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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding the right yardstick

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

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

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

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What’s next after the historic No Kings protest?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minneapolis gave us the blueprint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A structure test

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power, unity, leadership: an honest accounting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are training for something larger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identify targets that are vulnerable to pressure 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t stop at the obvious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The nuts and bolts of power analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reevaluate your target as needed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ending the war in Iran

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

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

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

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The American peace movement we need today

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

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

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

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

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

Preventing proliferation in the Gulf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Halting the arms race

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

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

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

Slashing war budgets 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At ground zero, exasperation and relentless protest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The support of political parties is key

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was first published on Meditations in an Emergency.

What is power? It is at its most essential the ability to influence an outcome on any or all scales, to protect one’s own interests at a minimum and to influence, even control others at a maximum. 

Violence is constantly misunderstood as power, and it certainly looks like power, and in some respects it is power, but a limited kind of power to harm and destroy. The threat of violence is often used to coerce — but also often has negative consequences, including the loss of other kinds of power, the powers that come with relationship, connection, alliance, trust. Violence isolates and alienates; it makes enemies, it stirs up dangers that linger. Friends are another kind of power built through another set of skills.

Botanist David George Haskell’s new book “How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries” describes a kind of power often ignored or dismissed, just as flowers themselves are. He writes, “When flowers arrived, they upended and transformed the planet. They were late arrivals on the world stage, appearing about two hundred million years ago, long after the evolution of complex animals and other land plants. By one hundred million years ago they were the foundation of most habitats on land.” 

He expanded on the subject in a “Wonder Cabinet” podcast interview, declaring “We often think of power and revolution as about control, authoritarianism, and violence. Might makes right. But that’s not the only way in which revolution and power and transformation take place. Flowers offer a different narrative. They changed the world in revolutionary ways through cooperation, through collaboration, often mediated by beauty, by sensory experiences. So a flower is quite literally speaking to the sensory system of a bee or of a hoverfly or of a bird to draw that animal into establishing a cooperative relationship, a reciprocal relationship. And we’re just the latest animal to become enchanted by the flowers and to become loyal collaborators with the flowers.”

Flowers, as he unpacks, developed the power to influence others’ behavior by building symbiotic relationships: “I’ll feed you fruit if you scatter my seeds; I’ll give you nectar and pollen in return for pollination; I’ll let you domesticate me and provide you with your daily bread and you’ll plant and tend me across countless fields for countless generations.” In an earlier book, “The Botany of Desire,” Michael Pollan speculated that plants had domesticated us as much as we had domesticated them, since we serve their needs so that they may serve ours, from the most practical issue of bodily sustenance to the most poetic one of bouquets and beauty. That’s flower power.

But as Jonathan Schell reminded us in his landmark book from 2003, “Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People,” violence as military attack is often deployed because politics — the art of persuasion, the building of alliance, the finding of common ground — has failed. Violence itself often fails too. Schell came of age as a young writer who went to Vietnam at the height of the U.S. war there and perceived that for all its superior military might, the U.S. could not conquer the people of that country. Because the U.S. or some of its leaders didn’t learn that lesson, the same mistake was made in Afghanistan, Iraq, and is being made now in Iran. 

People who have violence at their disposal often confuse it with power, and while it can achieve some things it fails at others. I think of the abusive spouses who think they can coerce love but often can only extort a reluctant simulation of the same by someone whose motivating feeling is fear rather than love and whose desire is often to escape.

Something that’s struck me about the Trump administration throughout its second term is its profound misunderstanding of power. Over and over again, Trump and his minions demonstrate that they think they have a monopoly on power and that history will unfold as their actions without any reactions, a literally inconsequential view, as in, “There will be no consequences other than the ones we impose.” It’s a version of reality so simple I would not accuse a toddler of holding it; toddlers know well there will be reactions and consequences, because they know others have power.

But the Trump administration’s thugs, for example, went into Minneapolis thinking they were a conquering army that would terrorize and intimidate the populace into subjugation and found that the populace was fearless in its defiance. It was a defiance motivated by a kind of moral beauty — solidarity, care, loving thy neighbor — that this administration has trouble imagining, especially when that solidarity reaches across differences of ethnicity and religion, as it did in Minneapolis. In this sense love is a power, or a motivating force to exercise the power of solidarity with the oppressed and the power of noncooperation with the oppressors. The abominable JD Vance doesn’t understand these forces; he had earlier misinterpreted Catholic theology to claim that, “We should love our family first, then our neighbors, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.” Catholic theologians smacked him down then, and they haven’t stopped since. 

Speaking of the Catholic church, this week The New Republic described this extraordinary situation:

Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture. ‘The United States,’ Colby said, according to a blistering new report by The Free Press, ‘has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.’ One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the 14th century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon, a region inside France.

Yes, these idiots reportedly threatened the head of this ancient institution, on the basis that the pope had better not dare oppose their power. But unless it wants to use violence against the pope and the Vatican, the Trump administration has very little power in that situation. And if it did use violence, the blowback would be profound, domestically and internationally.

The power the administration constantly squanders without understanding the consequences is soft power. Take for example, the fact that when Trump wanted European countries to help him reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which was only closed because of his feckless unforced mistake of a war, heads of state laughed at him because he’d destroyed the U.S.’s once-good relationships with a number of their countries with his threats against Greenland, his waffling on support for Ukraine and NATO, and his tariffs.

USAID created soft power around the world while also doing actual good in saving lives and preventing suffering; dismantling the organization was one of many actions this administration took that weakens this country in the long run and, really, the short run — that with all that macho strutting and bullying, they don’t understand that they are weak and making this country weak says more about the epic incomprehension. This should remind us that knowledge is power, and understanding is power; stupidity is a weakness of theirs evident in the attack on Iran. The heroic uprising against the regime was undermined, not strengthened, as the Trumpists thought, by this attack. They strengthened the regime instead. And Iran has seized control, for now, of the Strait of Hormuz and is demanding huge tolls from ship traffic there.

The war has had catastrophic impacts around the world on the price and availability of fossil fuel and fertilizer (aka nutritional supplements for flowering plants), and that in turn has sacrificed more U.S. soft power and good will and created more suffering. The fact that this fossil-fuel crisis is pushing both nations and individuals to speed the transition to renewable energy is another consequence the fossil-fuel-allied regime did not foresee. Likewise, the Trump administration has exercised its power to sabotage climate efforts and renewable energy in ways that make this country weaker in the long term, but Trump is on his way out and clearly does not care about the long term in any way other than in masturbatory monuments to himself and illicit wealth for his family. In a similar way, Netanyahu has devastated Israel’s relationships with its neighbors and much of the world, because he apparently only cares about his own fate and not about his country’s, let alone the lives of those he has slaughtered in Gaza and Lebanon.

While the primitive machismo of the Trump administration sees violence and the ability to inflict harm as power, and asserts that because it is powerful it does not need alliances and good relationships internationally, these things have not made it and our country strong, but weak.

Vice President JD Vance has a playground bully’s understanding of power, as has been clear at least since he went to Europe in 2025 and went out of his way to insult and patronize the world leaders he met with there. It too sacrificed the long-term power of having the trust and support of European heads of state and diplomatic leaders. Vance said this week in response to the Iranian refusal to give up the right to enrich uranium, “You know what? My wife has the right to skydive, but she doesn’t jump out of an airplane because she and I have an agreement she’s not gonna do that, because I don’t want my wife jumping out of an airplane.” This stunningly idiotic analogy seems intended to mean that Iran is like his wife, someone who has to agree to his wishes, but he has instead shown that he doesn’t understand analogies, power, Iran and, possibly, wives.

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What we can learn from the playbook that defeated Orbán

Last week Vance went to Hungary to try to stump for Viktor Orban, the authoritarian president there who as I write, has just lost the election after 16 years as prime minister, during which he worked hard to spread authoritarianism around the world, including in the U.S. The vice president’s efforts were said to have been the opposite of helpful. Only yesterday, the inexperienced Vance failed to gain anything in his negotiations with a far more skilled Iranian negotiating team. The Trump administration appears to have lost this war — had it won, it would be dictating terms, rather than unsuccessfully negotiating to return to the status quo of an open Strait of Hormuz. And of course the main justification after the fact for the war is Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear arms, but speaking of soft power and the power of cooperation, Trump sabotaged the deal the Obama administration struck with Iran. Soft power trumps the power of violence, over and over.

And then there’s the case of congressman and California gubernatorial candidate Eric Swalwell, exposed Friday by a detailed account in the San Francisco Chronicle of his alleged manipulation and sexual abuse of a staffer and by another report at CNN detailing accounts of sexual misconduct by more women. It’s a sordid story or several of them, and one that is only too familiar. Two things are most striking to me. One is his apparent gambling on getting away with exactly the kind of actions that have in recent years terminated a lot of men’s reputations and careers and sent some to prison (even if some have bounced back or escaped the most serious consequences).

The other is that while espousing Democratic and presumably lower-case democratic values, he allegedly used the power differential to bully and coerce young women, and counted on that inequality to keep them silent. Now he looks likely to pay for his abuse of power with a permanent loss of it. The term democratic values in the sense I just employed it means a world in which the rights and voices of young women matter even when they’re in conflict with a powerful man, a new world just emerging thanks to feminism. The soft power Swalwell had as allies, supporters and endorsers building possibilities of further political power is fast draining from him. By using coercive power, he has lost cooperative power.

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The lesson flowers offer is that when you treat others well, when you meet their needs, you can enter into relationships that serve you as well as them. When you use violence or otherwise exploit and coerce to get what you want, you create adversaries, not allies, and they too often turn out to have power. In a world of increasing equality over the past few centuries, cooperative power matters more, and violence, as Schell points out, has become an increasingly weak way to get what you want.

We are increasingly coming to understand nature itself — Haskell’s book is a fine exploration of this — as orchestrated by cooperation and symbiosis, not the Social Darwinist’s vision of brutal competition for scarce resources. Haskell’s is only one of many splendid books about this new vision of nature to appear recently. Forestry scientist Suzanne Simard, whose book “Finding the Mother Tree” was a hugely impactful account of how forests are essentially communicating cooperatives, a deeply interwoven whole, not a collection of lone competitors, has just come out with a new book I’m excited to start reading, “When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World.”

It is all connected. In my most recent book I quoted the scholar Judith Butler who has another explanation of why violence should not be conflated with strength or power: “In my experience, the most powerful argument against violence has been grounded in the notion that, when I do violence to another human being, I also do violence to myself, because my life is bound up with this other life.”

This article Cooperation is more powerful than coercion was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

In January 2026, a man installed two phone booths in cities 1,560 miles apart. 

One phone booth was in Abilene, Texas, one of the most conservative pockets of the country, and the other was in one of the most liberal, San Francisco. Signs on the phone booths read, “Call a Democrat” and “Call a Republican,” respectively. Anyone walking by could either make a call or pick up a ringing phone. 

There were 387 recorded conversations during the six-week “party line” experiment and, even though many were short, they were surprisingly profound. The word “love” was used 398 times (six times more than “Trump”) and people frequently showed solidarity toward one another, saying things like, “It’s us against the world, man.”

The man who installed the phones works for Matter Neuroscience, a self-described “emotional fitness” organization whose mission is to help people become more aware of how hormones and other brain chemicals impact one’s everyday outlook. The company is interested in exploring how seeking connection can help retrain our brains to boost feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine and cannabinoids. 

While the party line experiment may have been held in the name of neuroscience, it holds five key lessons for how we can organize more effectively in a hyper-polarized, digitally mediated world by prioritizing connection, curiosity and creativity.

1. People are eager to find common ground outside of politics

The participants in the conversations instinctively sought out areas of connection, no matter how small. They giggled about how odd it was to suddenly find themselves on the phone with a stranger. They chitchatted about the weather and their plans for the day. 

When one caller from San Francisco introduced himself as Christopher, the other excitedly replied, “Chris, man, that’s my brother’s name!” Steven and Stephanie chuckled at the similarities in their names. Another pair was amused to realize they were both 46 years old. 

When a woman in Texas asked a man in San Francisco what housing prices were like in the city, she was shocked by his reply that you can’t get a one-bedroom apartment for less than half a million. In Abilene, she said, you can get a house for $200,000.

But she added that a recently built data center had brought 15,000 new employees who were buying up homes in the city. They moved into discussing whether data centers use too much water and energy and wistfully agreed they wished we could return to the 1990s, a simpler time before the internet and artificial intelligence. 

And of course there is the state of the country. 

When one caller asked another, “Do you see the world as crazy as I do?”, she sighed and replied, “I do. It’s getting worse and worse every day.” 

2. Many people don’t fit neatly within party lines

Although the phones were labeled with the names of political parties, many of the callers were quick to point out they didn’t identify as either Republican or Democrat. 

When one caller in San Francisco asked a woman in Abilene if she was a Republican, she laughed and said, “Yes, I am.” But she then paused and backtracked. “Well, no. Hmm, I’m probably an independent, I would say, as I’ve gotten older.”  

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Early on in another conversation, a man in California began the conversation by saying, “I am not a Democrat per se. … I kind of abandoned the Democratic party.” 

More than 40 percent of callers said they didn’t identify with either party, which is an accurate reflection of the country: A record 45 percent of Americans now identify as Independent (while only 27 percent identify as Republican and 27 percent as Democrat). 

Importantly for organizing, the transcripts of these calls remind us that people are often more committed to values like fairness, stability and opportunity than to party labels.

3. Creative activities are an accessible way to engage people  

A recent Pew poll found that 90 percent of Americans feel exhausted when thinking about politics. 

When people are burned out, creativity can be one of the most effective ways to reengage them. While many of the people who made or answered party line calls might have been wary of, say, talking to a stranger campaigning on the street, the phone booths gave them a way to engage with politics that was novel and self-led. 

Activities like these don’t have to be expensive or complicated. In this case, Matter Neuroscience bought the phone booths on Facebook Marketplace for $300, painted them, got permission from two stores to install the phones in front of them, and put Verizon SIM cards in the phones to allow them to work like cell phones.   

Organizers can take inspiration from other participatory art, such as Yara El-Sherbini’s political art installations based on children’s games. For example, her piece “Border Control” reimagines the game BuzzWire. Participants have one minute to “cross” a wire shaped like the U.S.-Mexico border. If they touch the wire, sounds and lights flash. Or take New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recent scavenger hunt, which led 5,000 New Yorkers along a route with seven stops leading to landmarks named after former mayors (with the prize of a bag of potato chips — a playful poke at former mayor Eric Adams passing a bribe to a reporter in an empty potato chip bag).   

By thinking creatively, organizers can draw people into activities and conversations that give them an unexpected, fresh and less combative way to engage with one another and with political issues.  

4. People are keen to see hopeful messages online    

In a media environment that is optimized for outrage, it’s refreshing to see images and videos that capture genuine human connection. They stand out because they resist the dominant narrative of polarization.   

Matter Neuroscience’s first few party line videos were liked by more than a quarter million people, and the comment sections were filled with people saying things like, “We all have more in common than we think,” “This is the answer. People talking,” and “This made me tear up. What a beautiful idea to bring us back together.” 

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Organizers who focus their online messaging on authentic connection and kindness can create the kind of community that people are excited to be part of.

5. Clear guidelines influence behavior  

Putting simple guidelines in place can help potentially inflammatory activities run more smoothly. For example, on each phone booth, there was a description of the party line experiment that included the line, “The goal for this project is for people from different places to have a meaningful conversation and enjoy common humanity.” 

That simple prompt seemed to work, as only five percent of calls had any kind of negative interactions (and none had sustained confrontation). 

Many calls have ended with both people saying they felt better and more positive about the country after the call. 

In a moment fraught with division, the party line experiment is a welcome lesson for organizers that to build the biggest, broadest coalitions possible, we must find creative ways for people to connect across their differences in order to seek out and nurture solidarity. 

This article How two phone booths connected strangers across party lines was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The scenic campus of Birzeit University sits on a hill near Ramallah, 12 miles northwest of Jerusalem, in the occupied West Bank. Vast blue sky is visible from every road and sidewalk. Palestinian flags wave in the breeze.

The familiar campus bustle of classes, friends and events was violently interrupted on Jan. 6, 2026, when Israeli forces raided the university in broad daylight, firing live rounds and employing sound grenades and tear gas to disperse crowds of students. Forty-one people were injured, with three students sustaining gunshot wounds and three hit by shrapnel, according to Al Jazeera. Eight thousand students were trapped on campus during the military assault.

The raid coincided with the student union’s protest in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners and a screening of “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” a film about a six-year-old girl murdered by the Israeli military during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The Israeli occupation forces wrote in a statement that the raid was targeting “a gathering in support of terrorism.”

This was the 26th raid on Birzeit University’s campus since 2002 and the sixth since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023. The other 25 universities in Palestine also experience raids, often in higher volumes, like Al-Quds University outside of Jerusalem. 

Attacking Birzeit’s campus, especially while class is in session, is part of a systematic policy “to intimidate students and undermine their right to education, with the aim of suppressing Palestinian consciousness and targeting national institutions,” said a statement from the university following the raid, authored by the Right2Education campaign. 

The right to education

Since its transition from a college to a university in 1975, Birzeit University has been forcibly shut down by Israeli military order 15 times. The longest period was 51 months, starting in January 1988, shortly after the start of the Palestinian uprising known as the first intifada. In response to these violations and forced hiatus, Birzeit student volunteers and academics birthed the Right2Education campaign. They provide legal aid to students and faculty facing arrest and imprisonment by the Israeli occupation forces and have begun to develop an international network of solidarity around the human right of education for Palestinians.

The campaign has expanded beyond Birzeit University, with affiliated chapters at Hebron University in Hebron, Al-Quds University in Abu Dis and An-Najah National University in Nablus. 

The need for student legal representation has only grown more pressing. Since Israeli occupation forces stormed the campus on Jan. 6, they have arrested several students, part of a pattern of increased arrests since October 2023, with an estimated 9,000 Palestinians being held indefinitely in Israeli prisons. Sundos Hammad, coordinator of the Right2Education campaign at Birzeit University, said that student arrests have doubled since the genocide began and more than 150 students are currently imprisoned.

The campaign is also steadfast in its fight against scholasticide, which it defines as “deliberate destruction of education as a means to deny Palestinians the ability to rebuild their future and pursue justice and liberation through knowledge.” Scholasticide is part of the larger Israeli settler-colonial project that seeks to control, disrupt and ultimately erase every aspect of Palestinian life. 

Aya Dola, who studies English literature at Birzeit, joined the campaign because she wants people to understand “the difficulties that we suffer daily just to get a very basic right to education. Even though it’s a fundamental human right, it becomes a privilege here in Palestine.”

One of those difficulties is simply getting to school. Palestinians are unable to travel between Gaza and the West Bank, and checkpoints between local cities make travel tedious. “The number of the checkpoints and roadblocks [in the West Bank] after the genocidal war in Gaza have increased from 600 before to over 1,000 today,” Hammad said. 

In front of the Birzeit University campus stands the Atara military checkpoint. “If the occupation decides to close the gates, it deprives more than 10,000 students from going to their university,” said Dola. “They control the process of our education.” She said the closures take a toll on her mental health.

The barriers mean that many students are limited to the school or university nearest to their home. For Nael Betaar, who is from Tulkarem, a town northwest of Nablus, it previously took an hour and a half to reach Birzeit. Now, checkpoints have lengthened the journey to six hours, making it unlikely for other students from his town to attend the university. 

Betaar, a second-year accounting student and spokesperson for the campaign, explained that fragmentation — the “physical and academic isolation of educational institutions” — is a calculated tactic of movement restriction by the occupation to separate Palestinians who share the same national identity and history. 

“This isolation limits academic exchange. It prevents the unification of the educational system and forces each region to operate as a separate entity,” Betaar said. 

The Right2Education campaign documents Israel’s escalating attacks on education and urges global actors to “demand lifting of movement restrictions and the prevention of students from Gaza from reaching West Bank universities,” Betaar said. Such “divide and conquer” tactics, also a pernicious feature of the Israeli occupation for non-students, seek to squash Palestinian autonomy and collective power.

“We need more than solidarity”

The goal of Israeli scholasticide, and genocide generally, is erasure — to convince the world that Palestinians do not exist. The Right2Education campaign is involved in several efforts to confront scholasticide through transnational academic solidarity.

The campaign urges international academic institutions to cut ties with Israeli universities, partner with Palestinian academic institutions, and divest from weapons manufacturing and war profiteers, along with “any companies that invest in the occupation and apartheid that we live under,” Hammad said. 

Internationally, the demand for divestment from funding the occupation became louder after the genocidal assault on Gaza began in October 2023. Student movements globally and at over 150 universities in the U.S. created solidarity encampments for Gaza — including one at Birzeit University — and faced arrests, suspensions, expulsions and evictions.  

The academic freedom of students in the U.S. is also challenged when support for Israeli apartheid is on the line. Columbia University students Leqaa Kordia and Mahmoud Khalil, who are Palestinian, are among numerous student leaders targeted by the Trump administration for their anti-Zionist organizing. 

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University administrations around the world have engaged in divestment conversations, though many conceded only to provide investment oversight committees. Dozens of student governments have voted in favor of divestment and are still pressuring their institutions to take meaningful financial action. But there have been a few successes: In the U.S., the University of San Francisco voted in May 2025 to sell its investments in apartheid profiteers and enablers after 18 months of pressure from students. In New York, Union Theological Seminary became one of the first institutions in 2024 to completely divest from Israeli companies, and the CUNY Union representing faculty and graduate students followed suit. 

One particular target of divestment campaigns has been Palantir, a U.S. surveillance tech corporation, which holds several university research partnerships and investors, and has active contracts with the Israeli occupation forces, ICE and the U.S. Department of Defense, furthering state violence and genocide from the U.S. to Palestine.

In a 2025 report, U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese outlined “reasonable grounds” that Palantir allegedly laid the technological foundation for Israeli military-developed surveillance systems like Lavender and Hasbora (the Gospel in English) that are used in Gaza. These systems use artificial intelligence to generate automated airstrike and assassination targets in Gaza, according to +972. 

The American Friends Service Committee is championing the Purge Palantir campaign, mapping institutional stakeholders across sectors like education and healthcare. They pressure investors and institutions to end their relationships with the surveillance tech company. Even before October 2023, students have been resisting academic relationships with Palantir. In 2019, over 1,000 students across 17 U.S. colleges pledged not to work at Palantir due to their contracts with ICE.

After months of pressure from the student body and other actors, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, research program cut ties last year with Elbit Systems. Amid ongoing protests, students around the world and the Right2Education campaign are hopeful that other institutions like Cambridge University will follow suit and divest from war profiteers for good. 

Cutting ties to the military-academic complex 

In addition to boycotting and divesting from weapons manufacturers, the Right2Education campaign calls for international academia to sever relationships with Israeli universities — which have deep ties to the arms industry. 

Israeli weapons manufacturers Rafael, Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries were developed from military research infrastructure laid at multiple Israeli universities such as Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science, founded as far back as 1912. 

Israeli faculty and students of these institutions created weapons used against Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” referring to the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral lands to establish the state of Israel. 

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After 1948, Israeli universities stretched their campuses over ethnically cleansed villages and even used confiscated books from Palestinian homes to grow their libraries, anthropologist Maya Wind explains in her book “Towers of Ivory and Steel.”

Today, programs like Hebrew University’s “Havatzalot” unite academic study and military intelligence training. Many of its graduates have gone on to serve in Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s surveillance intelligence unit, similar to the National Security Agency in the U.S. The Israeli Defense Ministry also sponsors Hebrew University’s “Talpiot” partnership program — an even more selective program that is often a launchpad into the Israeli military elite. 

In the U.S., high-ranking universities like Columbia, Stanford and Princeton have active study abroad programs and other relationships with Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and others in occupied Palestinian territory. The University of Michigan remains in partnership with Technion and Weizmann, whose academics helped facilitate the Nakba. 

At least eight U.S. universities have partnered with Ariel University, established in an illegal West Bank settlement of the same name. Ariel has given academic credits to student volunteers involved in Hashomer Yosh, a formerly U.S.-sanctioned youth organization known for settler violence against Palestinians. 

Last year, Harvard ended research ties with Birzeit University and the 12 universities in Gaza and instead expanded partnerships with Israeli universities. 

But others, like MIT, are taking a different path.

Academic partnerships

International collaboration with Birzeit and other Palestinian universities — a key tool to combat erasure — is growing. Recently, Right2Education conducted a tour in the U.K. that focused on expanding collaboration. The tour was fruitful in creating several paths to ongoing institutional cooperation, connecting Birzeit University and U.K. academics, faculty and students. This year, Birzeit University piloted the Palestinian Student Research Project, modeled after similar programs at MIT and funded by a grant from them. 

Birzeit University currently holds several other partnerships with international academic institutions, including in the Netherlands, Lebanon and Jordan. Birzeit is also discussing research and academic collaboration opportunities with Japanese universities.

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In Gaza, education is a daily act of quiet resistance

These partnerships are especially vital in Gaza. All of the universities in Gaza have been destroyed partially or completely. Over 193 professors and more than 18,000 students have been killed in Gaza since the genocide began. 

“The world is dealing with the universities in Gaza as if they no longer exist. But these universities have resumed their online teaching since last June 2024,” Hammad said. “Academic collaboration with Gazan universities affirms their right to exist and their right to education.” 

Birzeit University’s “Rebuilding Hope” campaign supports online instruction in Gaza in partnership with West Bank universities, provides resources to Gazan universities and seeks to rebuild educational infrastructure. 

Education as an act of anti-colonial resistance

Since its creation in 1948, the state of Israel has used education as a tool for the Zionist settler-colonial project, enforcing state control over Palestinian educational institutions. Although the Palestinian Ministry of Education oversees education in Palestinian territories, curriculums are censored by the Israeli government, removing references to Palestinian history, heritage and culture. This censorship serves to normalize Israeli narratives. 

Hammad explained that knowledge erasure is a type of “invisible violation,” different from the physical restriction of movement or other tactics. 

“The occupation wants us to say that ‘we don’t have a past, we don’t have history,’ because our past and history create our identity, and they want to erase our identity,” said Dola, the English literature student at Birzeit. “It is really difficult to experience [this] as a student, suffering and enduring all these things,” she continued. 

Regardless of occupation and genocide, Palestinians have always made space for their history, stories and reproduction of knowledge. “We believe in our education as a form of resistance. It’s a part of our lives to be educated,” Hammad said.

During the university closures of the first intifada, popular teaching projects emerged, fusing political and cultural education. Educator Yamila Hussein describes these efforts as a fight to “‘Palestinianize’ the curriculum with a vision of national identity and the national struggle.” Leadership during the first intifada distributed communiques seeking to bring a more revolutionary consciousness into the education sector and catalyze the mass mobilization of students and teachers to defy Israeli repression of education. “If knowledge were notresistance, the occupation would not be working against it,” Betaar said. 

The Right2Education campaign maintains emergency support for universities in Gaza and advocates to sustain education in the West Bank, especially for rural elementary schools like Al-Tahadi, which face ongoing settler attacks. The campaign also facilitates ongoing opportunities for students to tell their stories at international gatherings, despite the risks of arrest and repression.

“Ignorance is a potent ally of the settler-colonialism that we live under. It is a potent ally of the status quo that has been enforced on us,” Hammad said. “Education can change that status quo; it leads to the Indigenous empowerment of our people and our self-determination, which leads to our liberation.” 

This article Palestinian students are fighting for their right to education was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Sunday night, the streets of Budapest were filled. Tens of thousands of Hungarians poured into the streets along the Danube River, singing folk songs and waving flags celebrating the end of Viktor Orbán’s rule. A young man named Mark Szekeres, his face painted with the colors of the Hungarian flag, told CBC News: “This election was about a clash of civilizations. Either you belong in a Western-type democracy or an Eastern-type dictatorship.”

For 16 years, Orbán controlled the country as the classic strongman. Orbán’s electoral defeat was sound — so much so that he conceded defeat before all the votes were counted. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party captured more than 53 percent of the vote and approximately 136 of 199 parliamentary seats, a supermajority decisive enough to undo the constitution and other laws that Orbán rewrote. The turnout alone was a verdict: nearly 80 percent of all eligible voters.

For us fighting democratic backsliding, this is exceedingly consequential. Orbán wrote the authoritarian playbook now being used by Donald Trump and actively exported his approach, even giving Hungarian tax dollars to fund CPAC. The people’s playbook used to oust him is a critical case study to learn from — from how the opposition party organized in Orbán’s strongholds, to how they made repression backfire when he overreached, and more. 

Informed by talking with people on the ground, I’m writing an outside take of lessons gleaned knowing we’ll need more analyses to make the most of our learning. Already D-HUB, a network of international anti-authoritarian activists, has vowed a more thorough case study after more study and reflection. 

Orbán’s loss raises a question we all should learn from: How do you beat someone who has spent 16 years rigging the game?

Understand the bad

To appreciate what happened Sunday, you have to understand just how thoroughly Orbán had slanted Hungarian political life towards authoritarian rule.

Within months of taking power in 2010, Orbán began systematically dismantling independent journalism. He encouraged his oligarch friends to buy media. He created a new state broadcaster, called MTVA, as a government mouthpiece. And his party created a Media Council — staffed by party loyalists — that issued crushing fines for “unbalanced” news that didn’t toe the party line.

By 2018, more than 470 pro-government outlets had been merged into a single conglomerate called KESMA — the Central European Press and Media Foundation — making the concentration of power official. Orbán’s party and friends eventually controlled roughly 80 percent of Hungary’s media landscape. “You can’t write anything bad about the government,” one anonymous Hungarian journalist told Al Jazeera. 

Then the courts. Orbán passed a new constitution and forced 274 judges and prosecutors into early retirement in the first year alone. The judiciary became almost entirely a political instrument.

Then, most consequentially, he moved to rig elections: The maps were redrawn, and he gained control of independent institutions overseeing elections. Orbán shaped Hungary’s 106 electoral districts with no input from the opposition, concentrating urban voters into large districts while spreading out his rural voters into more districts. The results were staggering: In 2014, Orbán’s ruling party captured 45 percent of the vote — but 91 percent of the districts. “Free but not fair,” as the ever insightful John Oliver put it in his review of Orbán’s rule just ahead of the elections. “You are free to vote for anyone you want, whether it’s Orbán or whoever inevitably loses to him.”

Universities are often the birthplace of pro-democracy movements, and grinding them down was essential. The most famous casualty was Central European University, founded by George Soros, which was slandered and pushed out of the country. This was in line with right-wing and antisemitic attacks on anything Soros-related (even though Orbán had once received a Soros-funded scholarship). 

And finally, he created imagined enemies of the state. Like every authoritarian, Orbán used divide-and-rule to create people to fear and keep his own growing scandals and corruption off the front page. Like most authoritarians of late, he chose LGBTQ people and immigrants as his primary scapegoats. George Soros, the EU and Ukrainians were added to the roster of villains. 

When President Trump sent Vice President JD Vance to campaign for Orbán, Vance followed Orbán’s escalating attacks on EU bureaucrats, who had voiced concerns about how Orbán’s re-election would affect the future of the EU. With no sense of irony, at his campaign stop Vance called the EU bureaucrats “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I have ever seen or ever even read about.”

So with that much control, how did Orbán lose? And so badly?

Tyranny is unstable

One reason dictatorships can be appealing, at least to some, is that they appear effective. To his supporters, Trump gets things done. While the democratic process is slow and grinding, the dictatorial one is about action. It breaks through red tape and fixes problems.

There’s truth in this, so far as democracy can be messy and dictatorships simple to understand. But it’s also mythical. Because a dictator doesn’t run a country — they order others to run a country. 

Whereas power is traditionally seen as flowing downwards, in fact many pillars are required to hold it upright. These are groups and institutions — like media, religious institutions, the business community, civil servants and security forces — that prop up the regime. In Thailand, where I first learned about this model of the “pillars of support,” it was drawn as an upside-down triangle. 

A dictatorship is no exception. By keeping society functioning, these pillars support the regime, even if they may disagree with it in private. 

It’s important to recognize that power is never as stable as it seems. It is not the natural state of humans to be dictated to. 

As a parent of a 7-year-old, I can attest: Go to any playground and you will see a bunch of kids experimenting with ordering each other around. Kids don’t like being bossed around. So the wise ones learn how to ask, entice, convince. The bullies learn to just use fear.

The problem with ruling with fear is that it requires constant and ongoing pressure. It creates frustration from those who have been slighted, grudges get nursed and a level of control needs to be constantly applied.

Ahead of the election, many (but not all!) of the pillars propping up Orbán began to crack. The economy, the media stranglehold and the manufactured fear — all began to crumble.

The economy was the biggest crack

Most activists I talked with described the Hungarian economy as Orbán’s primary vulnerability. Hungary has suffered the worst inflation of any EU country over the past 25 years. Prices rose 57 percent over that period — nearly double the EU average of 28 percent. The health care system deteriorated badly, with hospitals crumbling and doctors fleeing for better jobs. Hungary ranked last in the EU on household wealth in 2025.

This is common for authoritarians. We know instinctively that authoritarians do not take orders from polls or the number of people in the streets. As Rebecca Solnit beautifully put it, authoritarians view power as a “conquering army that would terrorize and intimidate the populace into subjugation” — as opposed to that of a flower, where “when you treat others well, when you meet their needs, you can enter into relationships that serve you as well as them.”

The outcome is that authoritarians ignore the pleas of the people. According to research from the Varieties of Democracy Institute, authoritarians create four times as many economic crises — a threat very much in our sightlines in the U.S. They spend 50 percent less on social protections like health care. Unresponsive to the needs of the people, they spend less on education, with students in school for fewer years, receiving lower quality instruction. All this adds up to life expectancies that are 12 years lower and infant mortality rates that are 62.5 percent higher. And, of course, corruption becomes the standard way of life.

As Hungarians struggled in all of these ways, Orbán’s friends grew rich. Video footage circulated of an estate owned by Orbán’s father with zebras grazing near it. It turned out that the zebras were from a nearby estate owned by Hungary’s richest man, who is also a close friend of Orbán  — so they became a potent symbol of elite excess.

Stefania Kapronczay, a Hungarian human rights strategist, identified the core problem Fidesz faced: It thought it had a sales problem when it really had a problem with the product. “Instead of addressing [voters’] demands they resorted to creating enemies and being louder,” she explained. “The economy stalled in the past 4 years. The explanation that it’s somehow Brussels’ fault and soon there will be never-seen-before success rang empty. They also miscalculated how pro-European Hungarians are.”

Unable to campaign on any positive accomplishments, Orbán defaulted to fearmongering. As an analyst wrote in Foreign Policy, Orbán’s campaign was centered on “fantastical claims about Ukraine planning military actions against Hungary,” substituting conspiracy for governance. “After a while voters, especially moderates, become exhausted by constant messages of fear, hatred and vituperation.”

But conditions alone do not dictate election outcomes. I’ve been running around the U.S. telling the story of Zimbabwe. In the 2002 elections, President Robert Mugabe abducted activists and controlled elections. By the time the 2005 parliamentary election rolled around, a Zimbabwean colleague told me, “We’re already living in hell; it can’t get any worse.” The inflation rate had exceeded 100 percent. But Mugabe managed to buy and steal the election for his party again. By 2008 the economy had completely bottomed out with an unbelievable inflation rate: over 200 million percent. The colleague told me the same thing, “This time it can’t get any worse.” Still, Mugabe won — this time by attacking and torturing people so extensively that opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew from the race. 

My point here is this: It can get a lot worse and that alone won’t change the electoral outcomes. Organizing, not conditions, is most important.

A talented candidate 

The opposition party candidate who won the campaign, Péter Magyar, is not a left-wing hero. He was a loyal insider until 2024 — an Orbán man through and through. He married a government minister. 

His break came after a corruption scandal where — you guessed it — Orbán’s party pardoned a convicted accomplice in child sexual abuse. 

Magyar went public on Partizán, an independent YouTube channel, revealing the rot at the center of Orbán’s “Christian nationalist” project. “For a long time I believed in an idea, the national, sovereign, civil Hungary,” he wrote. “Today, I had to realize that all of this is really just a political product, a frosting that serves only two purposes, covering up the operation of the power factory and acquiring enormous amounts of wealth.”

His credibility as a defector — someone who had seen it from the inside — gave him a voice that no outside opposition figure could replicate.

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He was also a masterful communicator. Unlike traditional politicians who attempt to govern at a distance, he regularly walked the country and held rallies in small towns that the opposition party had “sewn up.” For years, he went directly and repeatedly to Orbán strongholds. In the final weeks before the election, he was visiting up to six towns per day.

As Kapronczay observed: “Tisza won because they went all-in: did not stop campaigning, went around the country to meet people and with an amazing political talent reacted to all the mistakes of Fidesz.”

Magyar did not rely on an anti-Orbánism message. He talked regularly about corruption, health care and everyday affordability — things people actually care about. Political analyst Zsuzsanna Végh of the German Marshall Fund described him as “focusing on policy responses, hitting a moderate tone and giving back agency to voters to decide about their and their country’s future.” A regular campaign slogan was a call for a “humane Hungary.”

And while a bad dictator versus a strong candidate is a good combo, that alone would not suffice to win. Civil society had to play its role.

Tisza Islands: organizing that reached everywhere

One of the most important tactical decisions of the opposition party, Tisza, was the creation of Tisza Szigetek, or “Tisza Islands.”

Beginning in mid-2024 after Magyar’s strong showing in European Parliament elections, the party began systematically building local chapters across the country — not just in Budapest’s liberal districts, but in the small towns and rural constituencies where Orbán’s party had historically been uncontested. By January 2025, social media analysis suggested there were 208 “islands” with over 20,000 members.

Inside the new chapters were a mix of brand new activists and experienced civic and political activists who had been working to reform Hungary for years. New and old, all were active supporters. They staffed campaign stalls. They distributed a volunteer-delivered newspaper called Tiszta Hang, or Clear Voice, launched in July 2025, specifically designed to reach rural voters who were only exposed to pro-Orbán media. 

That last point matters. The Tisza Islands were not top-down campaign field offices. They functioned with genuine local autonomy. The party even held closed primaries for all 106 of its constituency candidates — an internal democratic process designed to give local members real ownership of who represented them.

Crucially, this meant that by election day, Tisza was able to deploy a breath-taking 50,000 activists as election monitors across the country’s polling stations. I’m hoping Hungarians will write more about this polling operation, to relay both how it was set up and its effectiveness in assuring a wary public that elections would hold. This was an historic, organized and scaled effort of election protection.

Investigative journalism did what no campaign ad could

One other piece multiple Hungarian activists have raised with me was the critical role of journalists.

Remember that Orbán controlled 80 percent of the country’s media. And yet, a handful of outlets — Partizán, Direkt36, Telex, 444, Magyar Hang — managed not only to survive but to land body blows in the final months of the campaign.

Partizán gave Magyar the interview that broke open the sexual abuse pardon scandal. Direkt36 broke the story of attempts by government-connected operatives to infiltrate Tisza’s digital infrastructure. Telex published an interview with a police whistleblower about the government’s attempt to send Hungarian troops to Chad. As Martón Kárpáti, the president of the board of Telex, described it: “This campaign showed the importance of the free media.”

A key documentary — “A Szavazat Ára,” or “The Price of the Vote” — was released on March 26 by the investigative team at DE! Akcióközösség. Based on a six-month investigation, the film documented Orbán’s party’s systematic operation of vote-buying and voter intimidation and coercion in impoverished rural communities. It showed that Orbán’s mayors controlled who got food, housing and even drugs. Within days, the documentary had been watched 1.3 million times.

This weakened the intimidation network. For the first time, government loyalists felt that they might be exposed. As political scientist Gábor Toka noted, “Intermediaries are [now] far less confident that illegal activities won’t be investigated and punished.”

Ahead of the election, this led Euractic to conclude in a headline: “Hungary’s Independent Media Has Already Won the Election.” 

The public shakes off fear

The June 2025 Budapest Pride parade was a classic backfire moment. Orbán had been escalating his war against LGBTQ folks for sometime. LGBTQ rights activists had been pushing back for years. But last summer his party took an extreme step and all but banned the Budapest Pride parade. His party enacted extremely tight rules on when and where and how the parade could proceed, wild police oversight, further restrictions under the pretense of “child protection,” and encouraged local authorities to deny event approvals entirely. 

It was an overreach and the Pride parade swelled to massive numbers, with people clearly having fun and boldly proclaiming they would not let the government scare them off. 

“The unsuccessful ban on the Pride parade was a clear sign of Fidesz’s inability to regain the political initiative,” wrote Hungarian journalist Pal Daniel Rényi. Ahead of the elections, the people had signaled that they were not going to be cowed. The massive parades exposed the government as out of ideas and increasingly disconnected from the public mood.

This kind of moment has been described by Turkish-American economist and political scientist Timur Kuran as an “unanticipated revolution” — a moment when an otherwise powerful political leader who seems to have full support suddenly has it evaporate. 

Backfire happens when the public shakes off its fear, and the rift between the people and the authoritarian is revealed.

What activists should take from this

Here, then, are eight points about what the defeat of Viktor Orbán offers to people doing the long, unglamorous, essential work of democracy defense.

1. You have to meet people where they actually live. The Tisza Islands model is a direct rebuke to opposition campaigns that organize from the cities outward or from the top downwards. Magyar’s team built physical, relational infrastructure in communities that had been written off — not because they expected to win every seat, but because showing up is the message. The act of going to rural Hungary, of knocking on doors in Fidesz strongholds, communicated something no television ad could: that people in those communities were worth fighting for. Any opposition movement that limits itself to mobilizing its existing base is already half-defeated.

2. Anti is not enough — you need a proposition. Magyar ran on corruption, yes, but he ran for something: affordability, public health care, housing, a “humane Hungary.” He hammered relentlessly on what Orbán’s rule had cost ordinary people in their daily lives. The lesson for Democrats — and for any opposition movement — is painfully direct: Running against the other side’s failures, without a clear and compelling alternative vision, leaves persuadable voters with nothing to vote toward. 

3. Build for the long game, but deploy at election time. The underground LGBTQ organizing work and the Tisza Islands didn’t spring up in campaign season. They were built over many years, quietly, in communities across the country. Civil society organizations spent that same period building nonpartisan mobilization infrastructure, producing online videos and recruiting election monitors. The 50,000 activists who showed up as poll watchers on election day didn’t materialize from nowhere — they were organized, trained and ready. Democracy defense isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon that occasionally demands a sprint.

4. Investigative journalism is infrastructure. This is perhaps the most striking lesson for movements in countries where independent media has been similarly squeezed. In a media environment where 80 percent of outlets are government-aligned, a handful of scrappy independent outlets broke stories that changed the trajectory of an election. The lesson isn’t just to support independent journalism (though that matters). It’s that, when coordinated with civil society organizing and election protection, investigative journalism creates a kind of immune system for democracy. When those functions work together, they become more than the sum of their parts.

5. Election protection is a form of power. Hungary’s activists understood something that is increasingly essential in systems where the electoral rules are rigged: You cannot simply outperform the fraud margin and hope for the best. You have to actively contest it. The 50,000 election monitors Tisza deployed were not passive observers — they reduced fear and combated intimidation. The documentary released weeks before the election served a similar function, activating public consciousness about what was happening in those rural constituencies. This combination — exposing the system, then flooding it with watchers — helped neutralize what had historically been a decisive advantage for Fidesz.

6. Plan for backfire. Yes, some moments just arise — in Hungary, wearing zebra costumes; in the U.S., frog costumes. But other moments are organized, such as the surge of people at the Budapest Pride parade. The folks at HOPE have created a curriculum to learn more about the dynamics of backfire. A key insight: Backfire isn’t automatic. Repression only sparks outrage when it’s seen, understood and emotionally felt, which means movements have to actively expose injustice, frame it clearly and help people connect the dots so what power tries to hide becomes impossible to ignore.

7. If you can only do one thing: Act courageously. Much of Orbán’s rule was marked by people publicly kowtowing. Timothy Kuran wrote a book called “Private Truths, Public Lies” about “preference falsification” — the idea that people fabricate their public preferences to match social pressure. When there’s enough social pressure, people conform — even if privately they disagree. This can generate a collective illusion that the authoritarian has broad support even when he doesn’t — until a sudden tipping point is reached and the whole facade collapses rapidly. Before that tipping point is reached, however, some individuals have to be very brave: acting noncooperatively, voicing dissent, organizing marches and protests, taking public stances, and going into strongholds to convince people they are being cheated. A few people acting courageously opens the doors for more.

8. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the winnable. Magyar is not a folk hero. He’s a politician who is, for now, best suited to dismantle Orbán’s authoritarian state. Magyar’s party does promote greater inclusion of women and Romani people in its platform. However, he remains socially conservative, and his history as an Orbán loyalist is more than cause for concern. But after left-wing parties failed to meet the moment, the people saw him as their best chance to defeat Orbán. Movements fighting authoritarianism will always face the tension between holding out for the ideal candidate and unifying behind the one who can actually win. 

The work continues

As with any electoral win, the work is only started. Orbán still controls Hungary’s media. He packed the Constitutional Court. He built an economy of patronage and dependency that reaches into every village. Magyar’s supermajority gives them the constitutional power to undo much of what was done — but the institutions, the oligarchic networks, the culture of intimidation, will not dissolve the day Magyar is inaugurated.

For organizers, this is the sobering coda: Electoral victory is a door, not a destination. But on a Sunday night in Budapest, they earned a moment to celebrate. And we should take a lot of hope from that, too. As U.S. organizer Ash-Lee Henderson noted in her response to Orbán’s loss, “I’m not trying to tell you that Hungary is America. It’s not. I’m telling you, though, that the math is similar everywhere. There are always more of us than there are of them. The question is never whether the people have the power. The question is whether we build something worth moving for.”

This article What we can learn from the playbook that defeated Orbán was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When Dolores Huerta came out about the abuse she suffered from Cesar Chavez, Jenna Peters-Golden was not that surprised, because they had seen similar situations before. “I feel sadness, of course, for all individuals who are impacted by sexual violence, but I also feel a lot of grief at how much weaker and fragmented our movements and and wins can be because of the role that sexual violence plays inside of that,” Peters-Golden said.

When Peters-Golden was involved in the anti-Iraq War movement as a high school and college student, they both witnessed and experienced sexual violence and harassment, and saw how little recourse there was. Organizers they knew who had experienced sexual assault or misogyny felt like they had to chose whether to leave a campaign or commit to tolerating a culture that normalized those things.

Peters-Golden knew that there needed to be a change, and as a survivor, they wanted to be part of the solution. They got involved in Philly Stands Up, a transformative justice organization that aimed to hold accountable people who perpetrate sexual violence and abuse in movement and activist spaces. 

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My experience in the farmworker movement helps me understand Dolores’ silence

Within movements, there is sub-movement to address sexual harm in organizing spaces. Many people who have done this work, including Peters-Golden, say a culture of putting the cause above oneself, or not wanting to make the movement look bad, results in movements becoming spaces rife with abuse. However, there are people who are working to empower survivors, keep organizers safe and hold perpetrators accountable through concrete and actionable steps.

Ana Avendaño, a visiting assistant professor at the City University of New York School of Law who has worked with the labor movement, is one of those working to prevent sexual violence and harassment in movements. She got into the work during the #MeToo movement, when she saw union men being exposed for sexual harassment and then uncovered union staff and leaders harassing workers at a labor-adjacent nonprofit she oversaw, which employed mostly women.

“I began to really study this, because I was shocked that a movement whose mission is to protect workers was allowing the kind of behavior that I saw happen — which was sexual harassment and abuse of young women,” Avendaño said. “The labor movement fights very hard against sexual harassment when it is being perpetrated by employers on the outside, but when they themselves as employers are enabling harassment, then it becomes taboo to talk about it.”

Now, she works to change the culture in organizing spaces to prevent sexual harm. She encourages unions and other nonprofit organizations to rethink the systems that are in place and put in new systems that don’t allow harassment to happen.

Reforming a culture

Avendaño stressed that understanding and reforming the culture of a group is key to preventing sexual violence and harassment.

While a lot has changed since the days that some unions wouldn’t even allow a charter for women workers, some of that male-centered culture remains and is a main driver of harassment, she said. Men still speak over women at meetings, appropriate their ideas and are celebrated as superstars for doing the exact same work that women do — sometimes less. Then there are the more overt examples — like an elected labor leader who, when asked about room accommodations on a business trip, told his staff that he preferred a “cheeseplate, wine and twins,” Avendaño said.

Meanwhile, organizers are taught to put “la causa,” or the cause, before their own personal needs or experiences.

“The culture demands silence, because when people raise issues of internal abuse, what we hear is it’s not the right time, the movement is under attack,” Avendaño said. “That leaves women and other marginalized people very vulnerable to abuse, because they know that either whatever complaints they raise are not going to be heard or they will be shunned for raising a complaint. This is a system that has existed for decades.”

In many cases, Avendaño added, those who do speak up find that their careers are over. 

“That’s the opposite of what the movement should be about,” Avendaño said. 

Avendaño does consulting work with nonprofit and organizing groups trying to transform their culture to prevent sexual harassment and abuse. One tool she uses and recommends is a climate assessment. First, she spends time with a nonprofit or organizing group and speaks with workers to get a sense of whose voice is heard or ignored. Based on what she hears, she creates a large questionnaire to identify points that make up a culture, seeking to understand, “What are the unwritten rules? What are the norms? Who gets resources, who is valued, who gets punished, who doesn’t, who gets away with stuff?” 

After reviewing the responses, she works with leaders and staff to develop systems that address the main issues raised. Solutions can include setting up independent reporting systems, codes of conduct with real accountability, investigations grounded in restorative justice principles and, importantly, education for employees to learn to stand up for each other and challenge harmful norms. 

Peters-Golden said that it is important everyone in the group contributes to reforming the culture. When it was active from 2005 to 2015, Philly Stands Up did transformative justice work to support activist communities in Philadelphia by helping survivors regain agency and changing the behavior of perpetrators. 

“That requires a commitment from every single member that ‘I’m not going to laugh at that sexist joke; I’m not going to normalize or think it’s okay for us to go get drunk after we canvass and be inappropriate with a field organizer; we won’t give each other passes about flirting with or trying to build relationships with new, young organizers who are coming into spaces,’” Peters-Golden said.

Rethinking leadership structures

One problem with organizational culture can be blind loyalty to a leader “who is equated with the cause,” as in the case of Chavez, Avendaño said.

Peters-Golden agrees that it is important to rethink leadership in organizing and union spaces.

“When there’s a culture where sexual violence is normalized, especially when leaders are getting away with it  … there’s something really important for us as movements to think about in terms of how we relate to leadership,” Peters-Golden said.

They said that a crucial element is to have channels for feedback to leaders and to have peer-based, rather than hierarchical, relationships within the organization. This is positive for leaders as well, they said.

“Supporting their leadership involves giving feedback: saying that something isn’t okay when we know it’s not okay, ensuring that there are actually expectations about behavior and consequences when anyone, including some of our brightest and most charismatic leaders, don’t live up to agreements or values that hold our movements together,” Peters-Golden said.

Additionally, Avendaño said that there need to be more women in power, especially people who have been personally impacted. However, she said that is not enough, and men also need to be part of the solution.

Amy Livingston, director of the Labor Education Service at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, who also has a background in organizing and works directly with union organizers to prevent sexual violence and harassment within unions and unionized workplaces, agrees, and says that it’s especially important for men to step up in spaces where women are a minority.

“I don’t think that women and gender minorities need to wait for men to get on board, but I do think it makes sense for a union or a worker center to invest in this kind of education to help men understand,” Livingston said. “For the most part, cisgender men often need a little bit more hand holding to get to the point where they understand why gender-based violence at work is something they should care about, even if it doesn’t impact them directly.”

Worker-led solutions

Avendaño suggests that movement groups and unions can look to successful worker-led efforts to prevent harassment and build empowerment on the job, and apply those lessons to organizing spaces.

When Livingston works with survivors of workplace harassment and sexual abuse, she helps them to get justice and regain safe working conditions, and when it comes to those who caused harm, she ensures a fair investigation was done into their misconduct.

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“I really prefer teaching about how workers can regain some control over their workplaces through organizing … against gender-based violence, instead of just being in the position of a victim who’s like looking to the police or some outside agency for support,” Livingston said.

She has also conducted in-depth research and interviews to develop bystander intervention training curriculum for members of unions to intervene and deescalate a situation before it escalates to gender-based or sexual violence. She said it is important to build spaces where co-workers can support and trust each other so they have someone to confide in if something happens.

Similarly, Avendaño said that the SEIU-USWW janitorial union in Los Angeles adopted a peer education model of “by the people for the people,” inspired by the promotora model of health care outreach in Latine communities. Members are trained to talk to each other, recognize sexual harassment and understand how to intervene in those situations through a restorative lens by interrupting behaviors. The union also successfully organized in support of a California law mandating that cleaning services pay for worker- and survivor-led anti-harassment trainings.

Additionally, Avendaño points to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which has created a robust, quasi-judicial system where workers can file complaints to be heard by tribunals of farm workers, which practically eliminated sexual harassment in the fields.

“Those examples are inspiration that movements need to acknowledge and use as blueprints, start to build from that or come up with others, but also recognize that there is an internal structural problem is the first step,” Avendaño said.

This article How organizers are addressing sexual violence in movement spaces was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When a homeland is decimated by war and life must be repeatedly rebuilt anew, how does one find the way back to purpose? 

Since the start of the war in Sudan, Sudanese theater director and artist Rabee Al-Hassan has brought theater to survivors of war and displacement across the country. He uses a kind of participatory theater that he calls “resistance theater,” which gives voice to many issues that remain taboo under oppressive laws and authorities in Sudan. Resistance theater confronts themes of human rights, social justice and equality, as well as despair, fear and post-war trauma. For Al-Hassan, theater also helps participants resist internalizing displacement as an identity, and instead “frees us from it in favor of our true identity.”

Originally from Al Jazirah, one of 18 states in Sudan, Al-Hassan has experienced displacement twice amid the war: first to the state capital of Wad Madani, and later to Port Sudan. When war broke out in Khartoum on the morning of April 15, 2023, Al-Hassan fled. This war “stripped us of our human and professional identities,” he said. 

An estimated one in three people have been displaced since fighting started, and they make up almost 15 percent of all internally displaced persons globally. Nearly 12 million people have been displaced within Sudan alone, with around four million fleeing across the borders. Under prolonged siege, some displacement camps like Al-Hasahisa in Central Darfur lacked medical care, food and water, while others saw people returning to land contaminated by explosives. 

“Most dangerously, it forced us to face questions we were not prepared to face,” Al-Hassan said. “How long will this identity accompany you? Will you be able to be an active and influential member of the society in which you experience oppression?” As a playwright and director before the war, he was faced with a choice like so many others who became displaced or refugees: let the war shape his story with what it took away, or use theater to confront the political, social and psychological issues at the root of conflict in Sudan. 

Al-Hassan himself witnessed summary trials when former President Jaafar Nimeiri imposed Sharia law in Sudan in 1983. Known as the “September laws,” courts were allowed to sentence amputations of hands and feet. Amnesty International reported that there were at least 140 sentences in under two years. The September laws not only remained under Omar al-Bashir, but the death penalty was added for apostasy (renouncing Islam). Through the genocide in Darfur, to the separation of South Sudan, to the present day, it seems no Sudanese family has been “spared from setting up a mourning tent for one of the dead,” Al-Hassan said.

Resistance theater challenges audiences with “their evils, fears and aspirations … and addresses the reasons that led us to kill each other,” Al-Hassan said. “From childhood until now, death has surrounded us.” This means confronting hate speech, violence and mental health, child labor, homelessness, and what it means to build a culture of peace.

Al-Hassan also isn’t afraid to tug at the shadows of patriarchal and misogynist violence.

For decades, Sudanese women have fought for reforms to discriminatory laws, including forced marriage, child marriage and morality police controlling what women can wear and do in public. From colonial British rule to the introduction of Sharia law in the 1980s (including punishment by flogging or being killed by stoning), women’s rights have repeatedly been dragged backwards by conservative governments. The sentencing of two women to death by stoning in February, while others face death sentences based purely on rumor, keeps the September laws alive.

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With discrimination especially violent toward working-class and poor women, gender equality was at the heart of the Sudanese revolution in 2019, as well as within numerous peace agreements. Sudan remains one of the few countries that has still not ratified the African Union’s Maputo Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa or the 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. 

And many continue to live in fear, as rape has been weaponized in the war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, paramilitary, accused by Khartoum officials of being financed and armed by the United Arab Emirates. In siege after siege, combatants have abducted and gang raped women. Hala Alkarib, regional director for the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, testified before the U.N. Security Council in February about systemic gender-based violence. She also highlighted the detention of over 840 women last fall by state forces, who were accused of being RSF collaborators solely based on their ethnicity.

Al-Hassan writes strong women into his scenes, the way they are written into the very fabric of Sudan, and just as they are reflected in Sudanese literature. He finds inspiration in women’s resistance, steadfastness and creative ability to preserve collective memory. In his plays, he draws on characters like the self-assured Nima from the novella “The Wedding of Zein” by legendary Sudanese author Tayeb Salih, who chooses her own love over the preferences of her village. With many women still facing the restrictions on freedom that Salih wrote about in the 1960s, Nima’s choice is revolutionary. 

The script with which he is currently preoccupied, “Hosna Bint Mahmoud, The Last Witness,” is based on Salih’s acclaimed novel “Season of Migration to the North.” Salih’s character of Mahmoud — a rebellious and independent woman who becomes a widow after the death of her first husband — commits murder-suicide to escape a forced and violent marriage with an elderly man. This story of anguish is still resonant as RSF fighters have forced marriages with women and girls to establish greater control over Darfur. “Women’s resistance in reality is subtle and almost invisible, while Hasna’s resistance was a blatant and violent tragedy,” Al-Hassan said. While war in Sudan has left its mark on all, “our mothers, sisters and lovers die a thousand times over.”

He sees real counterparts in the ordinary lives of women carrying households alone, demanding a future without violence for the farthest-flung villages, and organizing at the helms of resistance committees that keep a revolutionary dream of a common and equal Sudan alive. 

An artist will find light in the dark. It was war that united survivors from Khartoum and Wad Madani with artists from Port Sudan. Language itself became a bridge for connection, with performances in languages from Beja, Hausa and Nubian, to Arabic and Tigrinya.  

Al-Hassan and his troupe brought theater to over 50 displacement centers in Wad Madani. But when the RSF invaded Al Jazirah and took over Wad Madani in December 2023, he had to flee once again. In the following year, conflict would displace over a million people from Al Jazirah alone. Flooding and disruption of agricultural livelihoods has kept people struggling to settle throughout the past year. 

“This time, the displacement was difficult and harsh,” Al-Hassan said. “We walked on foot and rode on animals, terrified and frightened, night after night on our way to Port Sudan.” But by this time, he had a sense of clarity from the experiences in Wad Madani. “We did not have the luxury of resting or healing the wounds and sorrows of the second displacement and loss,” he said. The show went on. 

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In discussing his work, Al-Hassan draws parallels to two distinct types of theater: theater for development and forum theater, using elements of both forms in his practice. Drawing on oral history traditions, theater for development uses performance as a tool for social change by exploring political and economic issues, and sensitizing communities to one another’s experiences of trauma, marginalization or stigmatization. 

Forum theater was developed by Brazilian theater artist and political dissident Augusto Boal as one of the expressions of the Theater of the Oppressed that sought personal liberation and decolonization for the poor and working classes. Instead of being treated as spectators, audiences are urged to participate by acting out solutions and desired outcomes for a story. Theater was also brought into common spaces rather than being treated as a commodity kept behind closed doors. 

Some of Al-Hassan’s highest-attended performances were staged at the Lawyers’ Union Theater and the Culture Hall in Wad Madani, and Writers and Artists Union Theater in Port Sudan, but the impacts were most potent in the displacement camps. 

“The more we expand the opportunities for these audiences to participate in our theater, which methodologically relies on interactive theater techniques, the more we achieve resistance and revolution through our theater,” Al-Hassan said. “The times and the historical moment do not allow us to present theater for entertainment and amusement — important as they are.” 

In Wad Madani, performances were a “lifeline” for people in displacement camps, he said, and a way to “break from the monotony of their days.”

Moved by the potential for theater to help survivors of violence heal invisible wounds and overcome the sense of isolation that is seeded by post-war trauma, Al-Hassan wants to “enable as many theater practitioners as possible in all Sudanese cities to reach shelters.” Integrating psychodrama into conflict resolution, like the improvisational “playback theater” where performers act out audience members’ personal stories, has “proven effective in supporting and treating individuals in communities that have suffered from post-war trauma and disasters,” Al-Hassan said.

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Isolation is not just a product of the war, but of political repression persisting since Bashir’s regime. Free expression in Sudan is heavily stifled, with journalists and activists routinely detained and murdered. Artists saw cultural institutions and unions targeted and shuttered under Bashir’s reign. Nearly three years of war have again strained artists, as already scarce money and food dwindled. According to Al-Hassan, some face denial of employment opportunities, arbitrary arrest and prosecution if they engage in activities supporting an end to the war. Cultural centers and museums have been damaged by bombing, and many artists lost their lives to shelling or to illness in displacement camps. Many others have chosen to emigrate. 

Though war still rages, Al-Hassan sees the arts and cultural institutions as a vital part of rebuilding Sudan and calls on artists around the world to speak about Sudan, “in order to end the shameful international silence towards what we are suffering.”

“There is no safe Sudan, and we will not be safe unless the war stops,” he said. “We are all suffering loss and fearing death, both spiritual and physical.”

Today, Al-Hassan continues animating Port Sudan with resistance theater. And though he and his family survived the treacherous 600-mile journey from Wad Madani in the heat of fighting, many did not. 

Over 33 million people across Sudan need humanitarian assistance. Over 21 million people in Sudan face acute food insecurity. In Darfur, entire cities are starving or relying on takaaya (community kitchens) for survival. In February, Chad shut its border with Sudan, trapping people in Darfur and limiting the passage of humanitarian aid. 

As another Ramadan has passed without a ceasefire, Sudan is still tossed between oppressors. Yet, even amid war, artists like Al-Hassan reject fear and despair; instead they are amplifying narratives of survival and illuminating humanity during the most horrific of crises.

“This is not just a symbolic and aesthetic salvation, but a real and tangible one that theater can achieve,” Al-Hassan said. 

This article Sudanese ‘resistance theater’ animates a future without war was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

My relationship with cooking began at a young age, while in elementary school, when I had the choice between preparing whatever I could find in the kitchen or not eating. Little did I know that cooking with such constraints would serve me so well decades later when I was incarcerated. It would become the vehicle by which I would build community and connection with my fellow inmates.

For a kid without much guidance, it was a steep learning curve. Here is one of my earlier memories from that time.

The blare of the smoke detector snapped me back to reality, reinforced by the smell of burnt ramen and Teflon. I had lost track of time, consumed by an adventure with my He-Man action figures, and had boiled the water right out of the pot and burned my Top Ramen noodles to a wormy crisp. The noodles and the pot were a total loss, and I knew I was going to get in trouble when my mom and stepdad got home. But that was routine, a problem to deal with later. At that moment I had to figure out what I was going to make for me and my brother. At eight years old, my repertoire was limited, as were the groceries in the house.

I came to my love of cooking out of necessity. When I was a kid, my mom and stepdad were often gone for long periods of time. Sometimes it was for work, sometimes a quick trip to the store could take them hours. My brother and I never knew if their absence would stretch into days. Tom, older by three years, was resentful of being stuck with me and told me that if I was hungry, I had better figure it out because he wasn’t making anything. Once I started cooking, he would add, “Might as well make me some too, since you’re cooking already.” Well played, big brother.

So there was the eight-year-old me at the stove, trying to figure out this whole cooking thing. I burned my fair share of meals, but slowly I began to get the hang of it. My mac and cheese had fewer lumps, my ramen was respectably soupy, my Hamburger Helper didn’t have chunks of uncooked dehydrated potatoes. My growing proficiency gave me greater confidence, which led me to try new things.

When my mom was in the kitchen making a meal, I would be right there underfoot, like an irritating cat. When I would ask if I could help, she would find something for me to do — shred the cheese, cut the easy veggies, or stir things in the pots and pans. I would interrogate her about what she was doing, why she used the spices she used. I was soaking up all that I could. I thought I was just trying to learn to cook, but it would become so much more.

A few years later, I made mashed potatoes on my own for the family for the first time. They were bland, lumpy and had bits of peel all throughout. But something surprising happened when we sat in front of the television to eat and watch “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” one of the few things that our dysfunctional family did together. My stepdad, a notoriously mean and unkind man, smiled and told me I had done a good job. I felt close to him in a way that I can’t explain and don’t remember ever feeling again.

When I was 18, my brother and I lived in a dumpy single-wide trailer with a friend named Brandon. It was a place to call home even if it wasn’t much of a home. Tom and I worked opposite shifts and shared a room, each of us sleeping while the other was at work.

While living in that trailer I purchased my first cookbook, “Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book,” which covered a wide range of cuisines, and I aimed to make one new recipe a week. I have many pleasurable memories from that time, including learning how to make chocolate truffles, a lifelong favorite to eat and share. Another favorite was a tater tot casserole. Nothing fancy, but a hearty meal. 

Brandon remarked after eating my inaugural casserole that I must really like to make meals that stick to the ribs. I replied that I like to make meals that put smiles on faces. I was beginning to understand the joy created by making and sharing food with people, but the deeper potential of food to connect people still hadn’t hit me yet.

My love of food continued for years, into adulthood with my own family, holidays, parties and ordinary weeknight meals. In so many parts of my life, food was the vehicle for coming together and making memories. That feeling would intensify when I was incarcerated. 

When I first came to prison, I felt lost. Isolated from those I loved most, I was alone and vulnerable in this big scary place. All I knew about prison was what I had gleaned from a lifetime of media consumption: gangs, violence, corruption, a place where the worst of society comes to become even worse humans before they are released back into the world to perpetuate the cycle of crime and harm.

Those stereotypes can be accurate at times, but I also found a thriving community of people working to learn and grow as human beings, people focused on being better than the choices that led them to this place, people that recognize the value and power of folks coming together. I have been humbled to find some of the greatest people I’ve ever met anywhere, serving sentences alongside me.

It took me about a year to figure out that my approach to food and cooking outside of prison was possible inside, even with the meager list of items I had access to through the prison commissary, and only a microwave to cook with. Who actually cooks in a microwave? They’re just for heating up leftovers and making popcorn, right? I felt a bit like eight-year-old me again, cooking with constraints.

It took some time and experimentation, but I eventually started to make some tasty things. I constructed a cardboard A-frame, draped butter-covered tortillas over it, and made crunchy tacos. I used apple jelly packets to caramelize summer sausage meat sticks to make rice bowls. I used brown sugar, soy sauce and powdered garlic along with my old friend, ramen noodles, to make chow mein. These became staples of my prison repertoire, and I began to offer to make meals with folks on the tier.

The power of food to connect people to each other, to culture, and to history really hit me when a man on my tier, Josue, asked me to make him a meal for his birthday coming the following week. He told me he had been craving a childhood favorite, pozole, a Mexican soup that uses hominy. I happily took the challenge, knowing I was going to have to be creative. I couldn’t get hominy from the commissary, but it had corn nuts, the dried and seasoned snack. That got my wheels turning. If I soaked and rehydrated the corn nuts, they might prove a worthy substitute for the essential hominy. I prepared the soup, getting as close as possible to the ingredients for pozole, which I had eaten enough to know that I had made a pretty decent version.

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When I showed up at his cell, bowl in hand, Josue greeted me warmly and thanked me for the birthday meal. I jokingly replied that he shouldn’t thank me until he tried my concoction. He grabbed his spoon and took a big bite, and I watched something magical happen. His eyes closed and as he exhaled his posture softened, shoulders dropped and he stood there for a split second, savoring the bite he had just taken. When he opened his eyes, there was a brightness, a gleam that reminded me of a child coming into the living room on Christmas morning and seeing the presents under the tree. He smiled and told me that it tasted like his mom’s pozole, that it tasted like home, that for a moment he was transported out of this place and into his mom’s kitchen where he felt warm, safe and loved. In that moment, the true power of food hit me.

This food that I had been making and sharing — the tacos, rice bowls, chow mein and Josue’s pozole — helped me make connections with folks in my prison community. I was building bridges with people I would never have thought could be my friends. In the shared time and space that comes with breaking bread, we focus on the one thing we all have in common. No matter our race, gender, sexuality, affiliation, religion or political beliefs, we’ve found our humanity. We are all just people. And in that shared humanity, we’ve been able to build an incredibly supportive and family-like community in one of the most toxic environments anywhere.

With a sense of community comes a shift in culture. Guys feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves and become more likely to engage in nonviolent means to solve problems or settle conflicts. I believe people invested in community are less likely to offend against it because they value it. Not only that, with the common ground established via the sense of community, doors and lines of communication open. Men come together in ways that allow for organizing and advocating for inmates as a whole and for the common good.

The food we share connects us in the present, but it goes deeper. The things we eat tie us to the memories associated with those flavors and remind us of who we are and where we come from. Eating anchors us in a larger life beyond the walls, people, places and milestones that are connected by the food we came together to share in those moments. It is the thread that stitches together the fabric of our lives.

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For me, in my past, cherished memories of connection with my mom and brother are rooted in the food we ate and prepared together.

In my present, the meals we prepare in prison bring our ragtag little community together to acknowledge our shared humanity. They remind us that even though we are separated from our families and friends, we are still part of something bigger than ourselves and that we are stronger together.

One day in my future, I will cook and share food with the people who will form my new community outside of prison. What a delicious thought.

This article Cooking for my incarcerated community affirms our shared humanity was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article was originally published by Truthout.

On the morning of Feb. 11, the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, or BNYDC, a non-profit landlord responsible for developing the Brooklyn Navy Yard, convened a closed-doors meeting. One item of business concerned the lease of Easy Aerial, an AI drone manufacturer with material ties to the Department of Homeland Security and the Israeli military, and one of 550 businesses housed inside of the city-owned industrial hub.

Meanwhile, 30 community members with the grassroots campaign Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard, or DBNY, occupied the lobby of Navy Yard Building 77, where Easy Aerial is headquartered. “We arrived with noisemakers and drums; we chanted and gave speeches,” said Leila Rafiq, a DBNY organizer using a pseudonym to protect her privacy. Outside, dozens of additional protesters picketed the building entrance.

In September 2024, DBNY launched publicly with a clear and enticing thesis. “A militant, consistent and organized group that employs a multiplicity of tactics can win,” said Rafiq. After an intensive research process, the campaign landed on two primary targets: Easy Aerial and Crye Precision, a tactical gear manufacturer. What started as a small group of committed organizers now involves many community members, Navy Yard tenants and workers, students and neighbors, all with different roles and levels of engagement.

Unlike other segments of the New York City Palestine Solidarity Movement, which revolve around sporadic mass mobilizations, Rafiq contends that DBNY is showing an alternative pathway: hyper-local organizing targeting suppliers of genocide.

During the DBNY occupation, news broke that BNYDC had made a decision about Easy Aerial: the drone company would no longer be welcome in the Navy Yard when their lease expires in May. Felicity Doyle, a Brooklynite who participated in the morning’s action, described feeling “utter disbelief,” at the news. “It was a small shred of hope,” she said.

While BNYDC claims the non-renewal was “for business reasons,” Rafiq said that “What resulted in their eviction is pressuring them from so many different angles with consistency.”

Global and local implications

Alongside militant, disruptive tactics, DBNY also prioritizes community organizing. One effective communications approach has been emphasizing the global and local implications of the campaign. “This is about Palestine, but it’s also local because they’re supplying entities targeting migrants, Black and brown people,” said Rafiq.

A 2022 Times of Israel article reported that Easy Aerial drones are used by both U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, or CBP, at the U.S.-Mexico border, and by the Israeli military at the Israel-Gaza border. Since then, the Gaza genocide appears to have been good for business — in 2024, Easy Aerial’s co-founder and chief product officer, a former Israeli soldier, told Truthout about Israel’s “immediate need” for autonomous drones after Oct. 7. The company contracts with Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, supplying drones for Israeli ground and sea weapons systems. In August 2025, CBP solicited a $1-2 million contract from Easy Aerial for enhancement of its drone surveillance capabilities. Easy Aerial did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment about its DHS contracts.

DBNY’s other primary target is Crye Precision, a tactical uniform manufacturer that licenses camouflage technology to a supplier for the Israeli military, and has numerous DHS contracts, including a recent “rapid order” worth $40,000 to supply CBP agents operating in Maine with Crye Precision cold weather apparel. The federal agents who murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis appear to be wearing Crye Precision equipment. Truthout reached out to Crye Precision to verify if agents were wearing its gear and did not receive a response. DBNY is leveraging the recent surge of anti-ICE sentiment to increase public pressure on the BNYDC.

Doyle, a musician and artist, attended a DBNY teach-in outside the Navy Yard, where she got plugged into a civic engagement role. “With my theater and performance background, I am comfortable speaking in public,” she said. One venue for her skills is Community Board meetings, neighborhood bodies where civic leaders gather testimony from community members and share budgeting recommendations to the city government. Doyle has spoken about Easy Aerial and Crye Precision at several Community Board meetings, distributing flyers and encouraging audience members to sign DBNY’s petition.

The petition, which DBNY said has thousands of signatures, including hundreds of Navy Yard workers and tenants, demands that the BNYDC board of directors terminate lease agreements with Easy Aerial and Crye Precision. The BNYDC board is appointed by the mayor, but Mayor Zohran Mamdani has not appointed any new board members, nor taken a position on DBNY’s demands. Mayor Mamdani’s press office did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment.

Many Roles for Many People

One evening in October 2024, Jacob was taking an online exam for a graduate course in his apartment across from the Navy Yard, when he heard protesters banging drums and blaring airhorns outside. Jacob, who requested a pseudonym to protect his privacy, is an anti-Zionist Jewish organizer from Brooklyn. He described feeling dissonance while “participating in careerism, as organizers did the real work of trying to put their bodies in the gears of a genocide.” Afterward, he approached DBNY during a community outreach session outside the Navy Yard, gradually becoming a regular participant.

Weekly pickets and noise demos are the cornerstone of DBNY, “providing a baseline of pressure basically every week to remind people of our presence and the presence of these companies at the Navy Yard,” Jacob said. At these actions, organizers approach curious passersby and share information about the campaign, inviting them to sign the petition and join the picket. Unlike seeing a social media post, Jacob said, “You can’t scroll past bullhorns and drummers and chanting about the mechanisms of genocide you live next-door to.”

While these pickets are a consistent way for New Yorkers to engage with DBNY, the campaign spikes the pressure during strategic moments. “Whenever the board meets we put on a special show for them,” said Jacob.

These “special shows” can include multiple simultaneous tactics, demonstrating DBNY’s organizing approach: many pressure points, many degrees of escalation, many roles for many people. For example, during the September 2025 BNYDC board meeting, neighbors including Jacob held a press conference; civic engagement organizers attempted to enter the meeting to give public comment (and were denied access); protesters picketed outside of Building 77; and autonomous climate activists blockaded an entrance — all at the same time.

Jonathan Bloom, a labor organizer and community member who participates in DBNY, including outreach sessions with workers, believes that building labor power will generate additional pressure on the BNYDC board. Bloom engages workers at pickets and during their lunch breaks. “When I talk to people, I say, there’s an issue here in your workplace, where you can materially impact the supply chain of genocide. And that’s a really big opportunity,” he said.

The Navy Yard is marketed as an industrial center for small businesses, sustainability startups and justice-oriented entrepreneurs, offering below-market, tax-subsidized rental rates. But this has allowed Crye Precision and Easy Aerial — labeled by the Navy Yard as “fashion/accessories” and “fine art/photography” companies, respectively, to exploit the same benefits while obfuscating their military connections.

According to Bloom, after learning about their military contractor neighbors, Navy Yard workers have supported the campaign by organizing teach-ins, signing letters and joining weekly pickets. “If enough workers were to stand up and say this isn’t acceptable to have genocide suppliers in their midst, they have a lot of power to disrupt, whether that’s withholding labor or generally applying pressure from the inside, because BNYDC cares about their image and maintaining a community of artists, designers and makers.”

A few blocks from the Navy Yard, students at Pratt Institute have also participated in the campaign against Easy Aerial and Crye Precision. “Frankly, most students don’t actually know the Navy Yard is producing military equipment for the IDF and ICE,” said Alex Pell, a Pratt Students for Justice in Palestine, or PSJP, organizer using a pseudonym. “So our job right now is just to raise awareness and show solidarity by participating in their actions through PSJP.”

Pratt Institute, a private university known for its arts and design programs, leases space from the Navy Yard for graduate programs and promotes the Navy Yard as a community arts center. “Pratt carries a lot of cultural prestige within the neighborhood. And when we can expose the hypocrisy of its partnership with the Navy Yard, it puts pressure on both Pratt and the Navy Yard,” said Pell. When students show up at pickets with signs identifying themselves as such, Pell said “it makes it more difficult for them to hold this facade.”

Multiple DBNY organizers told Truthout that one of the most effective strategies that resulted in Easy Aerial’s eviction was personalizing the pressure toward members of BNYDC. In December, DBNY demonstrated outside the apartment of BNYDC President and CEO Lindsay Greene, greeting her with drums, chants and trumpets, while canvassing her neighbors about Easy Aerial and Crye Precision. “House actions are really important,” said Rafiq. “Telling their neighbors about who they are, and confronting them with their names and faces on a banner, that’s effective.” DBNY has also demonstrated outside the home of BNYDC Board Chair Hank Gutman.

“From my perspective, that’s a very direct method of applying pressure to the people who can really make the decisions,” Jacob added. “I think that Easy Aerial became toxic, like an albatross hanging around the neck of the Navy Yard. And it grew more costly as time went on.”

Now, DBNY sets its sights on the future. In addition to holding BNYDC accountable by ensuring Easy Aerial really leaves in May, the campaign continues to target Crye Precision. They are eyeing other Navy Yard tenants with military contracts, including Radical AI and CubeFabs, the latter of which is backed by Peter Thiel. DBNY also participates in the NYC chapter of a national campaign against Capital One — a major investor in Elbit Systems. “Our aim is to fully demilitarize,” said Rafiq. “We want to change the name to the Brooklyn Neighborhood Yard.”

On March 4, the campaign organized a noise demonstration at Navy Yard Building 77 to commemorate the recent victory. Picketers picketed, drummers drummed, bikers stopped to holler in approval, organizers flyered onlookers, and the crowd erupted in the chant: “Easy Aerial go to hell.” Soon, the sun set against the backdrop of the hulking Navy Yard facility, as it seems to be setting on Easy Aerial’s lease.

Before departing, picketers converged at the Building 77 windows, staring down NYPD officers posted inside, hollering “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” harnessing momentum for the fight to come.

This article How grassroots organizers pushed a drone company out of Brooklyn was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.