing so much to help build something there. They are thinking, too, about the Korean and Bengali staff who have been recently hired to do this work, talented and energetic people who have been trained and invested in, who won’t have a place in Chinatown. They are thinking, probably, about the conflict that going down this road might force them to have in this room, worried about its costs. Maybe they’re thinking also about CAAAV’s reputation, or funders, or partners. They are thinking, in short, about loss — this strange, dark shadow that often keeps us doing things that aren’t quite right because doing them is better than the risk of something new.

Conflict for the sake of good strategy

There are lots of reasons for the lack of good strategy we often see across movement organizations, but conflict avoidance is one of them. Facing that isn’t the only thing we need to do to correct course, but it is a prerequisite, because groups need the capacity to be in healthy conflict in order to develop good strategy and the ability to carry it out.

Sometimes the conflict we are avoiding is between one another on our teams, or between us and other organizations, or with our funders, or our members. But perhaps unexpectedly, often enough, the conflict is inside us — between the parts of us that want to be big and powerful and effective, and the part of us that is ambivalent about power, the part of us that is afraid of the loss that comes with all real choice. Many of us are truly not in the habit of telling the truth when it is hard; we prefer, instead, to stay on the surface, to keep doing what is comfortable and within reach, to keep one another happy, to avoid the hard choice that might put us in conflict with one another or force us to give up things we care about, to protect the little islands we have made for ourselves despite the tidal waves heading straight for us. Conflict avoidance most often looks, in the end, like dishonesty.

But groups that don’t tell the truth cannot form a winning strategy, and they are unlikely to be healthy and strong enough to actualize it even if they did. So much of good strategy — and strong movements more broadly — is about making choices, to prioritize one thing over another, to let go of some things all together, to say many nos for the sake of a strong yes. Good strategy is about painstakingly clawing our way toward the truth: what is real about the opponent, about us, about the world, about our role, about the best way to move from here to there, about what we will need to change, even if it’s painful, in order to get there. Groups that lie to themselves about these things make strategies divorced from reality. Groups that lie to themselves and each other about these things can’t make real hard choices. And groups that lie to themselves about the tensions that exist in their strategy or their group dynamics also lie to themselves about everything else — about what is realistic for them to accomplish, about their competence and levels of accountability, even about their deadlines and when they’ll start their meetings. 

It is understandable that we sometimes avoid the conflicts that might lead to good strategy, because conflict can be difficult and dangerous. Many of us, especially those most often on the receiving end of the systemic abuses of this empire, have faced devastating conflict in our work, in our social lives, even in our movements. We’ve seen conflict break things we care about. Not all conflict, after all, is healthy, and even healthy conflict can be painful. And we have so few models for generative conflict, and often find ourselves unequipped, unpracticed and unsupported to carry it out.

The truth is, if we move toward conflict, we will encounter loss. We’ll discover disagreements where we thought we were aligned, weaknesses where we projected only strength, messiness where there was previously order. Sometimes we will work it out, but sometimes we won’t. In our organizations, moving toward conflict will sometimes mean changing course, letting partners down, disappointing funders or members. Sometimes it will mean parting ways with our teammates, hurting or being hurt, firing or being fired. Sometimes it will mean the group dissolving, leaving before the job is done, finding ourselves without a vehicle through which to do anything about the things we continue to want to change. Sometimes it will feel like failure. I cannot even count the number of times — as a facilitator and as a leader — that I avoided the conflict beneath the surface to escape this pain, to protect the people around me from it, to protect myself. It wasn’t just out of fear and comfort; it was also out of love. I loved the people around me and thought that what was best for them was to stay together, thought that conflict would wreck that.

But failure is a tricky thing. Often when we imagine it, we see groups imploding from infighting, mass firings or quitting, the organization disappearing. This happens sometimes, and it is painful when it does, to be sure. But more often, failure doesn’t look like collapse at all: It looks like organizations continuing forever and ever in mediocrity. It looks like achieving far less of our potential because we aren’t willing to confront each other and get to the bottom of things to become a stronger team with a sharper strategy. It looks like a movement incapable of meeting the moment. Conflict avoidance makes this kind of failure much more likely than open conflict would.

People are, in the end, much more capable of facing the truth than we sometimes imagine; we do it all the time. All we need are small supports, encouragements, structures and processes to do it well. In fact, avoiding it takes an enormous toll, requires immense effort, relies on endless tricks. If we want to build powerful groups, powerful organizations, powerful movements, we will have to cultivate truth telling as a skill, a reflex, a superpower. 

From Chinatown to Zohran

There is a brief silence that covers the room with the weird chairs, as the organizers from CAAAV consider what Em has said. And then Sasha, the executive director, steps into the gap, walks through the door: No, really. This is an actual option. Let’s play it out.

It is rare to have leaders who are willing to say no to something important for the possibility of a sharper, clearer, more powerful yes; rare, I think, to find groups that are really, truly committed to sacrificing things they care about for the sake of winning. But when I am in their company, I can feel it like a kind of electricity, and it is humbling.

The group begins to loosen, and as they start to talk about what could shift, their eyes light up. Emily and Julie talk about what they could accomplish if Alina and Em joined them in Chinatown; it could mean the difference between winning and losing their campaign to prevent four luxury towers from going up and displacing many of their residents. Em breathes a sigh of relief at the possibility of having a real team, rather than working alone to organize Mandarin-speaking Chinese tenants in Queensbridge while Oni works alone with the Bengalis and Kit alone with the Koreans. They admit that they don’t have much of a chance of winning there.

They’ve knocked on every Asian door in Queensbridge, and even if CAAAV was successful in organizing all of them, it would make up only a tiny minority of the population there. Sandra reminds the group of the logistical cost of shifting their operation in such a big way again, offers some thoughts about how to do it. Alina says, voice catching, that she has always dreamed of organizing in Chinatown, where her grandma lives in a small apartment that she spent visiting as a kid and living in with her as a young adult. Every time I visit, she says, a tear escaping despite her best effort, I can see that my grandma is trying to hide some new pain over something lost and gone — a favorite restaurant closed, a service she needed suddenly shut down, an old friend pushed out of the neighborhood. Farihah and Oni start to wonder about Sunnyside, Woodside and Astoria, these neighborhoods in Queens that Bengali immigrants are making home — a huge new base of people to organize. When Farihah, whose ambition and determination are both inspiring and intimidating, shares that Astoria is where her own family landed all those years ago, the fire usually in her eyes is replaced by something softer and more vulnerable, something seemingly aware of the challenge and the need and the stakes. They all go on talking and scheming, and there is some laughter, some arguing, some more scribbling on the whiteboard. And then there is thoughtful quiet again.

Someone asks: But, what about the leaders in Queensbridge? The doubt creeps back into the new quiet, a doubt brought on by real costs — the real impact on real people’s real lives. They say the names of some of these leaders they have supported and trained and sometimes coaxed into the fight, these poor and working-class immigrants who have so much to lose, so few resources, such a hard road ahead. They talk about the time they’ve spent, about the work being unfinished. They talk about heartbreak.

And then Kit, clear and determined, says: We have to do it anyway. We aren’t going to win if we don’t get more strategic. We owe it to our people to build as much power as we can. This is the first time Kit has spoken, and there is a silence bigger than the others after she does, because everyone knows that what Kit is suggesting could very well cost her her job. Kit is Korean, was brought on to organize Korean-speaking tenants in Queensbridge, and one of the most likely scenarios of the pivot the group is moving toward will mean not only throwing down harder than before in Chinatown, but building a new base of Bengali tenants somewhere in Queens, likely Astoria. There may not be a role for her anymore.

I ask Kit how it feels to say this out loud and she replies: Honestly, I feel relieved. I know it’s going to hurt some of our folks. I know I might not have a job anymore. But winning is more important. And now it feels clear, even if it’s a little scary.

The silence now seems proud — reverent, almost. They look at one another with kind eyes, and it feels like a decision. Sasha comes in again to offer structure and process. They lay out the beginning of a plan to gradually phase out of Queensbridge in a way that helps the members there understand the choice, get themselves organized another way and continue on with CAAAV if they want to. They start to design a process to gather data about different neighborhoods in Queens where they might organize this growing Bengali community and make a plan to test the organizing on the ground. They talk about the campaign in Chinatown, which has always felt like a losing battle, but which they now suddenly feel they might actually be able to win. They set next steps to write out the new strategy kernel.

They can’t yet know, at this moment, that these shifts will result in them stopping the towers from going up in Chinatown, but also lead to the embodied conclusion that if they want more than partial victories in these never-ending defensive battles — want to win a city their people can afford to live in — they will need the power of city hall behind them; they can’t yet know that this will lead to their sibling organization, CAAAV Voice, having some of the first conversations, hushed and tentative at first, about throwing down for a longshot democratic socialist mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani; they can’t yet know that they will organize a formidable Bengali base to win a massive affordable housing campaign in Astoria against a private developer; they can’t yet know that pouring immense volumes of sweat and tears there will result — alongside the hard work of other immigrant-led organizations like Desis Rising Up & Moving, or DRUM, Beats, and the steady organizing of the Democratic Socialists of America, and others — in the creation of a new power base that will end up being essential to that longshot candidate actually becoming mayor. They can’t yet know that, some short months after this mayoral victory — because of a million small decisions made by a whole host of actors that add up to greater than the sum of their parts — the city will pass a historic rent freeze, something they have only barely dreamed of at this point. They can’t see the future, and neither can I.

But there is enough here: enough clarity about their leverage and their options, enough willingness to take risks and experience loss and enter into conflict for the sake of good strategy; there is enough courage, enough honesty, enough choice, enough possibility.

Telling the truth

Not having good strategy sends resources, attention and activity in different — even contradictory — directions. It’s a waste of what precious few tools we have; it usually means we lose. And the losing that comes with bad strategy shapes us over time, gets swallowed up in the form of despair, calcifies into ideas and behaviors that make up the politics of powerlessness — an ambivalence toward power, where we turn inward on each other rather than face outward to the public and our opponent. 

Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

In the end, breaking the conflict avoidance that blocks good strategy is really about telling the truth whenever we can. And if we want to be different, we’ll have to practice. We can all begin by doing the small but vital things that are in our control: say what we mean, steer toward tensions instead of away from them, ask follow-up questions when we sense there is something being left unsaid, get curious about what is inside us and inside others, be honest about misalignments when they arise. Every day, little by little, we can just be a little more honest, even when it is hard — about our groups, ourselves, each other, our fears and doubts, our hopes and dreams, the stakes, our plans. We can anticipate conflict, make time for it, create regular rhythms for feedback, have ongoing conversations about how power is being wielded in our spaces, regularly question our own strategic choices and put them relentlessly to the test. We can build all of this into our meetings, our retreats, our planning sessions. We can invite people from the outside to facilitate or advise us in these risky, delicate, transformative journeys; demand that they challenge us, help us fill our gaps, take us through the fire and not around it. 

We should do all of this for the sake of good strategy and stronger groups. We should do it because organizations and movements that have good strategy win more often, and those embodied experiences of winning are some of our best protections from the politics of powerlessness — the choice to stay small and pure and righteous over growing and opening and taking big risks. But we should do it, too, because telling the truth is central to transformation. It is a fundamental part of looking at what is and what might be and making the choice to climb the distance between; a chance to flex that muscle of becoming and becoming again; an opportunity to become bigger as individuals and greater than the sum of our parts as groups. And it is absolutely central to the task we have taken up as movements more broadly: to take control of our lives, to shape the world, to make of it something nearer to the world we all deserve.

This article Movements cannot shy away from conflict was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, an authoritarian presidency has been accompanied by a brutal crackdown on social movements. While there are strikingly new features of Trump’s reign, many of the assaults on freedom and the persecution of activists have parallels in the histories of U.S. imperialism, the anti-Vietnam war movement and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of the right in the 1980s.

And many of the questions organizers are asking today were in debate then. How do you balance militant activism with the need to build a mass movement? What role do creativity, theatrics and joy take in resistance? What does it mean to support those who are facing the brunt of the state’s criminalization of protest?

This is why “Levitating the Pentagon and Other Uplifting Stories: A Life of Activism,” a recent memoir by New Left organizer Nancy Kurshan, comes at a critical moment. Kurshan takes a magnifying glass to her decades of organizing experience in an attempt to pull out the lessons that are most informative for today. I talked with Nancy about her history in revolutionary organizations like the Weather Underground and the Yippies — known for their theatrical antiwar activism — and how she sees their choices years later.

Your book is named after the Oct. 21, 1967 demonstration organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the precursor to the Youth International Party, or the Yippies), in which they claimed they would attempt to psychically raise the Pentagon building into the air. I don’t think you would be surprised that when I first heard that story, it was explained as a type of disconnect: These people really believed they were about to levitate the Pentagon. Can you put the levitation in context? 

We always claimed we did, in fact, levitate the Pentagon, but just not high enough — although I doubt a single one of us thought we would literally succeed. But we did hope to help end the war and, in order to do that, we did need to have those evil spirits expelled by enough people to help change policy. 

For instance, there was a young Daniel Ellsberg watching from an upstairs window of the Pentagon who later became a famous whistleblower by releasing the Pentagon Papers. So maybe we did succeed at driving out the evil spirits or at least hastening that process. Who knows?

As you discuss, this was a much more strategically conceived demonstration than it first appeared, even if it had some elements that weren’t that strategic.

That demonstration in particular was very strategic. We were not yet Yippies when a small group of us arrived in New York to help build a national antiwar protest in Washington. Our strategic goal was to build a larger, more militant movement and one that tapped into the energy of the emerging counterculture. Our little band of youthful agitators argued for the demonstration to be the at Pentagon, as opposed to the usual humdrum protest outside the White House. We wanted a target that made it clear this was not just about an argument of words but about a conflict in which millions of lives were being taken by weapons of destruction — over 2 million Vietnamese lives and 60,000 American GIs. And we wanted our slogan to be: “Shut it down!” 

And we wanted to do this by organizing mass civil disobedience. And the reason I stress mass is because there had already been very orchestrated, “stepping over the line” civil disobedience carried out by a few very wonderful, committed people. But it was time to massify it. And we did it. Hundreds were arrested. It was the largest civil disobedience of the anti-Vietnam war movement to that date. 

The other strategic aspect was we wanted to appeal to the youth of America. The hippie phenomenon was taking hold in many places throughout the nation, and the Pentagon protest was able to project a union of antiwar and countercultural streams. Later the colorful, satirical approach of the Yippies was very resonant with young Americans. 

What would you say is the value of these theatrical and performative protest actions?

Theatrical and performative protest are incredibly valuable. The whole Pentagon protest was a theatrical event, but one particular photo of Super-Joel placing a flower in the musket of a National Guardsman has traveled around the world. 

After Black Panther Fred Hampton and others were assassinated, and the guilty verdict in the Chicago Conspiracy trial came down, Anita Hoffman, Tasha Dellinger and I held a press conference and we burned judges’ robes in front of a banner referencing the Jefferson Airplane’s “We Are All Outlaws In The Eyes of Amerika,” [from the song “We Can Be Together.”] The photo went around the globe. 

During the wars in the 1980s in Central America, we went out in canoes and dyed the Chicago River red and left “bloodied” hands on the walls of the federal building. 

The 1,000 Grandmothers for Future Generations, a climate justice organization that I am a part of, has fantastical, huge puppets — the Water Protector, Flo the Hummingbird, the Fierce Protector and Winds of Change. The names alone are great, but the creatures are fabulous. And people, including children, love them. The incredibly original, creative banners and signs are proof that we are not “paid agitators.” Sometimes the movement’s fabulous art is reflected in the mass media, more often on social media. But always in our hearts and minds. 

Your book includes a deep dive into the Chicago Eight trial, in which eight antiwar activists were prosecuted for allegedly inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, including Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and Black Panther Bobby Seale (although Seale wasn’t present and had no connection). You were involved in court and jail support for the defendants, the kind of organizing that became increasingly important as repression against organizers grew. Can you talk about why this kind of prison solidarity and court support activism are so key, and what other campaigns you’ve been involved in?

I believe that prison support should play a central role in any vibrant movement challenging the status quo. I don’t think a movement can persist and grow if political prisoners are locked away without support. I was privileged to be part of a campaign to free 11 Puerto Rican independentistas, a campaign that was conducted in Puerto Rico, in Chicago and around the globe. After decades of imprisonment, their sentences were ultimately commuted by President [Bill] Clinton. That never would have happened if it weren’t for a persistent and intense campaign to free them across decades. I saw in that campaign what real loyalty looked like when day after day and year after year, decade after decade, there was a ceaseless attempt to hold the political prisoners in community, to tell their stories, to organize protests, to visit them, to raise funds and to incorporate them into the daily life of the community, primarily in Puerto Rican neighborhoods, but also among other allies.

I was part of the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, a campaign in the 1980s and ’90s to end the ongoing lockdown at the United States Penitentiary Marion [now named Federal Corrections Institution Marion], a federal prison where inmates were confined to their cells for 23 hours a day and without normal contact and recreation. I wrote a book about it, “Out of Control: A 15 Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons,” published by Freedom Archives. For 15 years we organized and protested to end mass incarceration and particularly long-term solitary confinement. That was our primary effort. However, we worked along with our Puerto Rican friends and others, incorporating demands to free political prisoners into our work, as they joined in fighting long-term solitary [confinement], which disproportionately fell on political prisoners like the 11. We also together assembled, published, collated and distributed four editions of “Can’t Jail the Spirit,” collections of biographies and photos of all the political prisoners we knew of at the time. 

I applaud the work of groups like The Sentencing Project and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. And when significant charges come down, whether on activists from the movement against Palestinian genocide or the immigration or climate movements, let’s show solidarity and have their backs. 

How did the struggle against white supremacy and for civil rights develop your consciousness as an organizer?

Anti-racism had always been, since high school, at the center of my political thinking. I was a Northern supporter of the Southern civil rights movement and then later, I was part of Students for a Democratic Society. I was committed to building an interracial movement of the poor. I was a middle-class white girl knocking on apartment doors of Black folks who were more hospitable than you can imagine. 

Then along came Malcolm X and the evolution of the civil rights movement into a movement for Black liberation. I heard both Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X speak and I got it: Black people are not the problem, and white people need to organize our own communities to oppose racism. 

My militancy grew in response to the way the Black movement had been treated and the response that ill-treatment generated in younger Black activists of my generation. We noted everything that was going on. The refusal of the Democratic Party to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the brutal murders of [James Earl] Chaney, [Andrew] Goodman and [Michael] Schwerner, and the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had a deep impact on me and many other activists.  

Over your years in organizing, how did you balance militancy and radicalism with the need to build a mass movement? 

Sometimes well, sometimes not that well. It was and is a conundrum wrapped in an enigma. This is a huge topic and I could look at each decade of my life and try to see how I – and we – dealt with that balance. But that would be a whole long piece. So I’ll just touch on it.

Previous Coverage

The day they levitated the Pentagon

I advocated for militancy in the form of nonviolent direct action, as exemplified by the October 1967 Pentagon demonstration. Our advocacy included satire and theater, thus the levitation. But our slogan of “Shut it down!” represented our militant intent, as did our refusal to leave. [The] Chicago ‘68 [Democratic National Convention protests] continued our militant trajectory and we were still able to grow the mass movement. 

Many of the Black youth in the movement were becoming more militant. The Black Panthers were sick and tired of being the victims of white hatred and violence, whether by the police or by racist white folks. So they marched into the Sacramento capitol of California with rifles and declared themselves the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. 

This was a time of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI COINTELPRO [counter-intelligence program], whose core objective was to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant Black nationalist movement.” It involved overt and often illegal operations aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and neutralizing domestic political organizations. Neutralizing? Scores of dead Black people give meaning to the definition. I was in Chicago when Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated. I walked through the bloody scene where they killed him in his sleep. He was old enough to be my baby brother. 

As Black, Puerto Rican, Mexican and Native (Indigenous, to use today’s language) contemporaries became more militant, we asked ourselves how we should respond. We supported what they were doing. So why wasn’t it appropriate for us to join in? Should we be onlookers or should we be like Old John Brown and his family — white folks who actively opposed slavery with their lives. 

For some of us becoming more militant meant joining the Weather Underground. By doing so, I never expected to become divorced from the mass movement. My passion was deep and I didn’t realize the mass movement would recede so quickly. 

What did that receding of the mass movement look like?

There were collectives around the country, particularly in college towns and other youth communities that persisted. I encountered many of them when a group of us traveled around the country in 1974. But in hindsight we could see that after the ending of the Vietnam War, and the repression of the Black movement, and also of Puerto Rican, Mexican and Native American [movements], the mass movement significantly receded.

By 1976 we in the Weather Underground Organization planned a Hard Times Conference in Chicago, a conference to address the economic recession taking place nationally, in large part to help reinvigorate a mass movement that would link a militant fight to combat racism and sexism together with the concerns of all working-class people. That didn’t work. I wasn’t there because I was delivering a baby at that moment. Large numbers of people showed up from around the country, but there was too much internal division for the convening to be successful. 

We made mistakes but perhaps objective conditions were not ripe. Our youthful passion often overlooked a clear view of objective conditions. We thought if we just worked harder, we could change anything and everything. 

You talked about your move away from the “straight left,” which was the term for the less theatrical and subcultural organizing left, in part because the cultural values of young people were coming up against the entrenched social conservatism you were fighting against, and this made many of the more buttoned-down leftist tactics seem antiquated. What was the value of this countercultural movement in terms of resisting the war and structural injustice? 

I lived in several different situations, but the most extraordinary was the Bachenheimer houses on Parker Street in Berkeley. The complex was a cluster of houses that went on rent strike for a couple of years. Bachenheimer was the name of the landlord/slumlord in charge of overcharging and under-repairing everything.

The rent strike meant much more than simply not paying rent. We, like so many others, had rejected the traditional materialistic values of U.S. society and were looking for more meaningful, cooperative and creative ways of living. We treated the houses as if they were our own, tearing down walls and rehabbing as desired. The backyards of the buildings ran together and there was a large outdoor common area.

The rent strike was a collective decision and action taken by all the Bachenheimer houses. We weren’t out to con the landlord. On the contrary, we believed that people had the right to decent and affordable living conditions, and we put our rent checks into an escrow account every month — payable when and if Bachenheimer brought the houses up to code. 

The nature of that community was not lost on the FBI. My FBI file [obtained through the Freedom of Information Act], indicates that: “This department had not had any success in developing any sources or informants … in the 2200 block of East Parker, Berkeley, California. … Because the residents of this block are ‘hippie type individuals,’ their attitude towards any type of authority or law enforcement official is somewhat negative, therefore, communication with them is also somewhat limited.”

I wonder if any left organization was better guarded against snooping FBI agents or undercover informants than the Bachenheimer houses. Although the rent strike may have been exceptional, there were communities of similar character all around the country.

Do you continue to see value for radical movements in the development of a counterculture as important?

I suspect that the melding of the antiwar movement and countercultural hippies probably led to the most successful influence on disaffected working-class youth [of any recent movement]. I can’t prove it, but I doubt anyone can disprove it. My family was solidly middle class by the 1960s, but I encountered countercultural working-class youth in Kent, Ohio as well as in Berkeley, California, the Lower East Side of New York, the Twin Cities, Minnesota, and in Manchester, New Hampshire, all of whom were antiwar. They were not that different from people I knew as a young child in Brooklyn. 

I also met with deserters from the U.S. Army in Sweden and worked with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In fact, resistance to the war inside the military, and organizing on the outside at coffee houses set up near military bases, was essential to ending the war and most of the participants were working class, albeit not only white folks. Tremendously aided by the music of Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan but also the Rolling Stones; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff and so many others. 

That assessment of the past hasn’t changed. Yes, many people both from the political movement and the counterculture returned to the mainstream, but in doing so, many maintained, in varying degrees, the values and thinking of the political/cultural movements. The civil rights movement was probably the grandmother/grandfather of them all, but it can be argued that the counterculture advanced notions of sexual liberation that, although shot full of male supremacy, or perhaps partly in reaction to that, then led to the birth of the women’s and gay liberation movements. You could argue similarly about the current climate movement. The seeds were there in the counterculture.

And the antiwar movement, unique in that it led to the eventual, massive alienation from the war machine, is still having reverberations today. The war in Vietnam remained popular much longer than the current war on Iran. That is echoes of the so-called Vietnam Syndrome.  

So I suggest that the mainstream has actually been moving towards us. Perhaps a slow evolution but a change in direction. And of course subsequent movements were critical — Occupy and Black Lives Matter. All these movements encourage changes in consciousness. And what we are seeing in this era, is the counter-revolution, if you will. In other words, the collective “we” has had a great influence which is why there is such a fierce response. It’s hard to tease out the different elements but it’s clear that all the mass struggles of our people have planted seeds that have blossomed in subsequent generations.

I returned to Vietnam in 2013 as a guest of the Vietnamese government, in thanks for helping end the war. It was the first time that I completely internalized that yes, we had made a positive difference. 

What kind of advice do you have for organizers today who are asking questions about the role of cultural struggle?

Don’t give in to cynicism. The current powers that be would love nothing better. When asked if I’m hopeful, I like to quote the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” I take it to mean we have to see the reality for what it is, not through rose-colored [glasses]. But we have to continue to act. 

My wish is to see some massive nonviolent actions — I like the ideas people are putting forth of a general strike.

But there are many other tools in the tool box as well. Find your own voice and use it in whatever way you see fit. Ask yourself what you think needs to be done, and consider what your own talents and inclinations are.

Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

Let’s continue to deepen our connections in the communities where we live, at the same time as we keep an eye on and respond to world events because the people in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, in Cuba are our sisters and brothers. We are all connected and they have been paying a heavy price.

Let’s build a big tent. Don’t get hung up on small differences. And let’s not throw anyone under the bus. Let’s continue to embrace the most vulnerable, and that includes the undocumented folks and trans people. We can build a big tent and do all that. 

The time is now. The place is here. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

This article The Yippies and the power of counterculture was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On June 29, thousands of people gathered at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar — the capital’s designated site for public demonstration — in the second week of a growing sit-in accompanied by a wave of online dissent. What is being called India’s first “Gen Z protest” was spurred by an education system that many young Indians believe has failed to offer fair opportunities.

Protesters arrived carrying the Indian flag, copies of the constitution and red roses, which they handed to police officers stationed at the venue. Volunteers reminded participants to remain disciplined, avoid confrontation and document events on their phones.

“The truth has no spokesperson except your camera,” organizers told the crowd.

Many participants carried signs reading “Main Bhi Cockroach,”  or “I too am a cockroach,” and wore cockroach masks, reclaiming the label that inspired the movement.

From simmer to outrage

On May 12, the government invalidated the results of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), India’s highly competitive medical entrance examination, citing allegations of exam paper leaks and widespread irregularities.

Nine days after taking the exam, more than two million students found themselves back to where they had started — preparing for one of the world’s toughest examinations with less than a month’s time, competing for fewer than 130,000 undergraduate medical seats. Reports of severe student distress, including at least 13 cases of student suicides, emerged from across the country.

The cancellation reignited longstanding criticism of how India’s examination system is administered and the mounting psychological pressure placed on students seeking professional careers. Since 2021, at least 93 suicides linked to the intense competition and financial burden of the NEET exams have come to light. Meanwhile, the NEET papers have leaked at least 89 times over the last 10 years, affecting 65 million students. 

Amid growing public anger, Supreme Court Chief Justice Surya Kant made a remark on May 15 that turned an already simmering online conversation into a wave of collective outrage. 

While questioning the conduct of lawyers he suspected of having fraudulent degrees, he turned toward the country’s unemployed youth, describing them as “cockroaches” and “parasites.”

“There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment or have any place in the profession,” he said. “Some of them become media, some of them become social media and activists, and they start attacking everyone.”

Justice Kant later said that his comments referred to individuals accused of obtaining fake degrees, and not the nation’s youth, whom he called the “pillars of a developed India.” 

But by then, the discussion had moved past the clarification.

In the midst of the online uproar, Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old Indian student based in Boston, casually posted a question on X, “What if all cockroaches came together?”

​The birth of Cockroach Janta Party

​Dipke’s call quickly sparked a wave of responses, with millions of young Indians embracing the cockroach as a symbol of resilience.

On May 16, Dipke announced the launch of Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, a satirical political outfit. It was widely seen as a jibe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political party, the Bharatiya Janta Party, or BJP, which has been in power since 2014.

“The CJP began as an idea after we saw millions of youth were repeatedly being denied a voice,” Dipke told me. “When authorities suppress people’s voices, that’s exactly when people should come together and raise their voices.”

The party introduced itself as “the voice of the burnt-out youth” and “a political party for the people the system forgot to count.”

Dipke set up a party website, outlining its objectives and inviting supporters to pledge their membership. Its requirements reflected the movement’s irreverent tone. Prospective members, the website joked, should be unemployed, lazy, chronically online and possess “the ability to rant professionally.”

Within a few days, tens of thousands of people had signed up through an online registration form, while the hashtag #MainBhiCockroach (“I too am a cockroach”) spread widely across social media. The movement also drew public support from several opposition politicians.

The party’s Instagram account has now surpassed 22 million followers, overtaking the official BJP account, which has around 9.4 million followers despite being widely regarded as the world’s largest political party by membership.

Its presence on X, however, has faced restrictions multiple times. The CJP account, which has attracted more than 200,000 followers, has been inaccessible twice within India, with users receiving a notification that “the account has been withheld in response to a legal notice.”

The manifesto

Behind the satire lay serious political concerns.

“We are not here to set up another PM CARES, holiday in Davos on the taxpayer’s salary slip or rebrand corruption as strategic spending,” the website said. “We are here to ask — loudly, repeatedly, in writing — where the money went.”

Its mission statement speaks directly to the generation driving the movement — a cohort that came of age amid economic uncertainty, competitive examinations and near-constant political engagement online.

“Build a party for a generation raised on promises, notifications and low battery warnings,” the statement reads. “A generation that is overqualified, frustrated, angry at what’s broken and financially confused,” the website further explained.

For supporters, the satire succeeded because it gave voice to frustrations that had been building for years. Behind the absurdity of a political party named after one of the world’s most resilient insects was a manifesto addressing issues that have long dominated public debate in India: the lack of judicial independence, doubts over free and fair elections, growing corporate control of media, frequent party defections and the underrepresentation of women in politics.

One proposal called for retired Chief Justices of India to be barred from accepting seats in the Rajya Sabha — the upper house of Parliament — after leaving office. The demand reflects concerns raised by critics that post-retirement appointments to political office blur the separation between the judiciary and the executive.

Another focused on electoral integrity. In deliberately hyperbolic language, the manifesto declared that election officials responsible for removing legitimate voters from electoral rolls be arrested under India’s principal anti-terror law — a key tool that the Modi administration uses to silence its critics — because “taking away voting rights of citizens is no less than terrorism.” The proposal referred to a recent controversy in which 9.1 million names were stripped from voter rolls in the West Bengal state elections won by the BJP in April.

Gender equality also features prominently. While India’s Parliament passed legislation in 2023 reserving one-third of parliamentary seats for women — a reform that has yet to be implemented — the CJP argued that women should instead hold half of all cabinet positions and seats in Parliament.

The manifesto also took aim at India’s media, proposing that television channels and news organizations owned by some of the country’s largest business conglomerates lose their broadcasting licenses to make way for independent journalism. Although framed satirically, the proposal echoed longstanding criticism from media watchdogs and opposition groups that growing corporate ownership has weakened the independence of India’s mainstream press.

It also targeted one of the country’s most persistent political problems: party defections. The manifesto proposed permanently disqualifying elected lawmakers who switch political parties after winning office, a practice that has repeatedly altered governments at both the national and state levels despite existing anti-defection laws.

Taken together, the manifesto is less a conventional political program than a vehicle for expressing public frustration through humor. Its proposals were intentionally exaggerated, but the concerns they referenced were familiar to many Indians.

From meme to movement

“Time to turn this tiny joke into a revolution,” the official CJP account on X posted after Dipke announced he was returning to India from Boston.

Upon his return on on June 6, Dipke travelled directly from the airport to New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, the capital’s designated site for public demonstration, where the party held its first protest, demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the repeated paper leaks and other alleged failures in conducting competitive examinations that affect millions of students and job seekers.

Despite the movement’s massive online reach, fewer than 2,000 people attended the inaugural rally, according to media reports. The turnout highlighted the gap that often exists between digital support and physical mobilization.

Standing before the crowd in Delhi’s summer heat, Dipke gave Pradhan until 5 p.m. that day to resign. When no response came, he extended the deadline by another week.

“But this doesn’t end here. Dharmendra Pradhan has wronged an entire generation. If he is not removed or does not step down within the next seven days, we will be forced to continue our protest on the ground,” he wrote later on X.

Rather than fading, the movement continued to gain momentum and has now entered into its second month.

“So far, we have not seen any substantial and meaningful effort from the government to address our demands,” Dipke told me. “If our demands are not met, our movement will still remain peaceful and continue through constitutional and democratic means.”

Beginning June 11, CJP supporters organized demonstrations across cities like Pune, Lucknow, Amritsar, Hyderabad and Bangalore. The demand remained unchanged: Pradhan must quit.

When the minister refused, the organization escalated its campaign, announcing an indefinite sit-in at Jantar Mantar beginning June 20. “This protest will go on for as long as it takes,” Dipke declared. “Nobody will move till Dharmendra Pradhan resigns.”

“I am appealing to all cockroaches, parents and teachers from Delhi to come and join us at Jantar Mantar,” he continued. “We will stay put for as long as we can, but we will not be able to pull this off unless we have your support.”

Students, teachers, parents, lawyers, activists, trade union members and farmers began arriving from across the country. Volunteers coordinated food, water and medical assistance, while supporters continued to amplify the movement online. So far, 800,000 online petitions have been signed demanding Pradhan’s sacking.

Major support has come from student organizations such as All India Students Association and Students Federation of India, or SFI. SFI has been protesting against examination irregularities since early May, with several members detained during demonstrations in different parts of the country. 

“The students and youth have been frustrated for quite some time,” said Aishe Ghosh, joint secretary of SFI. “The repeated incidence of paper leaks and rising unemployment has made the students and youth hostile towards the government.”

India is home to the world’s largest population of youth between the ages of 15 to 29, and has recorded the highest unemployment rate among graduates, estimated at 15.2 percent.

For Ghosh, the demonstrations reflected more than a single policy failure. “The ongoing protest is just a combination of the long-term anger and frustration,” she said.

Among those who answered Dipke’s call was Dr. Dighe, a Mumbai-based physician whose son took the NEET examination in May.

He said the cancellation of the results had taken a significant toll on his son’s mental health, but that his decision to protest also came from his experience as a doctor.

“I understand how important this examination is for the medical students who later become doctors,” he said. “I am here at the protest for my son, for the future of several other NEET aspirants and to save the medical profession of this country.”

The protest was also expected to draw support from several farmers’ unions, which announced plans to join the demonstration on June 28. However, on the morning of the protest, several leaders were reportedly placed under house arrest, preventing them from reaching the site.

“If leaders are placed under house arrest before joining any peaceful democratic movement, it is a matter of grave concern,” Dipke told me. “In a democracy, every citizen and organization has the right to express their views peacefully. We believe that dialogue and participation strengthen democracy, while restrictions and oppression do not.”

A distinctly Gen Z protest

As the protest grows, the CJP has developed a style of resistance that looks very different from the traditional political demonstrations in India. Memes and satire heavily drawn from internet culture are becoming central to how young people express political anger. Videos shared across Instagram, X and YouTube show protesters blending humor with dissent, creating a protest culture that feels distinctly Gen Z while addressing long-standing concerns over education, unemployment and government accountability.

The movement’s online identity quickly spilled onto the streets. At Jantar Mantar on June 29, protesters carried hand-painted placards filled with political criticism with meme culture, Bollywood references and internet humor. One sign read, “We asked for ‘Make in India,’ you gave us ‘Leak in India,’” referring to Modi’s flagship manufacturing campaign and the repeated examination paper leaks that triggered the movement. Another simply read, “Bro is still employed,” alongside a photograph of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, while others promoted the campaign “Pradhan Go Back.”

Between speeches and performances, groups of students were also seen playing cricket, giving the protest the feel of a community gathering as much as a political demonstration.

The familiar slogan of “Azaadi” (freedom) was reinterpreted to express frustration with the education system. Organizers also asked demonstrators to bring candles “in memory of each student who committed suicide, and the ones whose government failed to protect.”

Visual symbolism has become another defining feature of the movement. Groups beat steel plates and spoons, reversing Modi’s 2020 call for Indians to bang utensils in support of frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. This time, the gesture became a demand for accountability from the government. Organizers launched  a “Diaper Donation Drive,” encouraging supporters to write messages on diapers demanding the education minister’s resignation and send them to his office.

Despite these colorful tactics, Ghosh said the movement has received little attention from the mainstream media.

“The state is careful and alert to any eruption of collective anger or dissent,” Ghosh said. “Hence, it is using all mechanisms to control the narrative of the ongoing protests. Except for a section of social media, mainly the mainstream media has been blacked out from coverage.”

But throughout, students documented the protest as it happened, filming Instagram Reels, livestreaming speeches and posting photographs that carried the movement beyond the protest site and onto social media in real time.

Under state surveillance

As the CJP protest gathers momentum, the police presence has become increasingly visible. Protesters arriving at Jantar Mantar were required to show identification and pass through a scanning machine before entering. 

The security arrangements extended well beyond the entrance. Plainclothes police photographers and videographers blended into the crowd, documenting the gathering from within. CCTV cameras have been installed and around 270 body cameras are being used by Delhi Police. Several police buses remained parked outside the protest site throughout the day, while drones hovered overhead, keeping a close watch on the demonstration from the air. The CJP alleges that the government is also monitoring protesters’ phone calls and chats. 

“If people participating in peaceful protests are placed under excessive surveillance or made to feel intimidated, it is contrary to democratic values,” Dipke said.

As evening fell, the atmosphere grew more tense. Police repeatedly announced that protesters would have to vacate the site.

Soon after, electricity to the stage was cut, silencing the sound system. Demonstrators allege that police then temporarily blocked food and drinking water from entering the venue and cut off the water supply in nearby restrooms.

Several hours later, electricity was restored, food and water supplies resumed and restrictions on movement in and out of the protest site were eased. Yet the sit-in continued under heavy police surveillance as it entered its third week.

Police intimidation extends beyond the protest site itself. Delhi Police put up a notice declaring the protest unlawful and has tracked down organizers in person to intimidate and interrogate them.

“Many supporters who have been helping the protesters with food and water are being targeted by the authorities,” said Samrat Sonawane, a CJP volunteer. “Large teams from the Delhi Police and Crime Investigation Department have been visiting homes of several Delhi-based protesters in the early hours of the morning.”

“The authorities are also going to protesters’ relatives’ homes and warning them not to participate in the protest, claiming it is linked to terrorist activities,” Samrat added.

Despite the growing restrictions, CJP organizers continued to seek dialogue with the government. They say they have received no response. “The government has become totally deaf, dumb and blind to the demands of the youth,” CJP spokesperson Sourav Das said.

Ghosh believes the government’s reluctance to engage with the protesters is deliberate.

Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

“The government is actually avoiding engaging with the ongoing protest as a tactical strategy to further avoid antagonizing the larger student community,” she said.

On June 28, the education reformist, climate activist and Ramon Magsaysay Award recipient Sonam Wangchuk, who had been at Jantar Mantar since June 6, announced an indefinite hunger strike — a form of nonviolent protest with a long history in India. 

“Hunger strike is not the first but the final democratic expression of a movement,” Dipke said of the strategic decision to move toward hunger strikes. “The purpose of this strike is not to confront anyone, but to seriously draw the attention of the government and society towards this issue.” 

Democracy in question

Many protesters spent their nights sleeping on roads and pavement despite Delhi’s sweltering summer heat. For many, it was the first time they had ever participated in a public demonstration. Several students chose to remain at the protest site even after retaking the examination on June 21, saying the movement had grown beyond the paper leak and had become a fight for accountability in India’s education system.

For much of this generation, Modi’s government is the only political administration they have known. Their protest unfolded against the backdrop of a decade in which demonstrations over issues ranging from the Citizenship Amendment Act to the years-long farmers’ movement have faced heavy policing, legal action against organizers and administrative restrictions. Civil liberties groups and opposition leaders have argued that these measures reflect a shrinking space for peaceful dissent. 

Previous Coverage

India’s farmers’ protests are about more than reform — they are resisting the corporate takeover of agriculture

“This government doesn’t want the coming generation to question it,” Samrat said. “The more the public turns towards illiteracy, the easier it becomes for the BJP to continue running the government.”

When asked about the ongoing protests, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan dismissed the CJP as a “B team of disruptive elements,” a remark that fueled further criticism from protesters, who said the government was choosing confrontation over conversation.

The heavy surveillance at Jantar Mantar, combined with repeated attempts to end the sit-in, reinforced the students’ belief that the government was unwilling to engage directly with their demands. Yet despite the barricades, police presence and administrative restrictions, they continue to return each day, insisting that their struggle was no longer only about a leaked examination, but about the future of public education and the right to be heard.

“Our protest is fully nonviolent and falls within the scope of our constitution,” Dipke said. “Instead of breaking the morale of the protesters, this situation has created more awareness towards their rights.”

Whether the protest ultimately compels political action remains uncertain. But for the hundreds of young people who have spent days and nights at Jantar Mantar, it has already become something larger than a demand to reconduct an examination or remove a minister. 

It is a test of whether peaceful dissent can still compel those in power to listen. As Dipke said, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi must decide whether [ten million] students or one incompetent minister is more important.”

This article The strategic satire of India’s Gen Z ‘Cockroach’ movement was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

During this year of celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’ve been experiencing an unexpected emotion: pride.

For months, it’s been something far different — a mixture of disappointment, disbelief and disgust at the undermining of our freedoms, our wellbeing, our children’s futures and even our prospects for survival.

But recently, something shifted for me. I saw the excitement and global unity of World Cup fans. I talked to small business owners here in my small town in Washington state who were placing signs in their windows to let immigrants know they are welcome. I saw my community come together to march and rally on Juneteenth, with speakers reminding us that all people deserve freedom — and that we still have work to do to achieve that founding aspiration of our nation. I watched gay and straight neighbors at a joyful and defiant Pride parade in Seattle.

So many people are choosing courage and freedom for all, doing the risky, heroic work of resisting a would-be dictator and his sycophantic henchmen. I am feeling more confident that the courage and strength of the American people will get us through this period of darkness — but only if we reckon honestly with how we got here.

That means doing exactly the work the Trump regime is working so desperately to prevent: coming to terms with our nation’s history of race-based violence, exclusion and displacement, beginning with the killing, land grabs and cultural suppression of the Indigenous peoples who were the original caretakers of this continent, and continuing with the cruel enslavement of people whose forced labor built the nation’s wealth.

The work we need to do is more than an anti-bias workshop. It is the deeper and long-overdue work our nation and institutions need. Instead of papering over inconvenient history and its continued harm, we can do the work that begins with the truth, allows healing, strengthens a culture of integrity and builds the solidarity needed to face the enormous challenges before us.

The conviction that this work is necessary led me to create a free zine, “Community Reckoning,” that offers a process for reckoning with our history. We don’t need to wait for leadership from Washington, D.C. to take on this challenge. We can start now in our communities, congregations, universities, civic groups and other organizations. “Community Reckoning” offers a path to doing this work together.

The framework is simple: Stop the harm. Tell the truth. Acknowledge. Repair. The STAR acronym echoes the North Star that guided enslaved people escaping bondage.

This framework grew out of lived experience when I co-led, along with an Indigenous tribal elder, a community group formed after the 2001 desecration of Suquamish Chief Seattle’s grave. Over several years, Native and non-Native residents countered the political influence of a property owners’ group that had been actively hostile toward the Suquamish Tribe (Stop the Harm). We learned and shared the tribe’s history (Tell the Truth). We acknowledged the harms done when tribal land was taken and the tribe’s very existence was under assault, and celebrated those working to improve relationships between the Native and non-Native communities  (Acknowledge). Finally, working alongside the tribal government, we helped win the return of land that had once been the center of the tribe’s village, where Chief Seattle had lived most of his life (Repair). The trust and transformation that resulted from this collaboration rippled outward for years.

The STAR path can also be seen in Georgetown University’s reckoning with the 1838 sale of more than 270 enslaved people to pay the university’s debts. Students and alumni who researched this history discovered that — contrary to the story the university had told — thousands of descendants of these families were still alive. Apologies followed: Rev. Timothy Kesicki, S.J., said, “The Society of Jesus which helped to establish Georgetown University and whose leaders enslaved and mercilessly sold your ancestors, stands before you to say that we have greatly sinned. … We are profoundly sorry.” Former President of Georgetown John J. DeGioia said, “Slavery remains the original evil of our Republic — an evil that our university was complicit in.”

The students persuaded the administration to rename two university buildings that had been named for the Jesuit leaders who arranged for this sale, and assessed themselves a fee in honor of those whose lives financed the institution’s existence.

The Jesuit order has donated and raised funds for a Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, which is now giving $10,000 scholarships to descendants, supporting modest home improvements to allow aged descendants to remain at home and sponsoring educational events and dialogues on racial justice.

These stories and others, along with practical tools, resources and inspiration from wise leaders, are contained in the zine.

The zine is built around practical ways communities can begin this work: learning local history, acknowledging harms, preventing ongoing injustice and working toward meaningful repair. Every community’s path will be different. But every community has one, and the integrity and deepened relationships that result are well worth the hard work.

Integrity is the reward

Some people say we should put this reckoning off yet again — that there are more urgent matters as we face an authoritarian regime committed to entrenching its power, and other existential crises.

But we will only achieve sustainable progress when we heal our nation’s foundational wounds — a process that can’t wait for some ideal future.

Previous Coverage

We need to build a movement that heals our nation’s traumas

For centuries, politicians and economic elites have used racial resentment to prevent working people of different backgrounds from joining together to win real improvements. They’ve turned natural allies into rivals while they consolidate power and ever-larger shares of our nation’s wealth.

The result is an increasingly powerful group of the ultra-rich supporting the right-wing surge in the United States and elsewhere. People of every race — but especially people of color — struggle to afford housing, education, health care, gas and even food, things most people in wealthy countries take for granted. Politicians answer to big money and to the lobbyists who flood the centers of power. The monied interests get their way, not us.

If we’re going to build power, we can only build it on a foundation of solidarity. And solidarity is only possible in movements that are fully inclusive — and have done the work of racial reckoning. Without it, internal fault lines caused by unaddressed trauma, unrecognized privilege and unintended harms will continue to undermine trust.

True reckoning means we don’t wait for a fracture. The burden doesn’t fall on people of color to identify the flaws or the injuries of institutions that have yet to reckon with their own history, biases and privilege. Instead, we collectively take on the needed work.

National healing

The benefits of this work go even further — they include the possibility of profound healing for all of us. Instead of accepting lies and half-truths, we build a foundation based on honest reckoning and the integrity that comes from insisting on the truth.

A person, an institution or a nation that papers over a traumatic and unresolved story doesn’t make it go away. The consequences of the falseness keep showing up.

We might prefer to tell ourselves we’re the greatest country on earth, the most free, the most exceptional; we might not want to think about what that greatness was built on.

Maybe what looks like American confidence — the swagger, the entitlement, the insistence that we have nothing to apologize for — is really a brittle facade. It’s what shame looks like when it doesn’t get named.

A university, a denomination, a nation that hasn’t told the truth about its own past has to keep defending a story that doesn’t hold up — and that takes energy and vigilance, and sometimes results in anger at any who would challenge the facade.

Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

The good news is that the alternative to living with half-truths isn’t shame. It’s something better than both swagger and shame. It’s integrity. A person, an institution or a nation that has told the truth about its own history no longer needs to defend a false story. It can simply stand on what’s true. That’s a sturdier foundation than any myth.

Our history has been one of atrocities — and extraordinary courage. An honest accounting of our nation’s founding injustices gives us the opportunity to make them right. When we do, we won’t need the swagger anymore, because we’ll have something sturdier: the real thing. We can be unified in pride for this country, and unstoppable in coming together to build what could truly be a more perfect union.

The zine, “Community Reckoning” is free to download, print and share here.

This article Finding real national pride on America’s 250th birthday was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Looking for a quintessentially American book to read this 4th of July? 

As we celebrate and/or mourn the 250th birthday of the most militarized, most violent, (almost) most corrupt, most polluting, most inequitable and most sad nation on the face of the Earth, I am reading “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground.” Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s new book about his Weatherman parents is more than just a great beach read (which it also is, literally). It is the most appropriate book to read instead of subjecting yourself to a PTSD-triggering fireworks display.

It chronicles a small group of revolutionaries who used dynamite, bombs and guns to blow up buildings, statutes and police cars, break people out of prison and generally make mayhem half a century ago. But it is not just history to view on the page. It says so much to our MAGA moment.

It is a story of history, conscience and memory at a time of AI slop, official lies and active amnesia. It is a story of youthful rebellion against the Vietnam War that matures into revolutionary sabotage, political violence and life “underground” that eventually settles into careers in education and law outside of the mainstream. It is the story of surviving some of the most harrowing political moments of the last half century. It is a story of a family.

I grew up in a very different corner of the left than Ayers Dohrn. There were no drug-fueled orgies, shootouts with the cops or days of rage in the Catholic left. But there was a similar stridency, urgency and seriousness about my family life. There was jail and prison and fear of FBI infiltration and dirty tricks. There were people with no last names who showed up for a meal or a night and headed back into the underground. We also survived separation and secrecy, and I am also not raising my children on the knife’s edge of the revolution. So, Ayers Dohrn’s effort to tell his family’s story with truthfulness, curiosity and distance landed so very true for me. 

Don’t need a weatherman to know

Who were the Weathermen? They’ve been memorialized countless times on screens small and large, most recently (sort of) in “One Battle After Another.” But in real life, they were mostly white, mostly college educated, mostly middle-class young people who had been part of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, before splintering off from that group in the summer of 1969 to join forces with the Black Panthers and incite revolution, laying waste to what they left behind. They felt like they had tried everything else!

In recounting this episode, Ayers Dohrn was able to use FBI notes and communiques to highlight their role in fomenting the clash between the more progressive and radical factions, manipulating members into all-out conflict with one another and essentially destroying SDS. Ayers Dohrn quotes Weatherman faction leader Mark Rudd reflecting that it was “the single greatest mistake I’ve made in my life … scuttl[ing] America’s largest radical organization — with chapters on hundreds of campus[es], a powerful national identity and enormous growth potential — for a fantasy of revolutionary urban guerrilla warfare.” What could have been is not explored.

At this point, we’d need speculative fiction to spin out the possibilities of true solidarity between the largely white, campus-based antiwar movement and the Black Panther Party and its affiliates. It sure scared the FBI! In fact, in a memo to agents in the field, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that SDS and the Black Panther Party working together would “pose a formidable threat. … It would be a definite advantage if these two groups were alienated.”

This story is told with cinematic depth, gleaned from Ayers Dohrn’s interviews with participants and from declassified FBI files. The new organization was small, secretive and “fiercely committed to following the leadership of the Black vanguard, to fighting the police and to going out, if necessary, in a blaze of revolutionary glory.”

A declaration of a state of war

The mostly middle-class, young, white activists had been working on many fronts for years, but their “organizing and peaceful protest had failed to stop the war.” They were going to try something new — but actually it wasn’t new. It was old. It was violence. And, for a time, it was street riots against the police and property damage during protests. But then their friend and Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated by Chicago police and the FBI in a barrage of 90 bullets. And then the horrors of the My Lai massacre were revealed, and as 1969 became 1970, the Weathermen declared war on the United States.

Ayers Dohrn describes a series of bombings at the homes of judges, banks and police stations, and a complicated plan in New York City’s West Village that would have brought the carnage of Vietnam to a military Officer’s Ball at Fort Dix in New Jersey. The Fort Dix plan was thwarted not by the FBI or a rival faction of revolutionaries, but by chemistry. The bombs went off in the 11th Street townhouse the revolutionaries were using as a temporary safe house (while the parents of one of the Weathermen were on a St. Kitts vacation). Three Weathermen were killed in the blast and the house was obliterated. Bill Ayers’ girlfriend at the time was among the dead and he carried that grief and memory into Ayers Dohrn’s life. As a little kid, Zayd remembers going with his father to lay flowers at the site every year. 

Recalling that loss, Ayers Dohrn asks his father how he contemplated killing people with those bombs. Bill Ayers responded that “We often said things like, ‘I need to be a tool of the revolution.’ … Or ‘I need to be an instrument of the rebellion.’ And that instrumentalizing of our lives was more than a weakness. It was a horror.”

That realization and the other reflections Ayers Dohrn is able to elicit from his parents as they think back on their roles as revolutionaries are the backbone of this book. Bill and Bernardine Dohrn are able to reflect, see mistakes and missteps, explain their priorities, and accept responsibility for the harms they inflicted because they survived and so many other people who were part of this splinter movement did not.

It was a horror

It is difficult and brave that Zayd Ayers Dohrn contends with violence and memory without letting anyone — even his mother and father — off the hook. Against the backdrop of an administration and a president that can’t remember, or won’t admit to, crimes of three sentences ago, he holds his father and mother to a high standard. And they can take it. They survived the days of rage and purity tests and self-criticism sessions and the run-ins with the law and stretches of prison and dirty tricks that so many others did not.

His mother, Bernardine Dohrn, is now living with dementia, as is my own mother, and I found his present-day conversations with her the most poignant and difficult of the book. Memory threads all the way through this book. What do we remember? Why do some memories stick? 

Ayers Dohrn began his reckoning with family history in an extraordinary 10-part podcast called “Mother Country Radicals,” which was Fred Hampton’s term of endearment for the Weathermen. But as he researches his own past and excavates his own memory, there are things that don’t add up, don’t stitch together, memories that don’t bear up to scrutiny. There are contradictions that he can’t square.

Once the podcast was released, he received letters, diaries and phone calls from old fellow travelers. These new resources, along with 7,833 pages of FBI files, convinced him that there was more to the story and he sat down to write. The book is more in-depth, intimate and searching than the podcast. Ayers Dohrn is less star struck by his parents’ bravado too. Now, he is a parent, too, noting decisions that Bill and Bernadine made that put the family in jeopardy, that were hard for him, that caused him pain. He sees and feels the impact of his parents’ choice of the revolution over parenthood. “Over and over, you can see the same pattern, repeated: Asked to choose between solidarity and family, revolution and love, my parents and their comrades chose the cause almost every time.”

Family lore had it that Bill and Bernardine hung up their revolutionary bonafides when they became parents. But the documents Ayers Dohrn received after the podcast aired show that was not true. They continued to take risks even after they became parents of Zayd and his younger brother Malik. One memorable camping trip in West Virginia as a family turns out to be a trip to case Alderson Prison for Women where Black Panther leader Assata Shakur was serving out her sentence. She was eventually liberated from prison in another operation and Bill Ayers played a small — but very risky — role in that while Bernardine was home with Zayd.

Ayers Dohrn confronted his dad by asking: “What would have happened, not only to him but to me, my mother and my unborn brother?” Ayers responded: “It was a difficult decision. It felt monumental, it felt important. We were pretty clear that Bernardine would be with you. … But yeah, it was, in retrospect, really risky. And really on the edge.” But in the end, Bill Ayers played his part, “Because it mattered. Because the world needed it to happen.”

They continued to do leg work for the Black Liberation Army and other radical groups like Action Five even after they informally adopted 14-month-old Chesa Boudin. That should have been a clear warning to stop. Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Chesa’s parents, had acted as getaway drivers for an Action Five robbery on a Brinks armored truck in October 1981. The job quickly went off the rails and three people injured, and three others were killed — Nyack police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown, and Peter Paige, one of the team from the Brinks truck. Boudin and Gilbert spent decades in prison for their crimes while the Ayers Dohrn family raised their son. 

Life underground

I described this book to a friend, and she got stuck on the word underground. “Wait,” she demanded, “you mean they lived underground, like moles or Hobbits?” No, they lived under assumed names, worked cash jobs, had fake IDs. They were on the run from the FBI, facing jail time and family separation. They had disappeared from “normal society” and were dependent on friends and fellow travelers for support.

A striking moment in the book comes when Ayers Dohrn recounts that at one of his father’s off-the-books jobs, as a longshoreman in San Francisco, he gets the sense that something is about to go down. Bill Ayers saw men on the rooftops and by the union hall, standing out in their cheap suits and cop-loafers. But he was already at the docks and there was nowhere to run. The docks are all of a sudden swarmed with police and his co-workers started yelling “La Migra! La Migra!”

 “It only took a few minutes; the feds rounded them all up, chasing them to the edge of the water or just tackling them down to the concrete of the parking lot. And they let all the white people go” Ayers Dohrn recounts.

Previous Coverage

Daniel Berrigan and his fearless nonviolence, at 100

The officials were not looking for Bill Ayers, of the Weathermen. They were rounding up undocumented immigrants. Ayers Dohrn writes that his father had “always assumed, with the self-centered paranoia of a federal fugitive, that he was the only outlaw hiding out on the docks. … But it turned out that half of the men on his crew were invisible, even to him. They were all living on a different plane, off the grid. Undocumented. Underground.”

In his autobiography “To Dwell in Peace,” my uncle, Father Daniel Berrigan writes that while he was underground, avoiding a prison sentence for the Catonsville 9 action and speaking constantly to young people, he heard that the Weather Underground wanted to dialogue. On Aug. 8, 1970, just a few days before he was captured on Block Island, he made an audio recording and sent it off through intermediaries. It had been just six months since the three Weathermen were killed in the bomb blast on 11th Street.

A new kind of anger

In the message, addressed to his “Brothers and Sisters,” Dan Berrigan invites them to “a new kind of anger which is both useful in communicating and imaginative and slow-burning to fuel the long haul which is the definition of our whole lives.” He calls them away from violence for the sake of violence, noting that there is a great risk that violence “will change people for the worse and harden them against enlightenment.” He continues by sharing that “I hope your lives are about something more than sabotage.”

I looked around for evidence that Dan Berrigan ever sat down with the Weather Underground, or that his message received a reply. I did not find any, but the group did shift tactics after the 11th Street explosion. Ayers Dohrn writes of a meeting that his mother called a few weeks later where the group became the Weather Underground and “disavow[ed] deadly violence going forward.” They did not become paragons of pacifism after this, but they stopped a posture of open warfare against the American people. 

In “Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes: Conversations After Prison with Lee Lockwood,” Dan shares that the Weather Underground did respond to his communications, saying, “In fact the response was almost beyond my hope, because it indicated that they really were serious and were growing more thoughtful about such things.” That’s where that thread ends, as far as I can tell, but it is beautiful to consider the “calling in” and constructive dialogue that could have followed, as both sides — motivated by a fervent commitment to racial equality and an end to war — kept talking.

In his message to the Weather Underground, my uncle has a beautiful formulation of the concept of underground, writing: “Instead of thinking about the underground as temporary or exotic or abnormal, perhaps we are being called upon to start thinking of its implication as an entirely self-sufficient, mobile, internal revival community, so that the underground may be the definition of our future.”

Ayers Dohrn dedicates his book to his wife Rachel and their children Dalin and Light. Late in the book, he writes that “every generation is born into a world desperately in need of transformation, and young people in every era have inherited a struggle — a fight to make things better — that stretches back long before any of them were born.” 

Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

I read “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young” with horror and hope — in equal measure. There is plenty to rage about in the Mother Country these days. You do not have to look far to find a replay of the horrors that radicalized Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and their friends. The war lust, impunity and corruption of the Trump administration and the craven weaponization of the justice system under FBI Director Kash Patel makes President Richard Nixon and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover look like Boy Scouts, and that is saying something!

Our society is full of the dirty, dangerous, violent and young, but so much of the violence is turned inward into self-harm and online into self-referential time frittering. It does spill out into the streets and it is political, but it is not, for the most part, organized or coordinated. The political violence of the Weatherman and the Underground that felt so justified and satisfied, that urge to “do something” and to “take a stand,” did do something. But most of that something was sowing chaos, alienating potential allies and narrowing the political space available to others. That violence was used — over and over — to rationalize indiscriminate state-sponsored repression and violence. In the process, almost incidentally, they did build something of value, the idea of an underground, and that persists and continues.

There is a lot of hope here for me in this idea of a permanent underground that sustains and revives, a subculture of connection and support that is not on the same map (literally not plottable) as the systems that exploit and oppress.

Those who survived those harrowing years as fugitives, undergrounders and radicals, built community, raised families, showed up for one another. And they were able to do all that because they survived. Or, perhaps, they survived because they could do all that.

This article An intimate reckoning with the Weather Underground was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article is adapted from a Choose Democracy newsletter email.

One of the big psychological challenges of this time is: How do we measure progress while an authoritarian remains in power?

I’ve noticed more than a few folks feeling especially underwater recently — understandable given the weight of awful policies and cruelties emerging from the White House and its minions.

For our own health, we cannot let our yardstick be measured by whether we have stopped the authoritarian from doing anything. The reality is, he has the power to wake up and do awful things every day.

As I’ve written before, resistance to an authoritarian regime is measured by greater unity, greater nonviolent discipline in the face of violence, greater numbers and greater ability to provoke defections.

So how are we doing? Allow me to skip around with a few thoughts.

Hands off Ohio

On June 11, in a shameless act of interference with elections, the FBI raided the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, or OOC. The OOC is a well-respected organization that helps register voters, especially Black and brown voters in this swing state.

Over 100 federal agents descended upon Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton and Youngstown, Ohio simultaneously. Agents arrived at the OOC’s northeast Ohio office armed with batons and guns. Agents showed up at the homes of the organization’s leadership and employees, seeking electronic devices and in some cases carrying subpoenas, pressing people about alleged voter fraud — sometimes in front of their children — and following them to work and school.

The scale is staggering. The timing was calculated. And the impact was not at all what they hoped.

The hope, of course, was that this would scare off others from doing voter registration work — and that it would send the work underground. They cannot win the election, so they have to change the rules and tilt the playing field (especially with Ohio’s critical U.S. Senate race).

But it hasn’t worked out.

A national effort coalesced to support Hands Off Ohio. A cross-partisan group of former Ohio Supreme Court justices, former Ohio attorneys general and legal leaders signed a letter condemning the raids as an attack on democracy. These are not people who usually stand together. That they are standing together now is a signal. (Greater defections — a key yardstick!)

To be fair, some people are worried enough that they are training in what to do if the FBI shows up. (Record the interaction, don’t answer questions and don’t assume their warrant — if they have one — is valid without taking a close look.) But a lot of that is not fear — it’s preparation.

And importantly, the OOC didn’t shrink. Board member Prentiss Haney said plainly: “The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is not going to stop its work. If anything, it’s going to continue to build upon this work and make sure that our faith leaders and our community leaders and working-class folks know that we’re going to stand with them and not let them be intimidated by forces who want to use political power to stop them from engaging in fair elections.”

They’ve done what everyone should do when repressed by this government for doing good work — double down on the good work. In response to the raid, they’ve held expanded public voter registration drives across the state. (They’re holding a statewide clergy call this week.)

My mentor used to say there are two motions to the universe: getting smaller or getting bigger. The authoritarian strategy relies on a particular theory: Repress, and people will get smaller. They will hide. They will stop.

That’s not what’s happening here. Folks are getting bigger.

The Minneapolis 15

The same theory — repress, and they’ll collapse — is playing out in Minneapolis, and it is backfiring in real time. If you want to understand the HOPE framework for making repression backfire, read what happened in the Hennepin County jail this week.

The federal government indicted 15 people — including a union carpenter and a Buddhism professor at Macalester College — on conspiracy charges related to the protests against ICE during Operation Metro Surge. Simple acts like posting on Facebook, blowing whistles or identifying ICE vehicles were whipped into a furious frenzied indictment.

MPR News reports that one indictee — an in-home care aide —  had unidentified agents show up at her door. One neighbor explained, “We were on the sidewalk, we had all of our whistles, all of the neighbors came out. And so we were stopping them from taking her because we didn’t know who they were. … They came disguised as work people.” (Greater unity.)

The conspiracy charge is a familiar weapon — we saw it deployed unsuccessfully in Chicago. It’s a legal overreach. In this sense, we could say our authoritarian is less effective than Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Viktor Orbán — all of whom were more successful at putting their opposition into prison.

Of course, as some have pointed out, the process is the punishment — the slow churning of the courts and the criminal justice system’s regular violence. A recent New York Times report illuminates what that isolation looks like for those held in pre-trial detention.

But here is the story that the government cannot control. When Emmett Doyle, a union carpenter and one of the indicted 15, found himself alone in a jail cell, he started singing. Irish rebel songs. Prisoners’ songs. Folk songs from the labor movement. And then something extraordinary happened: A voice from down the hallway shouted a song request, followed by a chorus of laughter and the voices of friends. Suddenly, he wasn’t alone anymore. They sang “Solidarity Forever” in full — the original Industrial Workers of the World version — with increasing gusto. They sang “Bella Ciao” in English, then Italian, then Spanish. They whistled the “Colonel Bogey March” on their way to the hearing. (That’s the yardstick of nonviolent strength in the face of repression.)

Literally through song they found out who else was being held.

As elsewhere, groups unified to condemn the indictment. The next day, people showed up, again, at the Whipple Federal Building, where ICE staged Operation Metro Surge. They faced tear gas again. They remained nonviolent. They kept coming.

Could we do more? Sure.

I’m not attempting to paint a picture of perfection. There are lots of moves not taken and chances to up our acts of solidarity. I keep thinking about dramatic actions that reduce our fear — which I guess is why I keep thinking about Bayard Rustin.

Previous Coverage

Remembering the genius of Bayard Rustin

Rustin arrived in Montgomery, Alabama in February 1956, when the city had dusted off a 1921 anti-boycott law prohibiting conspiracies that interfered with lawful business. The strategy was to scatter the leadership, to make people lay low. The city indicted 89 boycott leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and E.D. Nixon.

Rustin told them: Don’t hide. Move toward the fear. Gandhi had said the same thing — if something frightens you, that’s the direction you should walk. And so E.D. Nixon and dozens of other boycott leaders chose to turn themselves in. Hundreds of supporters gathered outside and cheered leaders who emerged with police citations in hand. Some leaders who arrived discovered they weren’t on the indictment list — and argued to be added. The fear shifted.

What Montgomery’s city government had calculated as a terror became a celebration. The fear inverted. The movement doubled down.

Georgia redistricting

Now let’s talk about Georgia, because what happened there last week is one of the most important things that has happened in months, and it’s not getting nearly enough attention, as with much of the organizing happening in the South right now.

The context: The Supreme Court’s Callais decision earlier this year was devastating. It gutted the Voting Rights Act, resulting in a loss of Black political power comparable only to Reconstruction’s devastating rollback. Southern legislatures rushed to redistrict.

Challenges to the redistricting saw a string of losses: Florida, Tennessee and wild mid-election cancellations in Louisiana and Alabama. And some temporary wins: Mississippi and South Carolina delaying their redistricting for now.

So Georgia looked like it was going to be a loss. Gov. Brian Kemp called a special session to draw up new districts. And then something remarkable happened. Democrats and civil rights advocates turned the planned special session into a public showdown over minority voting rights. Civil rights organizations, labor unions and community advocates filled the state capitol with chants of “Black voters matter!” (Greater numbers.)

And just hours before the legislature was set to convene, Republican House Speaker Jon Burns announced they would not take up congressional or legislative redistricting.

Let’s pause and assess.

This wasn’t like Indiana’s redistricting, where a few Republicans broke ranks on principle (helped along by protests) — this was a calculation.

When I asked local organizers why they thought Republicans made this call, the answer was plain: Republicans assessed that pushing redistricting would provoke an already-active population into an even greater reaction. They looked at the energy in the streets and decided the political cost of poking the bear was higher than the electoral advantage they’d gain.

They are making an assessment that we are powerful opponents, and they often have a better perception than we do of ourselves. Our opponents are calculating our power and finding it formidable enough to stand down from a fight they wanted to win.

This win emerges largely from the work of Black women organizers and voting rights advocates in the South who have been doing this work for years in a context that has been chronically under-resourced and under-appreciated. (If you’re looking for one place to support, give to Black Voters Matter.) That reckoning deserves to be named.

Fear, not victory

Donald Trump has a fundamental problem: He doesn’t understand humanity. He believes domination results in submission. That’s why he misjudged the Iran war so completely. That’s why he and J.D. Vance entertained doubling down via the Insurrection Act after Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE. That’s why his hoodlums thought they would terrify voter rights groups and citizens standing up for their neighbors.

And that’s why he won’t win — because they fundamentally misunderstand how human nature works.

The UFC cage match theory of political power — that dominance equals effectiveness — is both a moral failure and a strategic one. Their major political prosecutions have collapsed or stalled, and their ability to generate lasting fear has been repeatedly undermined by the courage of ordinary people.

Take heart. This is boldness in many corners.

Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

I’ve said for a long time that in time we’ll learn a bunch of stories of noncooperation happening inside the administration. We just learned a new one: When the Department of Homeland Security and DOGE sent the Social Security Administration a list of 2.7 million citizens and legal residents with instructions to falsely mark them as deceased (destroying lives and opening them to ICE deportations), a career civil servant named Jeremiah Schofield refused the order, and stopped the plan, offering a case study in resisting authoritarian overreach through bureaucratic friction.

And the breadth of public resistance keeps growing. The indefatigable K. Starling reports on the rise of protests in Arkansas — where recently an additional dozen new cities held protests for the first time in the past year.

In Paris, Arkansas, four people protested, including Rev. Dawn Chesser. One lifelong resident of Logan County, Arkansas shared with Chesser that their gathering was the first protest he had ever witnessed in Paris.

“He stated he had been a Trump supporter in 2016, but was no longer because he felt like the current administration is mostly corrupt and in it for financial gain,” Chesser said.

This is a reminder that there are millions of us who are finding ways to resist.

So each of us has a choice right now — do we get smaller, or bigger? More bold, or less?

I think we follow the folks in Ohio, in Minneapolis, in Georgia, in the streets and the jails and the capitol buildings and the Signal group chats.

My encouragement: Keep getting bigger.

This article Trump’s repression of dissent is backfiring was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Just before dusk, a crowd began marching down Dëshmorët e Kombit Boulevard in Tirana, Albania’s capital, toward Prime Minister Edi Rama’s office. As they approached, the sound of drums and their chants calling for “revolution” got louder. Once they arrived, the national anthem echoed throughout the avenue.

Since May 31, protesters have been setting off every single day at 6 p.m. from Skanderbeg Square to take part in what has been dubbed the “Flamingo Revolution.” The iconic bird was chosen because of its connection to the natural protected area of Vjosa-Narta in Zvernec, where plans for a $1.4 billion luxury resort linked to Jared Kushner, an American real estate mogul and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, have caused fierce opposition. The project’s scale would require ecocide, endangering thousands of species in Europe’s last wild river delta. The lack of transparency and corruption has also riled up the local population, who were fenced off from their own land without notice. 

The initial protests in Zvernec started as a dispute between residents joined by environmental groups against the developers who fenced off the area and brought heavy machinery into an extremely sensitive ecosystem. However, the protests exploded when a resident was assaulted and dragged by a private security member in the presence of the police, who stood by without intervening. 

Protesters tell me this is the first time they have felt hopeful that the system will change. With an estimated 100,000-200,000 people joining the protests on the weekend, this is the biggest nationwide movement the country has seen since the fall of Enver Hoxha’s communist regime. Protesters chant “Albania is not for sale” and “Rama quit” to the tune of “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes, reminiscent of U.K. football fans. 

Previously, protests such as those that occurred in February 2026 amid a corruption probe into then-Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku have been co-opted by opposition parties. Between 2018 and 2019, a student movement against sweeping privatization reforms of higher education prepared many young people to become more politically conscious. They were successful in forcing the government to drop tuition fees, but it ended there. This time, protesters are demanding much more.

More unity than ever

As a youth-led uprising, for many it has become a form of socializing. “We are joking that we have replaced meeting for coffee with going to the protest as a hangout,” said Sara, a 23-year-old protester. 

Olsi Nika, who heads the environmental group EcoAlbania, says that the current political system has alienated Gen Z-ers. “The majority of the protesters are young people who were raised with a progressive European mentality,” he explained. “So, how on Earth can you set up a formula that … is driven by a political elite that is still operating on the mentality of the old regime?” 

While the movement has no definitive leadership, everyone helps however they can. One elderly protester brings free fruit, and another elderly couple hands out bottles of water. Another group of friends picks up litter from the streets. One of them, named Thea, says that they got together and decided to do this so the municipality’s street cleaners don’t have to bear the brunt of the government’s actions that people are protesting. “This is an injustice done to the Albanian people. Our land is being sold to foreign investors with no transparency, and we are being sealed off from it,” she explained. 

Other volunteers have also set up a “kids’ corner” for those coming with their families. I often see three generations of the same family together in the square. One of them is 42-year-old Elvira. “This is all about young people having a future in this country. I am here because of them, for my daughter,” she said. 

Protesters are taking pride in mobilizing with dignity and unity like never before. Sidorela Vatnikaj, an activist working across social issues, says that she joined forces with others from a multitude of groups to support the protests with logistics. She even spent money out of pocket to set up a sound system and invite members of the public to come and speak without having to be on a list. Everyone — young, old, established activists, ordinary people, city residents and rural dwellers — has stepped forward to voice grievances and motivate the crowds to not give up on their cause. 

Every evening, new people address the crowd. The 14th day featured people from the diaspora who had traveled back home to share their stories. They talked about the hardships of emigration and that they won’t stand for a country that forces its young people to leave. Vatnikaj says that many came in on a one-way ticket because they saw for the first time hope that things might change. 

Similarly, Maya, a veterinary doctor in Sweden, said she used her annual leave to come back so she could protest with her people in Tirana. Elsewhere, across all major cities with sizable Albanian populations, diasporas and their allies have been marching in solidarity. 

Sara also tells me that solidarity from abroad has overjoyed people in Albania. “Gen Z-ers are all fed up with their politicians and the system,” she said. “That’s a big thing we have in common. We see each other, how we have been rising, and we give each other hope.”

People connecting on the internet have been essential in propelling mobilizations.

“The movement is organized purely online,” said Gent Fetahaj, a tourism expert and protester. He shows me on his phone how the protest location has been geotagged on Google Maps as “Flamingo Revolution.” The reviews are all five stars. 

Social media wasn’t only essential in organizing the protests because Gen Z is very digitally-oriented, but also because there is diminishing trust in traditional media. Marijola, a biology student who has joined the protests with classmates from her university, created online groups and chats with friends to share information and coordinate. “Using social media avidly was the only way to find out about the protest since mainstream Albanian media did not even report on it until much later.” 

This is the case for Alis, a student who has been using her social media platforms to talk about the protests and the situation at large. “Social media became a necessity in Albania because the press here is not to be trusted,” Alis said. “Our local media, which we pay license fees to, did not cover our protests for more than five days until they had no option. So, we rely on alternative channels for informing each other and organizing.” 

Protest humor has also become a defining characteristic of this movement as many attendees use meme references and pop culture to express their dissent. Every day at the protests feels like an unofficial competition about who will come up with the funniest protest sign for the day. Some of them poke fun at Ivanka Trump for claiming in an interview that she “discovered” Sazan island — where Kushner plans to develop a luxury resort with his company Affinity Partners — and climbed it barefoot. 

Artists and creative individuals have also been banding together to create compelling visuals for the protest. “We are trying to convey our dissent through the beauty of art,” said Argita Dulaj, an urban planner and architect who was holding a placard reading “Hands off Vjosa-Narta.” She was at the protest because the government is acting arbitrarily, taking advantage of illegitimate means to build over protected areas without transparency or public consultation. 

The issues at large 

Albania transitioned to democracy only 35 years ago, and it has been under a two-party system that concentrated power in a few hands. Incomplete transitional justice after the fall of the communist regime has caused many unaddressed rifts that affect society today and are now becoming rallying points at the protests.

One of those issues is the fear of the state apparatus and land grabs by opportunists looking to exploit legal loopholes. “This is not the democracy we have been dreaming of. This anger has been building for a long time,” Vatnikaj said.  

The state is trying to intimidate people by having unidentifiable plain-clothed police among the protesters who muscle people around. People also face threats of losing employment and legal troubles. 

Almost everyone I talked to identified fear and censorship as key challenges to overcome. “They have killed our fear, and we have nothing to lose,” Alis said. “We are not scared anymore of the propaganda. We want to get rid of patronage politics and the intimidation.” 

The concerns fueling the movement are evolving beyond what initially sparked the protests. People bring up material concerns, dilapidated infrastructure and public services, as well as increasing authoritarianism and corruption as their motivation. “We want the fall of the whole system. This government is only benefiting the oligarchs, and the divisions between the rich and poor are getting bigger,” Alis said. As I turn around on my left, a Wolt driver has plastered a sign on his moped that reads “economist by profession, delivery driver by need.” 

Dulaj wants to see Law No. 21/2024 repealed, which has amplified the prime minister’s power to fast-track development projects in protected areas. But she also wants to see the whole government purged of corruption. “We have really big problems in Albania right now, and the kind of investments they make in tourist areas will solve none of that,” she said. 

She has not migrated, because she wanted to use her knowledge and skills to contribute to her country, but opportunities are diminishing. “Our government invites foreign companies and their own people to work on all kinds of high-budget projects, and all they expect of us is to be cleaners and bartenders in their resorts,” she said. “As an architect, I learned that what makes you good at this job is staying in touch with the community you are serving. I want to use my skills and knowledge to help my country, not to work for billionaires in their resorts.” 

The future 

For the movement to be successful and sustain itself, the demands will need to become more targeted. 

Fetahaj explains that because the protected area is an issue that transcends borders, due to its significant biodiversity and its connection to the UNESCO-recognized Vjosa Valley Biosphere Reserve, it has attracted international pressure. If the protests were solely based on domestic problems, they wouldn’t have drawn the same attention. “This issue is linked to EU ascension and that’s the strategy we need to follow to see tangible results,” he said. “We should sharpen our demands into a few concrete points while working towards greater change. Chances of being successful are higher that way. I hope that the young people … will not tire until these demands are met.” 

Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

Evidently, the European Union’s recent call to the Albanian government to halt the construction in Vjosa-Narta has given people a major win. Construction at the site has stopped for now, but no one knows if this will last, so activists keep monitoring the situation. 

Nika, echoing these points, placed the environmental issue at the center. “We insist on the environmental aspect because it’s about our dignity and identity as a country. That’s what our nature represents,” he said. “It’s tied to our history as a people, and if these values are gone, we will have lost connection with who we are. If the protests don’t produce clear political demands and all this energy is not put into producing a clear political plan, then we will have to wait another 30 years until the next student protests erupt.” 

Vatnikaj is surprised by people’s readiness to protest. A really big weight has been shifted, she says, because people have not only become more politically conscious, but they feel like they are not alone anymore. “We have become stronger, united.”

Similarly, Marijola says that they are in this together. “Even though our government is not taking us seriously, we are the future of this country, and we will shape it together ourselves.”

As for Alis, protesters have already succeeded just by the fact that this is the first time in a long while that people have overcome their fears and come to the streets. “We are not turning back.”

This article Inside Albania’s youth-led ‘flamingo revolution’ was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The New York State Assembly made history this month by passing what could become the country’s first statewide moratorium on large new data centers. To activists all over the U.S. who are fighting these facilities and their massive social and environmental impact, the development seems like a turning point. 

“In almost all 50 states, there’s immense grassroots pressure to institute moratoriums on data centers and halt the spread of this industry,” said Seth Gladstone of Food and Water Watch, which supported the New York bill. “There’s a feeling the boom in data center construction has come about so quickly, the only adequate response is to press the pause button.”

New York’s moratorium still needs a signature from Gov. Kathy Hochul to be enshrined into law. However, its passage by the legislature is one of the more visible indicators of how a nationwide grassroots movement against data centers is having real-world impacts. The movement has grown almost as fast as the AI boom itself, prompting action at the city, county and state levels in both blue and red parts of the country.

“This isn’t a partisan issue,” Gladstone said. “The concerns raised by data centers apply to everyone. No one wants to pay exponentially more for electricity, and no one wants to deal with water scarcity.” 

Community opposition to data centers stalled or defeated over $150 billion worth of projects last year, according to the research from Data Center Watch. The movement has only grown since then, at a pace that’s surprised even groups with decades of experience working on environmental and social issues.

“I think a lot of organizations have been caught kind of flat-footed, simply because of the scale of these proposals and the speed at which they’ve emerged,” said Michél Legendre, campaigns director for the Dogwood Alliance, an organization that mobilizes to protect Southern forests. “It’s forced communities to do the initial organizing work themselves.” 

Some wins, like the one in New York’s legislature, have generated national headlines. Others have unfolded more quietly, especially at the local level, but are no less important.

“This is a David versus Goliath fight against Big Tech,” Gladstone said. “But we’re winning.” 

Local victories  

“People here are really activated over this issue,” said Ben Jones of 350 Seattle. “They want to do something.”

Seattle recently became the largest U.S. city with a data center moratorium, thanks to months of organizing by local activists. Last fall, organizations including 350 Seattle, Seattle Troublemakers, and Seattle Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, held a series of panel discussions about data centers and the AI industry. The events were responding to a surge of community interest in the topic — even though, at the time, no large data center projects had been publicly announced in Seattle. 

At first, Jones and others involved in the forums envisioned finding ways to support Central Washington communities that were already facing new data center proposals. Then, in April, news broke that four Big Tech companies were seeking permits to build at least five large data centers in Seattle itself. Just one would require putting a new six-story building downtown to house a computing facility built by Digital Realty, a data center developer. 

“The energy these facilities would use is equivalent to a third of the energy footprint of Seattle,” Jones said. “As soon as we heard about the plans, we started mobilizing.”

Thanks to the groundwork they laid last fall, Seattle data center opponents were able to quickly activate an existing network, generating over 96,000 emails to City Council. Within weeks, city officials were drafting language for a moratorium. Council members passed it unanimously on June 9.  

“By then, city leaders were competing with each other to be the one who made the moratorium happen,” Jones said. “They were responding to the impressive amount of public pressure they received.” 

Seattle’s moratorium will last for a year, during which city leaders and community groups have a chance to work on permanent guardrails for any new data centers. 

“We’re slowing down development of the industry in order to do this work,” said Raj Mirpuri, a machine learning researcher and Seattle DSA organizer. “We need to ensure rules for data centers include transparency, energy and water protections, and community benefits.”

Previous Coverage

The ripple effects of organizing against data centers

Similar processes are unfolding in other municipalities around the country. A short list of prominent towns and cities with data center moratoriums includes Monterey Park, California, Scarborough, Maine, Canton, North Carolina, and New Orleans. 

The movement hasn’t been without setbacks. Earlier this year, Maine’s legislature passed what would have been the country’s first statewide data center moratorium, only to have it vetoed by Gov. Janet Mills. However, similar efforts are already underway in other states, with New York closest to the finish line. States where lawmakers are considering data center moratoriums include Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Carolina and Vermont. 

The movement against data centers has grown so quickly, it has catapulted the issue into a top-tier concern for voters. Now, politicians from both parties are under pressure as they try to assuage public discontent.

Unconventional alliances 

One Saturday morning in late April, Deeda Seed awoke to news that Kevin O’Leary, “Shark Tank” star and celebrity investor, was attempting to build a huge data center in one of the Southwest’s most unique, imperiled ecosystems: the Great Salt Lake Basin. Commissioners for Box Elder County, Utah would vote on the project that Monday.

“I was like, you must be kidding,” said Seed, a Salt Lake City-based campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity.

With little time to mobilize, Seed and other local activists concerned about data centers reached out to their community contacts. As a result, some 180 people showed up to protest on the morning of the vote. Seemingly in response to this public pressure, the county postponed voting by a week.

Activists opposed to the new data center, which is called the Stratos Project, took advantage of the extra time to organize, tapping into concerns simmering in the community. Utah is processing a slew of data center proposals, including several near the Great Salt Lake. Among these, the Stratos Project stands out for its backing by O’Leary, and its potential to impact wildlife habitat in the sensitive Locomotive Springs Waterfowl Management Area.

“The data center issue was already close to boiling over here,” Seed said. “Stratos was what blew the lid off.”

Anticipating a crowd, Box Elder County Commissioners held their rescheduled vote at the local fairgrounds, where approximately 1,100 members of the public showed up to pack the space. Commissioners ultimately voted to approve the Stratos permit, with some claiming their hands were tied by legal requirements. Still, public opposition seems to have made a lasting impact.

In an apparent bid to appease constituents, Box Elder County passed a six-month data center moratorium on June 10. While it comes too late to affect Stratos, it could prevent additional data centers from moving forward. It’s also a sign of how government officials are buckling under pressure from a public fed up with the outsize energy and water demand from data centers, even in places where policymakers have long histories of siding with industry. 

“In the U.S. South, many of our elected officials have advanced and fought for data centers in their communities, while at the same time there’s pushback from within their own party constituencies,” said Legendre of Dogwood Alliance.

Just as in Utah — where opposition to data centers has united environmentalists with more conservative groups like Mormon Women for Ethical Government — the anti-data center movement in the South has given rise to unconventional alliances. Environmental groups worry that data centers’ demand for energy will become a lifeline for polluters like natural gas companies and a forest biomass industry that is denuding Southern ecosystems.

“We’ve seen many proposals for biomass being reoriented around filling the energy gap on data centers which would further incorporate forest biomass into industrial operations,” Legendre said.

Data centers’ demand for resources, and the impact this has on utility bills and energy and water scarcity, have brought other communities into the fight. 

“In the Southeast, we’re talking about a region that already has a lot of issues when it comes to access to resources,” Legendre said. “And now you’re telling people if there’s a winter storm or another hurricane, we’re going to have to choose between powering a data center, or whether 20,000 homes get electricity.”

These kinds of concerns have led to people packing hearing rooms and local government board meetings from coast to coast. Seemingly overnight, data centers have become a top-tier voting issue.

“I’m confident every candidate for elected office in Utah will be getting asked about data centers this year,” Seed said. “People want to know what they’re going to do about this.”

A national movement 

For some activists engaged on energy issues, the rapid proliferation of data centers is reminiscent of another time when new technology sparked an unprecedented development boom. In the 2010s, the emergence of “fracking” as a technique for extracting hard-to-reach oil and gas reserves spurred a frenzy of industry activity with far-reaching consequences. Affected communities mobilized, eventually winning a patchwork of state and local fracking bans. 

“Seeing these data centers pop up feels eerily similar to watching the fracking boom,” said Jones, of 350 Seattle. “One day it’s not a thing, the next it’s all over the country.”

Fracking is confined to states with large oil or gas reserves, but data centers can be built almost anywhere. And while fracking produces energy widely seen as a necessary resource, how the AI boom benefits ordinary people is far less clear. Take this into account, and the flood of data center proposals has potential to provoke an even bigger backlash.

Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

“It’s been truly amazing, as a longtime organizer, seeing this movement build momentum,” said Emily Wurth of Food and Water Watch, on a June 11 mass call that launched a nationwide coalition against data centers. Hundreds of activists attended from all over the U.S.

According to Wurth, over 500 organizations from 47 states have already joined the new Stop Data Centers Coalition. Notable names on the list include Food and Water Watch, Our Revolution, GreenLatinos, Third Act and Physicians for Social Responsibility. 

While a scattering of local data center moratoriums draw national attention, numbers cited on the coalition launch call suggest progress is more widespread than many media accounts suggest. According to Ben Inskeep of the Indiana-based Citizens Action Network, 13 county governments in Indiana have already enacted data center moratoriums. Rania Masri, from the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, said 25 local and tribal governments in her state have similar policies in place.

Efforts to coordinate at the state level are also growing more sophisticated. On the same day that Seattle passed its data center moratorium, activists in Washington announced a new statewide coalition that aims to introduce a suite of data center-related bills in the next legislative session.

The organized opposition to data centers builds on a wave of popular fury with the AI industry and its massive footprint, unlike almost anything in recent U.S. history. 

“Concerns about data centers are agitating even people who have never taken a public stand on any issue before,” Seed said. “They’re willing to take a stand on this.”

This article The data center backlash that’s uniting America was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.